 Hello, we'd like to thank the conference organizers for hosting us today and organizing the schedule. Today Savannah and I are discussing cost of living a later by the American artist Josh Klein, the fabrication techniques are similar to those already discussed at the conference. This series comprises a commercially produced utility cart illuminated with LED lights and 3D printed body parts and tools used by a later a cleaning staff member at a boutique New York City hotel are placed on the cart shelves. Klein used photogram obituary to capture a latest head hands and tools. The photos were imported into a CAD program which transformed them into a 3D surface model, which he digitally manipulated and then printed in color variations with a polymerized plaster. Klein provides the collector with the ability to print new components as printing technology progresses. At a time of production, the available print resolution that was used was substantially lower than what was held in the resolution of the digital files. As printing advances, the print output will have a greater resolution until one at one point it'll match that of the file data. One of the pleasures of this object is that Klein leaves the materials and that of the visual results up to an optimistic belief in future technology. It's an agreement that the collector museum is a willing participant in the possibility of change. The cost of living was completed in the fall 2014 as part of an ongoing series of portraits on the people of the losing end of the American economy. It was inspired as he encountered while subleasing in a space of an office building and ordering equipment was delivered by FedEx and UPS people. Examples here is what is called the series packing for peanuts where he incorporates FedEx and UPS labels on the 3D printed body parts of its scanned workers. For cost of living Klein was considering hotel staff and asking who cleans up our society's mess and who's maintaining the new boutique hotels of the New York City architecture of our time. To make this work he's also thinking about scanning working people, processing them through the computer and exporting them through different formats such as sculptures, images and video. Like any work that needs a set of instructions for the installation and care, Josh Klein created a set of rules and guidelines for these sculptures, which allows the possibility for an improvement in the future. If his goal is to bring the printed elements closer to the data, then I believe that Josh also himself sets up an end game either knowingly or by definition of our time. In Josh's words quote, unlike video which decreases in resolution and looks worse as it migrates to higher resolution display platforms. In the future, as elements of the work degrade or break and are reprinted the realized work resolution will increase until there's a one to one correspondence between the resolution of the file and the resolution of the print and quote. The Whitney's interdisciplinary replication committee conducted a series of formal and informal discussions with Josh to lay the groundwork for the museum's long term care of this object. Additionally, Josh was interviewed as part of the artist documentation program, which we'll be using today to hear some clips in Josh's own words. In this first clip, Klein talks about capturing photos a later. Yeah, we used the camera and it was photogrammetry, but really poor photogrammetry because it was just a single camera. The subject would have to stand very still, hopefully the wind wouldn't be blowing too much, and then we would shoot all these photos and then take them back into the studio and run them through this free software called 123D Catch, which would produce a very, very rough 3D model, which would then get reworked in software called ZBrush endlessly by a 3D model or with me art directing next to them until I got something that matched the photographs we took in my eye. And 3D printing is rapidly coming to the point when the output will surpass that date of Klein's stored data. There will also be what I'm calling his end game, when the data capture will be much lower than our capable output, and these parts will look very old dated, much like a 1980s Dwayne Hansen or a figure of an Alice Neil painting, and how they look retro to our eyes. And his discussions with the committee, Josh has always made it clear that the dating of this work and catalogs and wall labels should always remain 2014 no matter when the print prints are printed. In one sense, a more nuanced understanding of this work, and the unwritten date is also tomorrow in parentheses. I would like in a later cost of living to an ominous sci fi story where the narrator indicates this happens in the very near future. In sci fi, the far future can be firmly represented by flying cars and spaceships and we're all perfectly comfortable with this. However, the near future is more unsettling, not dated today, but coming up. If you don't know when, maybe tomorrow. This agreement for the near future is the leap of faith that collections make with all instructional art, be it solid with drawing or Yoko Ono instructional works to participate in the future of tomorrow. Our museum needs a firm understanding of the parameters of the game. Josh does an excellent job of creating through a series of discussions handbooks, what where when and how of reprinting would look like. How does he define his plans by first defining his preferences for when and what materials to print in the future. So in the future when these are reprinted, it's kind of the material doesn't matter to me as long as it doesn't look any worse than whatever was used the last time. So it can't go backwards. So looking worse means like a lower resolution printer. I mean, I guess I've thought a little bit about it at a certain point, you know there will be a one to one correspondence with the files. And then at that point it's just like whatever printer makes the most sense, you know, whatever the most affordable best printers at the time for kicking out 3D prints, or whatever comes after 3D printing. The cost of living a later is also similar to our understanding of work such that of the light strips of Felix Gonzalez Taurus, where one will need to source and adapt to create the works as rubber sockets and light bulbs to grade, or that of cut paper silhouettes of paper with elements can be replaced and repaired but don't bring into question the authenticity of the work. Cost of living fits somewhere in between those objects and it'll be up to the dialogue between the collector and artists to determine how that future unfolds. In our conversations with Josh you want to make actually absolutely clear the actual work is the experience of human being encountering the sculpture in front of the work. Go ahead and talk about it. Well one thing that Ben wrote in the article, even though I told him that it was not the case, he insisted that for me the file is the artwork. And I think if I'm on tape I do want to say that the file is not the artwork. The objects are the artwork. And something else that was kind of asserted in that article was that these objects are not the finished work because in some way I'm waiting for the better technology and I don't feel that way. I think these are very much the finished work and part of the work is that it will change over time. And I feel like about the file the same way that I feel about my video files. The video files are important. They're an intrinsic part of the work. But they're not the work. The work is the experience of sitting in front of the monitor or projection and watching the video. That is the work, like the person with the work in space. And I feel the same way about the sculptures. The file is just a technical part of it. And these archival and conservation aspects are just part of me thinking about how can this work translate into the future as the technology changes. But for me it's like these objects are the work. It exists now. It's not incomplete. I'll pass it over to Savannah who will discuss the technical side of the work. Thank you, Margo, for that great overview of the work. I'm going to talk about cost of living Olada for more of a digital preservation perspective today and about the 3D model digital files themselves. Even though Josh Klein himself says that the digital files are not the artwork and that the actual objects are the artwork. It is still of course highly important to conserve the files as components of the work. There are many questions surrounding this work regarding when and under what conditions it could be reprinted. But in order to even have that option of reprinting in the future, you first need to have the digital files and make sure they are compatible with the printers of today and eventually the printers of the future. As part of my role at the Whitney on the media preservation initiative project, which launched in 2018. I first developed new digital preservation infrastructure using the platforms archive matica and resource space. And along with that workflows for how we care for digital artwork files in the collection. As part of that project I also began systematically going through every physical media component in the Whitney's collection from videotapes and optical disks to hard drives and flash drives, as well as all of the digital files contained on them. I also included backing up all those files on our servers and then processing them to the digital preservation pipeline. So I was first introduced to cost of living a later through the hard drive pictured here. And then of course all of the digital files on it. I also included the file formats for each printed component of the work. Josh Klein provided a dot ZVD file for printing purposes, and then a folder of backup files that included a ZTL, which is a project file for the 3D modeling program Z brush, a 3D model and a JPEG image. The big question we had concerning this work was, are the files we have suitable for reprinting. And the answer we came to was no not really. We contacted LaGuardia Studio, which is 3D printing studio at New York University, and is also the same studio that originally printed cost of living back in 2014. Through consultation with LaGuardia Studio, we learned the ZVD printing file was proprietary to the printer used when the work was first printed, and that printer has long since been superseded by other models that print at higher resolutions. LaGuardia Studio also no longer even has that model of printer, and thus would not be able to reprint this work from the ZVD files. We determined we needed to migrate those files to another format that was more open and broadly supported. Before I go into more details on file format migration, I have a clip of Josh Klein speaking on obsolescence and 3D printing. With the printers, ideally they would be fully photographic, but the printers can't match the resolution of the files yet. So, and also just these materials and the printers themselves, they're all made for rapid prototyping. There's no kind of archival thinking going on at the companies or in any way with these objects and the materials. And so I just knew that these sculptures were going to have like a kind of in-built obsolescence, which would be fine with certain works, but with these I want them to continue into the future. And so with these sculptures, I see them very much as like solid videos in a way, like I think of them as like solid videos. And as with video, you know, like the DVD may get scratched, but you can just burn another one and then you can keep playing it. And then at certain point, DVDs may go away and then you burn a Blu-ray and then the Blu-rays may go away and then you just have a succession of like, you know, higher and higher resolution lossless files. And that's how you would see the genesis of these to keep going. Exactly. Except unlike video, which will look worse and worse as it migrates onto like higher resolution platforms, these will actually get better looking. Here, Klein compares this work to video and the nature of evolving technology being difficult to conserve over time, especially when the companies producing it aren't thinking with more of an archival mindset. I think this is something with time-based media conservation we are deeply aware of and concerned with, because as custodians of these works, we need to think about them in a more of a long-term way. And one strategy we have for keeping up with newer hardware, such as 3D printers, is to migrate the digital files to compatible formats. As previously mentioned, the ZBD printing files we had were no longer supported and needed to be migrated. In August 2019, myself and Taylor Healy, a conservation fellow at the Whitney at the time, went to LaGuardia Studio where we were very kindly allowed to work in their lab and they also offered guidance throughout the process. They only had one software program that could even read the ZBD files and they had very luckily just gotten it shortly before our visit. Pictured here is what one of the Aleta models looks like in 3D Sprint and through this program we migrated the ZBD files to the OBJ file format. We chose to migrate to OBJ for a variety of reasons. First and foremost is that it's widely supported in 3D printing and 3D modeling programs in general. This is a source format so it's not proprietary to one specific printer or brand. It can be used across many. And another advantage of OBJ is that it supports color and texture information which other modeling formats like STL do not. And since these objects are of a real person and require photo accurate color representation, OBJ was deemed a suitable choice and was also endorsed by LaGuardia Studio. And here is what one of our OBJ packages looks like. Here is the file package for a model of Aleta's shoe with the yellow sponge texture on the inside of it. With these OBJ packages it is actually three files working together to create the final model. First there is the .obj file itself which is the actual 3D model containing the geometry and structural information needed to create the shape of the print. And then there is the PNG which is a flat image file that contains the color and texture mapping information. And OBJ package may contain multiple PNG files if more than one texture mapping needs to be applied to the OBJ. And finally there is the .mtl file which acts as the instructions that inform the PNGs how to wrap around the OBJ structure. Now we have not yet attempted to actually make new prints from these files. At the very least migrating to OBJ was a stopgap measure that will enable us to continue working with these files and supported programs. And if the media conservation and digital preservation communities later decide on a different file format that is best for the long term preservation of 3D models, the OBJs would likely to be easier to use as the basis for another migration than the ZBD files would be. Another thing we were able to do at LaGuardia Studio was open up the backup ZTL project files in the program ZBrush and create video documentation of each of the models. ZBrush has a turntable feature where you can rotate a 3D model on its x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis and record a video of it. We save these video files of the turntables as additional documentation of the work seen here in GIF form. These video files are also accessible in our internal viewing platform resource space to curators and researchers who want to look at this work. Resource space can't display 3D model files natively, so these video files are very handy to have an idea of what the models look like without accessing either the original files or the actual sculptural objects directly. And just in closing, I will turn things over to Josh Plein one last time, and he can speak in his own words on how he sees this work evolving over time as printing resolution increases and components are reprinted. In terms of the sculptures, like where the prints that are on the sculpture, you know with those I don't think it's so important to lock them in, or even possible to lock them into the technology of 2014. Because, you know, the printer that these were printed on, they no longer make it. It's already advanced, and so later additions of the sculpture are actually higher resolution now than the ones that are here even. There's like another model beyond this, and when I look at the newer prints, I can already see the difference in terms of like a slight jump in resolution in the prints. And so I think it's kind of hard to like, and the printers are so expensive and obscure and like hard to maintain, that I just saw it as being counterproductive to lock them into that one technology. Yeah, because it would just be a nightmare, like a conservation nightmare. Yeah, it would be challenging to say the least. And in the long run, it would get in the way of like exhibiting the work in the future. So what point should we be remaking now? You know, I tend to say like as elements break, you know, they should be, if they can't be easily fixed, they should be reprinted. And then does that, you reprint all of them on the cart? No, no, no. Just, just the ones, so you're okay if they're looking different. Yeah. And finally, we would like to thank the following for the invaluable contributions to this project. Josh Klein, our colleagues at the Whitney and the Conservation Department and on the Replication Committee, the artist documentation program, Taylor Healy, and everyone at LaGuardia Studio. Thank you all.