AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Los Angeles Times

Conservators face issues in preserving video and modern material artworks.

“Video is a fugitive medium,” said Getty Research Institute’s Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for “California Video,” running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.

Jonathan Furmanski, an assistant conservator at the institute, describes one particularly unruly video installation. “The Philo T. Farnsworth Video Obelisk” (by Skip Sweeney and Video Free America) was recorded on “a phenomenally obscure 1-inch tape that plays only on a specific type of Sony deck. I needed to locate and repair such a deck in order to extract the signal from the tape. The signal itself was loaded with its own problems because the artists created a montage from a variety of sources that caused the video signal to fluctuate dramatically from scene to scene. Artists are not engineers and like to push tools like video equipment until they do something unexpected. And that unexpected thing is often the ‘art.’ ”

The question looms large for conservators: How will audiences of the future view art created with technologies of the past? To explore this and other delicate issues, more than 300 conservators, artists, curators and art historians gathered at the Getty Center for a three-day “Object in Transition” conference earlier this year. Aimed at getting a grip on art in flux, attendees discussed new media.

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