 Hello, I'm Peter Lexik, Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, and I'll be walking you through how to approach acquiring 3D printing files. Emily Hamilton walked you through how to approach the acquisition of physical objects, and I'm here to detail a similar process in the acquisition of digital 3D printing files. I'm going to reference Taoba Auerbach's Alter Engine, pictured here, which Megan Randall and myself will go into more detail in our separate case study talk on this piece. One theme that you've probably noticed is collaboration. We know that contemporary art conservation is a highly collaborative practice, and this is particularly true with 3D printed works. This process will involve people from around your institution with different skills, from conservation to registrars to curatorial, IT, and outside 3D printing ventures, just to name a few. As we're beginning to understand about 3D printed objects, the digital file is where the work is originally created and is how one produces the material object. Much like a photographic negative, the 3D file is what's used to create the object. In theory, you should be able to produce identical copies of the same object from a file, something complicated in material reality, but there is an intrinsic link between the file and the object. Here, the digital version of Taoba Auerbach's Alter Engine is compared to the analog material version. So, why should we acquire the 3D file if we wouldn't normally acquire a negative for a photographic print, for example? The three main reasons are to allow for future reprinting of the object, for documentation or reference, and for future utility. The first, reprinting is perhaps the most obvious. Works such as Josh Klein's Cost of Living, Al Jida, which we'll hear about more from Savannah Campbell and Margo Dilladow, are meant to be reprinted to the file as a critical element of the piece, or the work Alter Engine by Taoba Auerbach, where some objects needed to be reprinted because of degradation issues. Files can also aid in documentation and reference. For example, with this object from the Auerbach piece, we were able to see the amount of instability, which the object was beginning to suffer on, pictured here on the left, when compared against the ideal 3D printed file here represented on the right. So these files can really aid in providing reference or documentation of the physical 3D printed object. Even with works like Menaria Occupant's Glass Sections, where reprinting would be prohibitive, the file is still a valuable reference tool to the documentation of this work's ideal state. The files also allow for future utility. For the Auerbach piece, which is a complex installation with numerous objects, we were able to use the 3D renders to make templates to allow for a more efficient installation. And to create custom negative cavity storage for more fragile pieces, again utilizing the 3D printing files to aid in this production. So how do you go about acquiring the 3D printed files? First, I want to quickly reference or plug two resources for this acquisition methodology. The first, Matters and Media Art, has great information on how to approach the acquisition of all time-based media art and has numerous examples and templates to this end. The other is the Media Conservation and NIF Initiative, which was a project at MoMA to hold a series of workshops and expert discussion meetings on media art conservation. Out of this, a series of resources are available on collecting media art and more specifically the acquisition process. I recommend watching those videos for the full context of this methodology and I will draw from the acquisition methodology in this presentation. When acquiring any work involving variable parts, you need to first establish exactly what it is that you are acquiring. Much like in Emily's talk, this typically takes the form of a pre-acquisition conversation with the artist or gallery to gain more information about the work in question. You are trying to establish what the work is. This is by answering the following props. What are the basic details? What is a brief technical history of the work? You want to understand the work's content. You want to understand the basic understandings of its display specifications, so the equipment necessary for it, the space requirements, the degree of flexibility or variability in this specification. Any pros or non-technical descriptions of this work and sort of how it's installed and where the work currently is located. So first you want to understand what the museum will receive. Based on this information, you can then determine the ideal archival and exhibition formats to be requested and assess the suitability and generation of formats offered. It's common in this conversation to tailor pre-acquisition questions based on the medium. Here is an example of the pre-acquisition questions for a single channel video artwork. How is the work shot or recorded? How is the work edited? What is your master format? What is the video resolution? What file formats have you used for exhibition in the past? And here are sample questions for 3D printed work. How is the work created? Software used. What file format did you export the final product in, consider for the master? Was this format decided by you or the vendor? What printing process did you use? What was the printing process like? For example, did it take numerous tests? Did you work with a variety of vendors to achieve intended results? And should the file be used for future reprinting? These questions are constantly refined when we learn more about a format as acquisitions help us refine them and are always revised and tailored to suit the needs of the artwork in question. So really you want to revisit these questions every time you pose them in this pre-acquisition conversation to make sure that they fit the work in question. And this is how the artist Talba Alerbeck answered these questions when we required Altered Engine at MoMA. How was the work created and software used? It was done in Illustrator and Rhino. What file formats did you export the final product in? The STL file format and .png image reference files. How was this decided? This was decided in conversation with vendors. What printing process did she use? SLS, SLA, Polyjet, and T-Helm LS laser cutting, which we will go into more detail later. What was the printing process like? It was very research heavy and a lot of trial and error with different processes and vendors. And should the files be used for very future reprinting? And this we'll go into more in our discussion, but it depends. It was really case by case per object and really to the needs of this work. For the acquisition of the files, you want to focus on the answers to the first two questions. This tells you what applications were used and the file format you were going to receive. At this point, it's a good idea to research the file formats if unfamiliar with them. Once the file formats are established as deliverables, you then need to decide on how to receive them. This can be done via hard drive or file transferred protocols like Dropbox or WeTransfer. And this largely depends on your specific context and how you are best set up to receive digital files. For more information on this, the Matters and Media Art website and themediaconservation.io site have resources on the receipt of digital files. If the material arrives on a hard drive, it's good practice to use some form of write blocker to use before exploring the contents of this drive. This preference any user for making any changes to the drive or files contained therein. You also want to assign fixity to each file format. To quote the Digital Preservation Coalition Handbook, fixity in the preservation sense means the assurance that a digital file has remained unchanged, i.e. fixed. This can be done through tools such as checksums, which generate unique alphanumeric strings of characters, which essentially act as fingerprints for the digital file to confirm that the file has remained unchanged through various transfers or just over time. Once fixity has been established, you will then want to copy the file before going on to the next step of condition assessment. Condition assessment is essentially the act of confirming the condition of the file and that it behaves like it's intended to. This is perhaps most easily done by opening the file in different software. You can use a robust 3D rendering tool like Rhino, which we utilize for the hour back piece, which you can see here. But also it's good to check the file on another software if possible to confirm that it's rendering correctly when compared against the two. The open source MeshLab was used due to its ubiquity and is used within the 3D printing community and its affordability. It's free. And here you can see the same render of the file. Another free resource is MeshMixer that can be used for these checks as well. Another good idea is to confirm the technical metadata of the file to confirm it's described properly. Currently, there are no tools akin to characterization tools for still images like XF tool or for video files such as media info that exist for 3D printed files, unfortunately. For this reason, the check in the software is a critical step in the assessment process. And now a brief moment on the various file formats used in 3D printing projects. There are numerous file formats, both open source and proprietary. So this will cover only the main file formats that we have encountered in 3D printing projects. Drawn from resources provided by Zometry and on-demand industrial parts Marketplace, here are the breakdowns of the most popular 3D file formats that may be involved in a project you are working on. The STL file format, it's Pro, it's widely adopted and perhaps the de facto standard. It was perhaps the first file format for 3D printed projects. Its con is it does not allow for the capture of color, texture or material information. It allows for limited detail in the file format and it's pretty old. It was developed in the 1980s. The OBJ file format, it's pros, it can store the geometry, color and texture information that the STL file format cannot. However, it is not widely adopted as STL, it is complex and it takes the form of many file formats, meaning that with one STL format you can send to the printer when the OBJ file format comes in multiple files that you need to then safeguard and keep together. The AMF format is an open source format and can store all possible data as it has a small file size. However, there is limited support for it and the industry has not really adopted this file format as of yet. The 3MF, however, is very similar to AMF. It's very popular and compatible with multiple companies. The multiple companies have developed this file format. It can store the geometry and takes the form of a single file. However, due to the fact it was built by various 3D printing vendors, it is possibly a proprietary file format, so there are risks in terms of the long-term preservation potentially of this file format. More information on these breakdowns are in the link below, and I'll point to resources at the end of this presentation where you can learn more. After you receive and assess the file format, you will then want to catalog these files. So working with your registrars or on your own, you'll catalog this material into your collection. At MoMA, we catalog our digital material alongside our physical objects within the museum, system, or TMS. Here is an example of how we catalog this material. We make a component for each object and digital file, which you can see here, the dot A and then the dot A dot X1, which is A is the physical object, and then the X1 component is its digital file counterpart. We also add contextual information about these files in TMS, and here you can see we have relationship, so describing that relationship to the physical object on the left. And then on the right, we add in conservation notes any provenance information, so here just how we received it from the artist, any printing information, or anything like that would help contextualize this digital file more. After you have cataloged it, you will then want to store it. Storage will really depend on your context, and it should be a combination of different storage mediums in different locations, for example, perhaps on a hard drive or into the cloud. The resources I have listed previously go into way more detail about digital file storage, and so I recommend looking at those. Further down the line, you may want to migrate the file format. Migration means moving or translating the information from one file format to another. For instance, you may want to migrate a .stl file to a .obj file. This will require working with the correct software applications capable of making these translations and confirming that it's a one-to-one through checking and comparing in different software applications and also ideally printing. And on that note, for works where the file is intended to be used again for future printing, it is critical to do this process yourselves if budget and capacity allow, as it really does provide the best method of documenting the entire printing process. Emily went into this in far more detail, so I don't need to discuss it more here, and Megan and myself will also go into our experiences with this in terms of the Talba hour back piece here at MoMA. So finally, I just want to stress again that this entire process is highly collaborative, as all contemporary art conservation is. Acquiring these works takes the institutional skills of an objects media conservator, registrar, IT technicians, exhibition designers, and curatorial, but also needs a variety of outside experts to assist from software designers printing technicians along with countless others. This is not meant to imply this work is impossible without these people, quite the contrary. It is mainly to stress that collaboration is key, and when you don't have the answers to questions, reach out and talk to other people who may. Here are various resources that I have found helpful in learning about 3D printing files that I return to over and over. The Digital Preservation Coalition has done great work with Artifactual to document emerging digital technologies and write preservation white papers on them. Here's the link for the 3D data type series, as well as their blog post on the sustainability of 3D file formats. The Library of Congress also does excellent work on their sustainability of digital formats resources. In the last few years, they've really built out their 3D file format section. It's very much recommended when looking into what these file formats are and how to sustain them into the future. Thanks for listening, and here is my contact information if you would like to follow up with any questions offline. Thanks again.