 Kiol yw'r cwtau. Cwestiwch ar gallu'r galwyr i'w pwn o waithetw twch y mahi, hefregistra o'r hoed i'w teimlo'r caitiach i'w twyd, colwyr i'r fawr i'w twch yn goa, tennig o'r twch y toa. Time-based media artworks deliver some of the most immediate, powerful and immersive narratives in our collection. They're contemporary and they continue to evolve. We want to ensure that we're preserving these works and their stories for our audiences' current and future. I want to talk to you today about the journey that Christchurch Art Gallery has embarked upon towards a better standard of care for our collection. I hope my talk will both be an introduction to but also illustrate the scope and complexity of our project. I want to express our team's enthusiasm for looking after time-based media artworks and express the gratitude we feel to a number of colleagues both here in New Zealand and internationally for their passion and expertise. This project wouldn't be possible without the work of other institutions, notably the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and Tate in London, who have done so much to establish best practice in this field and to generously share their expertise. Finally, I hope that I might connect with some of you to inspire and to learn from you as glam digital advocates. So what is time-based media art? Tate neatly describes it as art that is dependent on technology and has a durational dimension. A durational dimension might also be described as art that unfolds over time. The technology we talk about might be audio, film, video, slide or computer-based technologies. So a typical example of a time-based media artwork might be a single-channel digital video work, but more complex works might involve multiple technologies in media and both sculptural or tangible artwork components as well as time-based and variable ones. To illustrate, here are three works from the Gallery's collection. Mary Shannon's Car Stories is a single-channel video shot through a car windscreen as the artist drives with voiceover narrating the history of all the cars she's ever owned. The work can either be displayed as a projection or on a monitor. Wayne Newell's Alone Time is described as an obsessively ordered and subversively witty reimagining of the artist's own studio and is an example of an installation work with several time-based media components and over 50 tangible objects and a number of variable aspects dependent on the exhibition. The work is soon to go on loan for Wayne's 2020 show at the Partica Museum. Finally, Harren and Aribari's work, The Hedge, is an early software-based digital projection made in 2003. If you make noises in front of the projection, the leaves and the hedge gently fall, forming different patterns depending on the duration and volume of the noises. Afterwards, when the gallery is quiet again, the leaves reassemble themselves as they were before. So the project we embarked upon earlier this year had as its core objective to survey and preserve our time-based media art collection. But because of the nature of time-based media art, it involves all aspects of their care. Acquisitions procedures, cataloging, legal documents, storage both physical and digital, documentation, display and installation, and conservation and preservation. It's a collaborative project with both registrars like myself, conservators, exhibition designers and technicians, the Council's IT department, our curators and external experts. This is definitely an ongoing project, and by its very nature we recognise it will be a forever project. Best practices will keep changing as fast if not faster than the technology that supports these works, and the works will need much more active management than traditional objects. I think an important question to ask is, why are we only just looking at this collection now? Firstly, it's a fast-growing collection. The gallery started collecting time-based media artworks in 2003. We have 33 artworks out of a total collection of about 7,000 artworks, but almost half of that collection of 33 artworks has been collected in the last five years, and it's a collection in high demand. 50% of those works are due to go on display within the year. Next, as I mentioned in my introduction, a number of institutions globally are already leaders in this field and have done vast amounts of work to establish best practices and standards. So although the gallery is late to the game, we saw that we have the opportunity to learn from others here. Rather than being discouraged by our lack of expertise and existing policies, we've embraced the possibility of learning from the best. In particular, we indebted to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, whose fantastic symposium, Towards a Digital Future, we were able to attend in Sydney in June this year. At home, New Zealand Museum and Galleries, Light to Papa and Auckland Art Gallery, are also well into their own work, and we are benefiting from our relationships with them and hoping to forge new ways of sharing information. Lastly, we need to act urgently. We know that many of the issues these collection faces are time-sensitive. They only get worse with time, and we're understanding that although we have limited time and resources at the gallery, doing something is better than doing nothing. The challenges that this collection faces are largely due to the fact that our existing systems, policies and procedures just don't fit. In almost every aspect of the care of time-based media art, a new way of working is needed. Artworks are often catalogued inadequately and inconsistently. We don't have legal paperwork to suit. We're often not sure how to display them without re-consulting the artist. They're being stored inadequately. Many are at risk of or already subject to obsolescence, and we don't have the specialist knowledge of how to preserve or conserve them. If that sounds daunting, then yes it is, but they also prove to be some of the most dynamic and exciting artworks to work with, artworks that keep changing and evolving by their nature. The more problems we come across, the more questions we often have to answer, but the more we're learning about the works. To try and give you an insight into what some of these challenges really look like and what, albeit small steps, we're taking in the right direction to better manage the collection, I'm going to take you on a tour of one of our current exhibitions at Christchurch Art Gallery. Ferico Brilliant explores the many roles light can play in the making and experiencing of art. The exhibition has been on display since May and runs until February. Does that sound gone off? Is it a shame? Oh, I'm sorry about that. There's a lovely little video there highlighting the exhibition of Ferico Brilliant at the Collection, which includes both time-based media artworks and more traditional ones. It is available on the gallery's YouTube page, so hopefully you can find a way to see it later. One of the first artworks you come in to come across in this show is a video work by Australian artist duo David Haynes and Joyce Hinterding. We purchased the artwork four years ago in 2015, but we hadn't displayed the work until this show. At acquisition we've received a master copy, shown here, on an artist signed USB carrier. Collection works for exhibition are normally condition checked weeks if not months ahead of exhibition so any problems can be identified. This work was only investigated days ahead of time when our conservators came to make an exhibition copy of the work from the master for the technicians who are installing the show. Since at acquisition we had no time-based media specific acquisition procedure, we dealt with this work much in the way a painting or a work on paper might be handled. We'd cited the carrier, we'd taken the details from the outside and noted them on our collection management system and the USB had been placed into storage. When we viewed the work though we realised that the files were corrupt, a pixelated band appeared across the file which you can see here. No one could remember viewing the work before so we weren't 100% sure it wasn't supposed to be there. There was nothing on file and we didn't describe what to expect, no physical description of what one looked at when viewing the work. Had we done something to the file when we'd opened it and copied it. Luckily it was the inaugural outing of our newly purchased right blocker, a crucial piece of time-based media art conservation equipment that protects the original carrier as your access files upon it. So we were confident that wasn't the case. There was nothing for it but to contact the artists and hope they could help. Luckily despite the fact that they were travelling to the cities, they had access to an exhibition copy of the work and they were able to send us a file in time. So what are we doing differently now to try and avoid these kinds of issues in the future? Well we're implementing procedures first to condition check works. We've set up a time-based media lab, a dedicated area within our conservation lab to condition check, view, make copies of and temporarily store time-based media artworks. We treat them as artworks. They have their own little space, we handle them with gloves, we track them as we might do an artwork on our database. We use that right blocker I mentioned and we create a series of standard metadata reports about the work. So we have a sort of idea of what they look like at a fixed point of time in respect of data. We're also setting acquisition requirements at that point of intake to the gallery. We're working directly with artists to specify we need a master, an exhibition, a viewing copy. We're telling them what our ideal maths carriers and sizes might be. Sometimes they have very strong ideas about what their artwork is going to be but more often than not we're finding that they're open to these sort of suggestions to help their work be preserved within our collection. And we're making preservation copies. We're getting permission from the artists via a preservation licence agreement to take copies of the original master files and we're making a validated copy using some software called Bagger that can be checked for corruption in the future. This is Kentari Yamada's horizontal number one. It consists of a plank of wood leant against a wall, a perspex shelf onto which images of sunsets from around the world are projected. Here's a detail of those sunsets projected through the perspex shelf so the viewer sees them from standing in front and crouching down to view the perspex. Made in 2008, the technology that supports this work is already obsolete. Behind the wooden plank is a DVD player connected to a customized LCD monitor whose screen sits flush with the rear of the perspex allowing the image to be projected on the shelf. When we carried out pre-exhibition condition checks of this work because there were after all tangible objects here so we were in somewhat more familiar territory we were concerned with the stability and safety of that customization. If you can see from the image the monitor has been stripped of its casing to make a truly flat screen which wasn't otherwise available to the artist in 2008 and we had concerns about how this would stand up to ten months of display in a public space. We also wondered if new technology could be used to achieve the desired effect. There was nothing on file again to suggest that the technology was variable or not considered an integral part of the work by the artist but when we communicated with him that he would be happy for us to substitute newer technology for display. So for our current installation we've chosen a slimline tablet and a brightside media player instead to do the same job. Artist and curator were happy with the result. What are we doing differently to anticipate these sorts of issues in the future especially in circumstances where we may no longer be able to talk to the artist. Gaining a deeper understanding of the artwork ideally at the point of acquisition is crucial. In this instance, ascertaining whether or not the hardware elements of an artwork have a conceptual or aesthetic importance in the artwork was critical. But in other artworks understanding what elements of the work would be provided by the artist and what elements of the work the gallery may need to fabricate or source could be key. To that end we're going to start using an artist questionnaire. By asking artists a range of questions phrased in different ways we want to try and tease out a more robust understanding of their intentions for the work. Example questions might be are elements intended to be fabricated or sourced with each display is the role of equipment purely functional or does it have a conceptual or aesthetic significance? In case of equipment obsolescence is it acceptable to replace vintage equipment with newer components? Is there an expected lifespan of the work? This is Ruben Patterson's Ruben Patterson's work Te Putahitanga o Rehua and it highlights some of the complexities of actively cataloging time-based media art in particular the limitations of our existing procedures for accessioning work on our collections management system and via that system sharing them with the public via our wall labels publications and website. The work is created from multiple layers of cut out and reorganised drawings that are scanned and composited or kaleidoscoped into a digital animation software programme and for our Erica exhibition projected onto a screen prepared with an artist-specified glitter. It's a work that's in both Christchurch Art Gallery and Te Papa's Collections and here is how it appears on our collection website. Our entry exemplifies some problems we've previously had capturing time-based art time-based media art. They vary with many of our records due to a lack of any applied standard. We've cataloged the medium of the artwork as the tangible component we received at the time of acquisition, a DVD. There's no mention of a digital animation, a projection, let alone the glitter surface that was projected onto for this iteration. Neither is it categorised as time-based media work at all, useful perhaps if you want to look at other like works in the collection. We haven't captured any duration so nothing to tell the public how long the video is, that it plays continuously or that it's silent or that the size of the projection can be variable. The location is shown as under display in the gallery. Useful for the visiting public but not very useful for our collections team who need to know where the master files are stored or that any associated accessories such as the leftover glitter are stored. Finally the images that we've chosen going back one the images are stills of the artwork chosen with the artist to best represent the work, a standard choice for a single channel video work but limiting. We aim to implement a system to record all this information and consistently in the future so that both our public and our curators, registrars, conservators and technicians can all make sense of what we have. In addition we'll be recording accurate metadata information such as file size, software, used, aspect ratio, format etc. Information which doesn't yet fit anywhere in our more traditional collection management system. I'd be really interested to hear at the end of the talk how you think we could better represent time-based media art online. The last artwork I'm going to talk to you about is one of our newest time-based media artworks and one of the most challenging for us. This work by Daniel von Sturmer generously gifted to the gallery in 2017 is a site-specific animated light installation. So site-specific in fact that our version is named for us and can be configured by the artist to work in any of our gallery spaces. I wish you could have seen the video because it really would have shown how this works that the robotic light, bottom right is programmed by the artist to pick out highlight and illuminate various aspects and details of the gallery's architecture. So it kind of scans the room and picks out sprinkler head, the light fixing cupboard, the skirting, a big circle on the wall and it moves around continuously and with a sort of degree of humour almost as it picks out the different elements. I would love to. I've got a video that if the file should be there as well. We uploaded it. It just played the first two seconds. I tried twice. No, it's slide number nine. Can we look on the? Maybe in that case the video is captured too. Never mind. I will put the link to it on my profile on the schedule later. Thank you for trying. Oh, thank you. The plants received acquisition for this work included a robotic light, an iPad with preloaded software and a set of go bows or stencils through which the light shines in different patterns on the walls. Some of the many challenges of this work include installation and lifespan since we understand the work to be on the artists so since we understand the work to be on the artists own interpretation of a space Daniel has come and there we go. Daniel has to come and program the work in whichever gallery it's exhibited whenever we exhibit it. Does it have any lifespan beyond his ability to travel and execute the work? Could he program he could he pre-program certain spaces perhaps but even that would be limited to the current gallery layout or even the lifespan of the building currently in habit. Documenting the work was also challenging. Video clips definitely give a better impression but even that is difficult because there's no one angle that you could video the entire totality of the work from so how would we achieve that? Could we take a 3D video of some kind could we use a 3D model and of course the costs in all the above need to be understood acquiring and maintaining a work like this is very expensive. There's also issues around software and obsolescence and hardware and obsolescence. The light is programmed with an industry leading lighting software the kind use for theatre and events is this crucial to the work or when that becomes unsupported could we use another technology, Ditto the iPad that this is all managed from at the moment and what about the robotic light is the aesthetic look of that light and the subtle but atmospheric whirring noise that it makes also crucial to the work. We don't have the answers yet and in fact we are only starting to look at this work with the artist to answer them. That artist questionnaire will be a starting point for us but we know that Daniel doesn't necessarily have the answers either. So what we are trying to embrace here are two key concepts of time-based media art collections management. Firstly conservation through insulation and secondly the gallery as collaborator. Conservation through insulation acknowledges that it's only through displaying these artworks that we're learning about them in a way that allows us to start to preserve them. With Daniel's work it's that broadly unlooked at and unconsidered for two years before display and that Hayneson hindering work I showed you earlier was about four years. Often in exhibition driven institutions like ours collection work is deprioritised so we are making the time with exhibitions not just to make do for display but to aim to identify and record the problems and ideally resolve those questions. And that's where having a team a collaboration between conservation and registration, designers, technicians and curators has been key as a group of people happy to discuss and brainstorm on these challenging artworks. In recognising the gallery as collaborator we acknowledge our role and not just the care of but the life of these works and in particular the knowledge we hold as an institution and as individuals. So we're building in processes to have debrief meetings and complete installation or iteration reports. These are a collaborative affair with lots of technical information and they aim to document decision making around all display decisions. I hope I've demonstrated that appropriate time based media art management is a complex challenge for any institution one that often feels like it poses more questions than it answers but without a dedicated role or a large budget we have managed to start to address some of the issues and we now know many more areas where we need to definitely advocate for more work to be done. I'd like to acknowledge my colleagues who have helped work on this project and again especially grateful to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in particular Asti sharing. I haven't touched on many aspects of time based media management especially the technical requirements of digitisation or the subject of digital preservation and storage. Anna Henry digitisation programme manager at Art Gallery of New South Wales knows a lot about the latter is also here at NDF and we thought if anybody would like to speak to us about this at afternoon tea we're very happy to meet you.