 Just trying to see how this works. Good. So I'm here to tell you a little about the research that we've been doing in Amsterdam throughout the last 10 or so years on face-mounted photographs and cleaning of these. We were part of the initial face-mounting, an international face-mounting initiative, where a number of institutions worked together voluntarily to just have a look at face-mounted photographs, at cleaning, damage, and things like this. And I'd just like to share with you a little bit what we've been doing in Amsterdam. Some of the information has been published and some has not, for which I apologize, but we're doing our best to try to get that out. So this is my co-author, Bill Wei, Dr. William Wei. And he could not be here sadly enough today, but I thought, you know, include a picture so that you all know who he is, but if you go to the next conference where he might be at, and he's here in spirit. So, although, just a quick overview from a face-mounted photograph, we've talked about this often today and yesterday, or rather Monday during the workshop. Although each artist uses slightly different materials and methods, the general construction of a face-mounted photograph consists of a sheet of polymethymethacrylate permanently mounted to the image side of a chromogenic, a silver-dyed bleach, or an inkjet print. This is done using silicone adhesive or a double-sided acrylic adhesive tape, film. With the inkjets, a laminate may first be adhered to the surface before face-mounting. The photograph, adhesive, acrylic, and also secondary support can be added, are adhered by placing layers together in electronic press, and this combines to become one indivisible object, so it's all now a permanent layering structure. PMMA is really the name of the material, but of course, we know it as plexiglass, acrylite, lusite, perspex, and there are some other names for the people who went to the workshop on Monday and will go tomorrow, you'll see that as well. So just to tell you a little bit about the cleaning experience that we've been doing, we started out in 2005 with a condition survey to see what is the damage, what is the condition of these face-mounted photographs in collections. And then we went to the Curler-Miller, that Abba Museum, the Pont Stichting, Haus Mercedes, the Steylick Museum, pretty much all the modern art museums are the museums that are collecting modern art in the Netherlands. We did some light exposure testing, this has not been published, and we do hope to publish that, light fading of face-mounted photographs, and we've done cleaning and dust accumulation testing. And this is something that actually I'd like to just talk to you a little bit more about today, about the testing we've done recently with cleaning and the electrostatic charge that is left behind after cleaning. The testing that we did for from the very beginning were done with various cloths, the DRS roller, which I'll talk to you a little bit about, and ionized air. And some of this, as I said, has been published and have just noted the publication from the ICOM CC Triennial Meeting in 2008 in India. So for those of you who would like to have some more information on that, that's where you can find it. So what we did is we started out cleaning, and we got into these discussions as conservation scientists and conservators often does, where we were looking at microscopic levels of how much scratching does a certain cloth cause, and Bill said to me at one point here, but what does it matter if you can't see it? And so this is really where the idea of perception testing came into place, and this is something that I think is very interesting to look into further. What is too much dust? What is too much scratching? What is something that maybe is reasonable? So in 2010, we started the perception testing, and you can see here, this is the detail of the work from Valerie Bellin, who is the work I'll show you in a second, but if you look really closely as a conservator would, you can see the typical round cleaning, circular cleaning marks, and you can say, oh, no, it's happened. And then when you look at the work hanging there, it's huge, and a visitor probably won't even see that. I'm talking a little bit in extremes, but it's good to maybe have a discussion later. But can this be maybe part of a patina of a face around photographs? These are all ideas that we've discussed. So the perception testing is going on. What we did is we made panels and we cleaned them 50 times with the varying cleaning methods, and we realized how electrostatically charged service becomes, and this is where, for me, it became kind of important to find out what is the static charge left behind after cleaning, and how does it affect desk accumulation? Is it important, or can we just dismiss it as not important? These are the questions that we had, and so this is what we've been doing presently. Here, just another example of, these are the panels that we used from 2005, 2008 for dust collecting after cleaning, and you can see the various types of dust that have accumulated, and actually, this is something, and a form of dust accumulation that I think is also very interesting. You can see it here a little bit with breaking light, and here just with specular light. Is this something that happens when you're, because you're peeling the facing plastic from the plexiglass surface, and the charge that's left behind actually produces small areas, islands of the electrostag charge where the dust ends up collecting. These are just ideas that I have that I'd like to just look into somewhere. So the cleaning methods that we used were microfiber and anti-static cloths. We used them dry and wet. When I say wet, we used a 50% solution of ethanol and water, deionized water. The DRS roller system, which is a system that a lot of artists are intending to use that are creating face-matted photographs. We talked about it in the plastics workshop on Monday, and you'll see it for those of you who are participating tomorrow. We also used ionized and compressed air, thinking, you know, not touching the surface would probably be the best way, but can you actually get rid of all the dust that's on the surface with just compressed air and ionizing this, you know, ionized air where you're neutralizing the surface. One thing we didn't use initially, but we started testing with this last phase that we're in now is the Kunsthoff Reiniger, which is a cleaning agent made by Brunus, and it's also said to leave an anti-static layer on the surface. So here you're seeing a couple of the clouds that we're using. The dust bunny was initially in the cleaning methods, which is available by preservation equipment and Gaylord, so it's really kind of made for conservation. This is the common supermarket microfiber cloth and the quick-star cloth you see here. There's another cloth that we used, but it's no longer being made, so I'm not gonna go into that. And here you're seeing just, this is one of the other targets we're using for cleaning. We've gone through a number of different face-mounted photographs. These have been donated to us by Grieger in Düsseldorf, so we're very thankful for that. And now we're just kind of using a PMA sheet for the dust collecting and static charge. I have also tested face-mounted photographs just to see if that's comparable, if there's something, if there's a layering structure instead of just one acrylic layer. The dust removal rollers, there are a number on the market, and here you're seeing two at the top, oh, pardon me. At the top, you see the DRS, which is also used by many of the German Düsseldorf School and what Alex uses with cleaning the Jeff Wall photographs. It's made by, it's the dust removal system made by DryTac, a company based in Richmond, Virginia. And the roller below is the AMS, Advanced Mechatronics Solutions Roller, and that's made by a company that's based in San Diego, so both are American-made. And you can just see, this is the technique, the vertical, we're putting the panel vertically on the, yeah, can't think of the word right now. And you have the roller, which is a polymer. They talked, the description is that it's a polymer. I believe there's silicone component to it. It's kind of soft. And when you roll the roller across the face of the PMMA, it picks up the dust. And I believe that it does that also because of static action, actually. When the roller has gotten a lot of dust, you can pass it across a sticky pad and then the dust will be transferred to the pad and you can keep going with a roller. Something else that we used, that I had been using for framing purposes, actually, is the ES2J ionizing air gun made by Simcoe. Simcoe is an international company based in the United States that specializes in static and anti-static apparatus. So there's a huge industry with the chip making and car spraying, like if you use, when you're painting a car in the factory to make sure that you use as little paint as possible, they create a static surface on the car and then they have a tiny little bit of paint that actually just sticks to the surface when they bake it. So these are some other areas that this is used in. And the ionizing air gun works because it uses electronically-starched plates to produce positively or negatively-charged gas ions and they are squirted out of the gun. They come to the surface and they react with the electrons that are on the surface and they neutralize the surface. Lastly, the Kunsthoff-Reiniger. I mentioned it's a cleaning agent. There's also another one that we looked at, the workshop that I've now forgotten the name, brilliant eyes, that's right. And that's, in American version, maybe you could say, I haven't tested that so I don't really know the qualities of that. But this is made by Bernus and what we did notice when we applied it, and you can see the streaks, is that it leaves a film. So this is something as a conservator that I might question the use of that for any reason. So the testing that we performed is we cleaned using the methods that I just mentioned. We measured the charge before and after peeling the PMMA's facing plastic off just to see what is the initial charge that comes on these surfaces. And then we did the charge, measured the charge before cleaning, after cleaning, and we looked at the duration of the charge. How long does the charge stay and remain on the surface of the plexiglass or PMMA? We're looking into, if there is a correlation with dust accumulation depending on how large the charge is, there are more dust on those panels. So this is what we're doing now. Dust monitoring, we're doing actually, we're doing a very easy type of monitoring, something that Bill has published. We're using a glass meter, and a glass meter directs a light at a specific angle, and we're actually using the Glass Master 260 manufactured by Sheen, and it measures angles 20 degrees, 60 degrees and 85 degrees. And so what you do is you, a glossy surface would reflect the light in the same angle and that would go right back into the detector of the glass meter, and so it would give you a certain number. If the surface isn't glossy, then the light has a diffuse reflection, and so you have lots of different rays going all over the place, so you have less light coming back into the detector. And this is how, so we're not actually measuring the amount of dust, but we're measuring the amount of the difference between the beginning glass and after time, glass after time. So this is, it's an easy thing to use. As I said, it calibrates with that little shoe that it's placed into, and what you take, it's a contact method. You place it on the acrylic glazing, and as long as you don't move it around, it isn't causing any scratching that we can see, and you can see here a dust plate and you would just put it on top and then you would get three measurements depending on how dusty it is, and then you can compare these measurements over time. Measuring the electrostatic charge, we're doing that with electrostatic field meters or one field meter that we've also gotten from Simcoe. It measures the magnitude and polarity of static charge, in fact. It's a non-contact measurement, so that this is nice, and it measures in kilovolts, and you can see there's just four buttons, you see the kilovolt sign, you'll have either a positive or a negative charge on the surface, so that this is something that it indicates, and if you're at a high place and you're going to measure, and you can't quite see the image, you can even press the whole button, and then when you come down, you can see it. It doesn't, unlike the glass meter, it doesn't hook up to a computer and it can't remember all your measurements, so this is something you have to note when you're doing the measuring. And here you see me measuring a large photograph by Gerald von der Kapp in the storage facility of the Steylick Museum, just to see if what our measurements were doing, if this is something that is comparable to real-life practice. And you can see I'm holding the electrostatic field meter about, I think, an inch from the work, and maybe you can see this little red dot, and when that's in focus, that's the distance that you want to have, basically. So just to tell you a little bit about what is electrostatic electricity, and I think everybody knows this, or the balloon trick, you know, where you rub a balloon to your hair and it sticks to your hair and it sticks to the ball. Well, basically what's happening is you create an imbalance of electric charges within or on the surface of the material, and we're talking with our materials more of the surface. And you have these electrons that are moving, these are all insulators and not conductors. Conductors think about the metals, think about copper wire and how it conducts electricity. They are the electrons they move freely throughout the materials, and that's how batteries work and so forth. But insulators, they don't release their electrons, so they have to actually discharge. And so the charge lasts as long as a discharge until the discharge comes, basically. So some materials cause or create more electricity than others. Since the static electricity is the collection of electrically charged particles on the surface of a material, various materials have a tendency of either giving up electrons and becoming positive or attracting electrons and becoming negative in charge. And there's something that's called, oh, the tribal electric series that lists the materials and depending on their charge and the more further these materials are away from each other, the higher the charge. I'm gonna just speed up a little bit cause I have a little time left. So contact adhesion and peeling away of an insulator will affect the static charge. Moving air will affect the static charge and moisture. And usually the higher the relative humidity, the less long the charge will be on the surface. So this is something we're also looking into. Just to go over the findings that we've had, this is the test of the fast peel and slope here. We did six panels for each. And you can see the means and standard deviation at the bottom. And the student T test at 95 confidence level shows that there is definitely a significant difference between the two measurements. However, I mean, slow peel, fast peel, you saw the sizes of the Jeff Wilde photographs. You don't really have control of that one point. I think the important message here is that you're causing quite a large amount of electr, static electricity when you're peeling away the plastic. And we actually, and we've been doing different testing, we actually have also numbers that go, well you can see it actually here, that go up to the 25 kilovolts more or less. In the cleaning methods that we use, here you see the graph, the blue lines is before cleaning and the red lines are after cleaning. So these results on only one specimen, we haven't done this three times. But this slide shows a trend that any cleaning procedure will reduce the electrostatic charge after peeling. It shows the effect of the iron gun, which de-ionizes the surface, whether fast or slow peel. The dust burning also had some good results. Further, there is more charge left after cleaning with the DRS, soft brush, and the two quick start treatments. And the Kunsthoff-Reiniger, the DRS by far showed the most electro-static charge. Clearly not doing anything after peeling off the foil will leave the largest residual charge. So this is something to think about. And not only when you're cleaning off the foil, but if you look at the photographs that Alex just showed, when you're unpacking, you're gonna have the same kind of effects. This is something that I'd still, we're still looking into, but theoretically it's the same thing. Something that was in contact, rubbing against each other, peeling off, what is the charge that's left behind and how do you deal with that? Here this graph shows the electrostatic charge over time. And what we're seeing is that the charge dissipates with time from the moment that the specimens were cleaned. And that in about 24 hours you have a significant drop. But it doesn't really, it's only about two weeks later that you have a pretty neutral surface. So this is something to think about when packaging and exhibiting and things like this. Glass measurements, you see, yeah, the way to read this diagram is to look at the slopes of the curves, not the absolute values themselves. The steeper the slopes, the faster the dust is accumulating. And you don't read too much into this slide because it's only a single specimen measurement, but also, but you do see two trends. There's a tendency of the specimens that had residual charge after cleaning, lost glass faster after the first month. The dust bunny and the quick start ride don't support this. This could be due to the dust accumulating immediately, but further testing has to be done. So just to give you a little bit of an idea of how we're gonna go further with this research, we're gonna keep going on the dust measurements and make more runs so that we can see how accurate it is every time we do it. We need to investigate the electrostatic charge by transport and packaging. I think this is something that is really important to look at, especially at the chaos of exhibiting and those 24 hours just before the opening, what are these works doing and when were they unpacked, were they unpacked in the clean room or not? And the effects of the air currents, if a work is under an HVAC vent, what does that mean for electrostatic charge and how does that react with, in terms of dust accumulation? The perception testing will keep going on and something else I'd like to look at is the effects of the solvents, water ethanol, the Kunstgeverreiniger on the stability of the PMMA. I'd just like to acknowledge the people that are listed here and especially the Creative Center of Photography, F-A-I-C and TrueView and you all. Thank you very much. Thank you.