 All right, welcome everyone and thank you so much for joining us. We are delighted to have you with us all today. Together with Alex, FAIC and all of the presenters, organizing this conference has sparked some of the most interesting conversations in our lives over the past few years and we are tremendously excited to extend this dialogue with you all. Our goal for this week will be to look at the challenges of caring for 3D printed art together. Building on our understanding of this works as we hear from diverse perspectives including artists, technologists, and museum professionals and even see if these works inspire us to rethink our collecting and exhibition practices. As you've heard, this conference was conceived of in San Francisco, California, in relation to our work at SFMOMA. We acknowledge that SFMOMA stands on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramita Sholone. We would like to pay our respects to the past and present stewards of the land where we were inspired and affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples. So as Emily was saying, this conference was conceived of in San Francisco when Emily was an artist's conservator and I myself was a media conservator at SFMOMA. And it is no coincidence that both this talk as well as the entire conference have an overarching theme of collaboration which will be reflected in other talks too. Since these artworks are represented both in the digital as well as the object realm, collaboration between object and media conservation will be crucial moving forward and caring for these works. And while the focus may lie on either end of the spectrum for each individual work, practically a collecting institution needs to care for both of these aspects equally. This duality was made most obvious to us during an acquisition process of an architectural model. At that point, however, at the point of that acquisition process, the designers were already unhappy with the model's discoloration. So instead of acquiring a yellowed object, the curator asked us, can we just get a file? And judging by the feeling of discomfort that immediately followed this question, it showed that we have found ourselves in uncharted territory. What was the artwork in this particular case? Was it the concept, the idea, the file? Or was it the manifestation, the iteration, the object? We have never acquired only a photograph's negative instead of a positive, nor have we bought an artist's mold instead of the sculpture. How would our roles be affected by these new circumstances and if we went along, what were the questions we needed to ask in the process? Emily will talk about this case study in more detail as part of an entire session we have on acquisition on Wednesday. So before we embark on this journey with you all to address such complex questions, we wanted to clarify the scope of the conference. 3D printing offers a vast field of possibilities, which have also been adapted by collecting institutions and museum professionals. They range from creating replications of missing parts, designing custom housing or exhibition mounts to means of access by 3D printing objects to experience them with more senses than our eyes. As in this example of the Mona Lisa by the unseen art project, which allows visually impaired people to experience artworks, otherwise inaccessible to them. Since we would need more than the three days we have prepared for you to address the manifold application, even within our small field of cultural heritage, we made the tough decision to exclude all of these in the coming days. Instead, we chose the focus of this conference to be on 3D printed works of art, as seen here in these artworks by Taoba Awabak and Iris Van Herpen. Our colleagues at MoMA will tell us about their experience reprinting one of the components on Awabak's table, and Sarah's couture will reflect on 3D printed fashion and its preservation using Van Herpen's dress as a point of departure. Colleagues from the M Plus Museum in Hong Kong will tell us about their engagement with Shirley's installation Negotiated Differences right after we hear from the artist herself. This work uses a creative commons file as a kind of digital ready-made, tapping into the potential this technology brings for democratizing design. Josh Klein's sculpture Cost of Living Aleda will be the focus of a case study by the winning museum of art. They worked closely with the artist to understand that the core of this work is truly the experience a person has with it, though the objects may be reprinted and evolve moving forward. Virginia San Fratello, who founded Emerging Objects together with Ronald Raelle, will tell us about their practice of exploring the technology of 3D printing with an eye to sustainability by creating objects of recycled and other innovative materials. One of these objects, Furry Curry, will be discussed by our colleagues from the Cooper Hewitt, who will also reflect on how works of 3D printing made them reconsider their exhibition practices. Before we dive in, we'll spend just a moment to introduce the terminology related to these works. People use multiple terms and they do differ in meaning. Additive manufacturing is a broad umbrella term used by those in industry and in conservation studies, referring to a range of techniques and media. Rapid prototyping generally refers to the production of single items or prototypes and may refer only to polymer-based works. Technically speaking, the term 3D printing refers to one specific printing process out of many, but we chose to use its term for the title of the conference as it's more commonly recognized. Throughout the conference, speakers may use these other terms as well. Though this is the first conference entirely dedicated to the care of works made using 3D printing techniques, it's not the first study or scholarly effort. Important past work within the field of conservation includes sessions in the Tech Focus, sorry, Future Talks conference series, and the American Institute for Conservation annual meetings. A WAC newsletter was dedicated to the subject in 2014, and graduate student research at multiple institutions have also made a significant contribution. Research within the industry by artists and related to exhibitions also enhance our technical and artistic understanding. We've begun a shared list of references on the subject and invite the audience to add more through the Google document that Alec shared. Moving forward, the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology is launching a three-year research project to support the preservation of 3D printed objects as they'll share more about in one of our breaks on the third day. So why do these works challenge us in the way that they do? When we consider care and preservation of contemporary artworks, we approach this by asking about the meaning, the concept, and the artist's intention, and we compare this to the work in its current condition or manifestation. How are we to understand these artworks? How do you approach care when there's a digital component and an object component that is potentially reproducible? While crucial research efforts have taken place in the past, best practices of collecting and caring for these works aren't yet established and there are only limited guidelines that collections can fall back on. The dual nature of these works requires multiple perspectives and a collaborative practice of objects and media conservators, and I should add the text of conservators and the paper conservators I've mentioned in the very beginning, working alongside each other. And there isn't much time. With the material inherent degradations of the objects and the fragile nature of the digital files, there is pressure to respond urgently and loss may be very immediate if digital files were not tested or even acquired at the point of acquisition and are no longer available at a later point. When traditional sculptors use the chisel and hammer on a block of marble, in 3D printing we have a CAD program that is prepared for a printing machine using typically a proprietary material of a wild mix of substances. A printer in a printing studio then arranges the objects in the printing machine and applies various post-processing procedures to the object. Between material and technology advancements, there's a tremendous amount of steps, processes and developments that are outside of our control. And even if reprinting is an option for a given work in the future, we may have to give up our hope for recreating it exactly as it was. And as we consider reprinting, we may lose the work's patina or remnants of technological process that may be valued in the future, root the work in its historical time and influence our perception. But maybe that's okay. As more and more of these works are entering, collecting institutions, we're developing our processes for asking the questions. And as with other works of contemporary art, we'll see that statements, key factors and even our own set of set emphasis may change over time. When these objects are prepared for exhibitions and loans long after their acquisition. As Alex, Martina and I bring our backgrounds of conservators of contemporary art to this discussion, we've frequently asked ourselves, where can we find parallels to guide our work? Could these 3D printed artworks be compared to software-based artworks that are also exposed to incredibly fast-changing technology and in some cases have a digital and an object component? Could we look at conceptual art where an idea is temporarily manifested in the galleries, like a solowit drawing? Or in a comparison that the Whitney presentation will introduce Carol Walker's silhouettes, which are created for an exhibition and are later destroyed? Along these lines, can we look to contemporary photographers' practice of reprinting discolored photographs? We find commonality in the gynec practice of seeking to understand the intangible values of these works in addition to the tangible manifestations. These examples offer some reference points and we'll hear more on this big picture contextualization from Jill Sterrett in our closing session. The potential of 3D printing is profound. From affordable housing, to prosthetics, to growing organs for transplant, this technology is changing lives. We'll hear more from Dr. James Weaver about its use as a research tool for a range of biological materials, lending a glimpse of its use in scientific applications. Within the field of cultural heritage, opportunities for access and interactivity challenge museums to develop new modes of collecting and stewardship. Will museums shift to collecting these works solely as digital assets? And if so, how will that change how audiences experience them? Will some artists want to make their designs available for printing on demand, either by museums or potentially by public audiences? And how do we ensure that these issues are managed responsibly to ensure that the creators benefit fairly from their work? Before we let you go and out on this journey, we want to warn you the reason we ask so many questions is because we don't know the answers ourselves and you may end up with leaving with even more questions. As we hear from artists, printers, technical experts and colleagues, we look to develop a common language to communicate more easily going forward. We hope to build familiarity with the common printing techniques and materials and promote open dialogue about the long-term stewardship for these works. Ultimately, we hope to help artists, collectors and museums to make informed decisions in the care of these exciting, intriguing, challenging and inspiring works of art. And with not much further ado, we want to wish you three fruitful days of diving into the many aspects of 3D printed art. Thank you.