Art and Obsolescence

This week on the show we are in the artist’s studio visiting with the one and only Tourmaline. Tourmaline’s work extends across various media and is a magical blend of a very research-oriented practice that brings history to life, and crafting visions of repose, luxury, relaxation, magic and joy – whether it is in the form of video installations,  photography, or fashion. To say that her work is interdisciplinary would be an understatement – not only is Tourmaline an accomplished and award winning contemporary artist, whose work can be found at this year’s Venice Bienalle and Art Basel, among countless other exhibitions, but she also works within the context of cinema – for instance the film “Happy Birthday, Marsha!” Which she co-directed, and focuses on the life of legendary trans artist and activist Masha P. Johnson – Tourmaline is also an accomplished writer, her latest being a book coming in 2024 from Penguin Random Houses’ Tiny Reprations imprint, on the life of Marsha P Johnson. In our chat delve deeply into Tourmaline’s process, influences, and also discuss her background as an organizer for abolition and trans and queer rights, and how this background factors into her work. Tune in to hear Tourmaline’s story!

Links from the conversation with Tourmaline
> https://www.instagram.com/tourmaliiine/
> http://www.happybirthdaymarsha.com/
> Tourmaline Wins Art Basel's Biggest Prize: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/art-basel-tourmaline-helena-uambembe-baloise-prize-1234631825/amp/
> Chromat x Tourmaline SS22: https://chromat.co/blogs/news/ss22

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Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week we’re visiting with Diego Mellado, an engineer who works in the service of artists. Diego has a formal technical background as a trained engineer but a long time ago after becoming disillusioned with the corporate world, pivoted to using these skills to support  contemporary artists. He has spent the past ten plus years in the studio of artist Daniel Canogar, designing and building elegant and durable technical implementations of Daniel’s artistic visions. The technical expertise that people like Diego provide to artists plays a crucial but often unsung role in the art world, and especially in conservation. How artwork leaves the studio, and what documentation accompanies it has a major influence on how well an artwork will survive the future. Years ago Diego was able to see this connection, and began immersing himself in the conservation world and today is an incredibly unique individual in that he has more than a decade of engineering and document works of art within the context of an artist’s studio, but also now is very much part of the conservation community. Tune in to hear Diego’s story!

Links from the conversation with Diego
> http://www.danielcanogar.com/
> https://muac.unam.mx/patrimoniobit/talleres/nuevas-aproximaciones-a-la-conservacion-de-obras-de-arte-digitales.html
> https://www.mediaartscultures.eu/mediaac/

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week on the show we're visiting with legendary curator and researcher of digital art, Annet Dekker. Annet occupies an incredibly unique and important role within the ecosystem of people that steward time-based media art.  In addition to her curatorial work and research, and in many ways serving as a hub and convener within the digital art community,  Annet has also serverd for many years as passionate researcher within the world of preservation.  Annet's work often serves a sort of meta role studying the work of conservators, the culture of institutions and utilizes her close relationships with artists to encourage the conservation field down a more enlightened path – Annet's influence on the field has been far reaching.

Links from the conversation with Annet
> http://aaaan.net/
> Annet speaking at TechFocus III: https://youtu.be/zhALZCR6lRM
> Collecting and Conserving Net Art: Moving Beyond Conventional Methods: https://monoskop.org/log/?p=20110

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week we're back in the studio visiting an artist. Alan Michelson is a New York based artist and Mohawk member of the six nations of the grand river, a Haudenosaunee community in Southern Ontario.  Alan is an astute and passionate student of history – an incredible fountain of historical facts, figures, and stories. His public art, installations, and time-based media works serve as moments where archival, appropriated, and newly captured imagery blend and give us a lens into the latest focus of Alan’s voracious appetite for history, often surfacing indigenous voices, perspectives, and truths that have been silenced for far too long. Coincidentally this episode is being released the week of the 146th anniversary of the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which Alan takes as his subject in two pieces of his we discuss in-depth, and which are currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum in the exhibition Mountain / Time.

Links from the conversation with Alan
> https://www.alanmichelson.com/
> https://www.billionoysterproject.org/
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/arts/design/alan-michelson-oysters-moma-ps1.html
> https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/exhibitions/319-mountain-time


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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week’s show features Gaby Wijers – with origins in documenting performance art in the 80s and 90s, as well as leading work in the early 2000s at Montevideo, an important Dutch video art orgnization – Gaby has played an incredibly important role in the ecosystem of time-based media art conservation over several decades, always in very close collaboration with artists, and long before the field of “time-based media conservation” as we know it today really existed. When she founded LIMA in 2013 she and her colleagues created a much needed sort of hybrid organization – a non-profit dedicated to the conservation of media art, but one that is entrepreneurial, and today provides a-la-carte services to more than fifty collections of time-based media art. Tune in to hear Gaby’s story!

Links from the conversation with Gaby
> https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week we are visiting with emerging conservation professional Anna Mladentseva. Throughout the course of her undergraduate and masters studies at University College London, Anna has been building some very fresh philosophical and ethical frameworks for how we think about the conservation of software based art, net art in particular, and her perspective is refreshingly grounded in a very sort of hands-on technical approach. In our chat we delve into the ins and outs of studing Flash, reframing how we think about an artist’s relationship to their source code, and what it means when a conservator is flagged as a hacker :-) Our chat finds Anna just wrapping up her graduate degree, and about to embark on her doctorate studies where she will be (among other things) studying the digital collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Tune in to hear Anna’s story!

Links from the conversation with Anna
> Anna’s paper “Responding to obsolescence in Flash-based net art: a case study on migrating Sinae Kim’s Genesis” https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2021.2007412
> Fetchish Magazine: https://www.fetchish.net/

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week's guest has been incredibly influential in shaping not just how art conservators think about preserving art on the internet, but also in building tools to help them accomplish things we never thought possible. As Rhizome's Preservation Director, Dragan Espenschied is responsible for the preservation of thousands of works of art experienced through the web, accessible to the general public 24/7, 365. As we'll hear, this very particular context has required Dragan to approach the practice of preservation from a fundamentally different angle than what has evolved in museum practice. Dragan's way of working, and his contributions to the field are vital and serve as a valuable counterpoint and compliment to the slower, smaller scale, shall we say small-batch style approaches we are more accustomed to seeing in conservation. Tune in to hear Dragan's story!

Links from the conversation with Dragan
> Rhizome: https://rhizome.org/
> Zombie + Mummy: https://www.diaart.org/program/artistswebprojects/olia-lialina-and-dragan-espenschied-zombie-mummy-web-project
> Emulating “Bomb Iraq”: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jun/24/emulating-bomb-iraq-arcangel/
> Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs: https://sites.rhizome.org/theresa-duncan-cdroms/

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week we’re visiting with brilliant curator and writer Mia Matthias. Mia’s current role is as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but not for long. No spoilers, but Mia shared some very exciting news during our conversation, and you’ll just have to tune in to find out what it is. Mia’s background, training, and the collection of experiences she’s accrued over the years is incredibly interdisciplinary – integrating linguistics, anthropology, and computer science into her vibrant practice. Tune in to hear Mia’s story!

Links from the conversation with Mia
> The Studio Museum: https://studiomuseum.org/
> Mia on Faith Ringold: https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/342
> The Life-Cycle of a Software Based Work of Art: https://voca.network/blog/2018/02/02/the-life-cycle-of-a-software-based-work-of-art/
> Mia’s co-presentation of her graduate work on the Guggenheim’s CCBA initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNgqLLMn7ps

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week we are revisiting our very first-ever episode, featuring one of the time-based media conservation field's foundational thinkers: Pip Laurenson, head of collections care reasearch at the Tate. Tune in to hear how a philosopher-turned stone sculpture conservator went on to become one of the most inflential conservators in time-based media art.

Links from the conversation with Pip
> Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/06/authenticity-change-and-loss-conservation-of-time-based-media-installations

> The Management of Display Equipment in Time-based Media Installations:
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/03/the-management-of-display-equipment-in-time-based-media-installations

> Reshaping the Collectible: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/reshaping-the-collectible

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

This week on the show we’re visiting with Lauren Cornell, chief curator at the Hessel Museum and director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard college. As a curator at Bard, the New Museum, Rhizome and beyond, Lauren has had a life-long dedication to time-based media art; as well as a passion for growing, shaping, and building arts institutions. Tune in to hear Lauren’s story, and the incredible exhibitions she has in store at Bard this summer.

Links from the conversation with Lauren
> Dara Birnbaum: Reaction https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/695-dara-birnbaum-reaction
> Martine Syms: Grio College https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/696-martine-syms-grio-college
> Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mass-effect

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate