Episode 017: sasha arden
Show Notes
Continuing our coverage of emerging professionals, sasha arden will soon be graduating as one of the first conservators from the NYU Conservation Center’s recently established time-based media conservation program. sasha is hardly new to the field though, having spent over a decade meeting the audiovisual needs of numerous institutions prior to making the pivot to conservation. Tune in to hear sasha’s journey, and how their trans nonbinary identity strengthens their practice as a conservator.
Links from the conversation with sasha
> interview with sasha from the Thoma Foundation: https://thomafoundation.org/news-press/foundation-news/meet-the-team-sasha-arden/
> sasha's 2019 presentation on the use of AR in conservation: https://resources.culturalheritage.org/emg-review/volume-6-2019-2020/arden/
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people who are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we have a very special guest who falls very much into that last category. Someone who is playing a big role in shaping the future of the field of time-based media conservation.
[00:00:23] sasha: I'm sasha arden and I'm currently a fourth year student in NYU's time-based media conservation program.
[00:00:30] Ben: If you have ever wondered where time-based media art conservators go to school, well, today is your lucky day. Now, although the time-based media conservation profession is very interdisciplinary and folks often come from all different kinds of backgrounds and academic training, up until very recently there hasn't been a single art conservation program in the US that offered time based media as a material specialty. So folks have had to either learn conservation and cobble together the material specificities of time-based media, or as we heard from Kayla, Henry-Griffin in episode nine, immerse themselves in the material specificities, but pick up the conservation aspects elsewhere. Well, a few years ago, the conservation center at NYU Institute of Fine Arts established a time-based media specialization. And sasha is one of the first conservators to be emerging from that program. As you'll hear from sasha story, they came into this program after a decade of experience handling AV for cultural heritage institutions all over the San Francisco bay area, so sasha really comes to the conservation field with a rather unique set of technical skills and academic training.
Before we get started, welcome to all of our new subscribers. You might notice something about the show there are no ads, Art and Obsolescence is fully listener supported, so in order to sustainably fulfill my mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, I need your help. Tax deductible donations can be made through our fiscal sponsor the New York Foundation for the Arts by going to artandobsolescence.com/donate. Thank you so much for any help you can provide friends. It is deeply appreciated. And now without further delay, let's dive into my chat with sasha arden.
[00:02:11] sasha: I think that everything that I'm going to say in the course of this interview really has to be heard in the context of a deep struggle with place in society. Experiencing really deep discomfort with assigned gender and not having a clear sense of myself really until my mid thirties. And it's slowed me down a lot. And led me to seek out people and spaces that resonated with me. So my path here is very much a winding one.
I kind of was one of those kids who loved to just take stuff apart. I'm so lucky actually that I'm alive because at a couple of different points, I was taking apart CRT televisions by myself in the basement. It's a situation looking back as an adult where I really wish my parents would've been a little more aware and maybe helped me understand my curiosities a little bit better. I think in another life, I would have maybe been a mechanical engineer. I you know, was raised, socialized as a female child and my parents didn't exactly put together that, you know, someone like me could be an engineer and growing up in a really small town was also I think a big limitation for me. I really loved just poking around and taking things apart, but also making things out of parts that I found. That ended up being a very necessary and therapeutic space for me as a kid who just really didn't fit anywhere and was very curious about the world too. So I ended up in the end going to art school as, you know, people who don't quite fit anywhere else go. I think that that was, you know, it was a really good move for me in the end, but at the time it was really a struggle. For me, it was really hard to make the transition from small town life, to the big city. I went to the school of the art Institute of Chicago, and that was really the first time that I'd lived anywhere that was not a cornfield.
And I realized in the course of going to art school, that I really didn't want to be an artist. It was very existentially difficult for me to make stuff that other people were going to look at and critique and you know? That's just how that world works and I realized it wasn't a good fit for me, but I also knew that I really wanted to stay involved in the arts in some way.
I was at the School the Art Institute of Chicago between 2000 and 2005, which, gives you a little bit of a clue as to where I am in my life right now. At that time, The film video and new media department had just kind of coalesced and SAIC is a very special place in terms of not needing to declare a major or even really a focus it's completely interdisciplinary and I really took advantage of that and I went in as a painting and drawing student, and then I very quickly pivoted into just experimenting with video and also started making new media art. Making work with web technologies of the time and starting to learn multimedia programs like Director and Flash. I have had occasion to conserve my own work.
I was really hoping to do the visual and critical studies program at SAIC which would be a fifth year following undergrad to kind of wrap into an MFA. But my financial aid situation changed very suddenly right before that year was going to start. And I being a young person without very strong leadership from my parents or other adults in my life just freaked out and was like, I need to write. So with literally just a couple of weeks before the semester was going to start, I just ran around speaking to different professors and counselors at the school. If you know me, you know, that when I set my mind to something it's going to happen and so I just made that happen. And it was a really interesting year of my life because I found myself in this creative writing program when I had been making very visual work and also kind of doing very experimental text-based works, and I just kept doing that in this creative writing program. In the end, I don't know how much value it has in the long run, but it definitely, for me at the time was an exercise in like, Okay. If I had an idea about what I was going to be doing, and then that radically changed and how am I coping with it?
The work that I was making during that year was very experimental and hybridized in terms of combining text with visual images. For example, I made a project of postcards just kind of snapshots from around Chicago. And then I adopted other people's voices to write about their tourist experience in Chicago. I was also writing poetry. I was creating fake catalogs with kind of like poetic artists' statements and curatorial essays. And I was just really kind of trying to approach every writing form that piqued my interest and trying to like mess around with it in some way and find its boundaries. How could it still cohere and be interesting and be recognizable as that medium, but just really be off. My personal approach is to see things from the outside and push the boundaries. And that is a theme that has really carried forward in many ways through my life.
I did graduate and I immediately needed to start working. And so I was still living in Chicago and was lucky enough to get a couple of contracts with the school. And gosh, I was writing guides for how to use equipment through the media center, which I had been working at as a student also, and I kind of really got my technical skills, built up through that job, just taking classes and producing work, but also teaching other students how to, how to use that equipment. And writing kind of instructional guides. And then I was also hired as an adjunct faculty member in the sculpture department, because they were interested in running these classes to teach sculpture students how to do expanded practice. So I did that, but, anyone who's an adjunct faculty member will know that that is not a very, um, well-paid or equitable position. So it lasted all of two years. And simultaneously just in my personal life, I realized I'd lived in the Chicago area, my entire life, and it was really cold and I really didn't like it so I gave myself the gift of a good climate and yeah, I moved out to the bay area with no plan and a little bit of savings and a little bit of support network and just made it work. I would not recommend that these days, but that was way back in 2007. So I had a, a little bit of a softer landing pad than someone would right now.
I don't even remember exactly how many addresses I had when I lived in the bay area for 12 years, but it was more than 12. It's a very, very unstable place and if you're not working in the tech industry and making six figures, it's really hard to qualify for a lease. And so there are very unstable, kind of precarious housing situations that anyone in the creative community has to get into to be there. So I moved around a lot, lived in pretty much every place you could live in the bay area.
I was really lucky because the San Francisco Art institute was hiring a projectionist for their theater, and that was a really great place to step into in terms of just community. The students were just amazing there and, I still think of them glowingly. They're so creative, so weird, so random, and I enjoyed helping them show their work and then eventually I held a couple of different positions at SFAI and I again was kind of like running a media center and helping students to understand how to make their ideas work with the equipment that we had and it's just a really satisfying process to help something come to life and make it work.
[00:12:35] Ben: When you were doing projectionist work, was that film?
[00:12:39] sasha: Yes, we did have a film projector. We had a bunch of slides. It was kind of a transitional period where some, some faculty and some visiting artists were still using slides. We also had a big old digital projector and a huge sound system. So it was really fun to kind of learn the theater projection side of things. One of the faculty there really wanted to show Bruce Connor's A Movie and we showed it, SFAI had a film print, and we showed that on a projector, which is just really incredible. It's such a treat to get, to see an original film print. Nowadays you can't really see that from film. So it was cool to have had the experience of seeing firsthand an artist's work in that format. The film was from SFAI's library and like not rented, not really replaceable and if I had understood at the time, how kind of precious that one print was, I probably would have been way more nervous, but at the time, you know, I was like, yeah, we can totally do this. This is great. Let's, let's show this film and that's kind of how I approached all projects up until pretty much I went into conservation school and then learned to be more cautious.
[00:14:16] Ben: Speaking of conservation, at what point during those years in the bay area, when you were working in the AV world, did you become aware of the time-based media conservation field?
[00:14:29] sasha: So between SFAI and SF MoMA, I had been working at the Oakland Museum of California and that museum it's all California based exhibitions, so they have an art gallery and a history gallery and a natural sciences gallery and some so in the art gallery, we were pretty regularly showing, multimedia works video-based works or interactive works by artists. So I got to continue working directly with folks from California. And then in the history and in the natural sciences galleries, it was a lot of your typical educational museum interactives. You know, kind of responsive immersive video installations and, screen-based interactives, so many iPads. So that really exposed me to many different types of file types. I kind of jumped into learning max MSP and things like that. Some of the things were created by a creative studio and then installed as a turnkey exhibit and the intention was for those things to just, you know, work when you turn them on, but of course that doesn't happen. So I had to kind of reverse engineer, a lot of these interactives to figure out what exactly was running them and what was not working and how to make it work and ended up having to do some kind of ad hoc migrations or replacing equipment with newer versions of things and having to integrate compatibility. It was really nice having that firsthand experience with things not going as expected and still needing to maintain the functionality of those pieces because we're not going to completely recreate them when we've already paid a studio to make a thing that's supposed to last forever.
[00:16:30] Ben: This one time when I visited SF MoMA, I think it was the first time that we met, it was when AIC was out there, and I was just touring the new building and, your little workshop and stuff and I just really got the vibe that, AV and conservation had such a really healthy and collaborative relationship at SF MoMA. Like very, very different than most museums. Why do you think that is? Like, why do you think that collaborative relationship was, the way that it was at SF MoMA?
[00:17:01] sasha: Yeah, I, I think SF MoMA was a really, really special place and I feel really thankful that I was there at a really special time too. I would really ascribe the leadership of Jill Sterrett to have a huge impact on that kind of culture of collaboration. She really supported research by staff in different departments at different levels. She actively fostered collaboration among us and through the team media structure. There were so many research projects that really invited artists to come and be involved in the activities of the museum. We also had a lot of study days and just, it was a very open environment in my experience. Where, even though I was a junior technician, I expressed interest and I was welcomed into those conversations. That really also signals an openness to hearing from all kinds of different people and I think that that is just so valuable and not every place as willing to give a platform to people at different levels of the institution.
I really got to commune with my inner child in that workshop space because, I volunteered pretty regularly to be the person to do maintenance on equipment and I got to go back to that really curious learning space of taking things apart and figuring out how they work. I just, that is so pleasing to me. It was really cool to be able to get say old 35 millimeter slide projectors working again. Either when we purchased them off of eBay to put into an equipment pool for an exhibition or just maintenance, because equipment goes through such rigorous, really intense exhibition. When you know, you're not just kind of showing something in your living room to your family for a couple of hours, which is what they're intended to do, but they're just turned into these industrial machines and they require a lot of care, especially as they age.
With the slide projector, there are a lot of plastic parts, and a lot of air circulates through them because it gets really hot. The kind of old halogen lamps that they use create a lot of heat and the fans are meant to dissipate the heat so that you don't melt your slide. So there's a lot of kind of dust and gunk that gets built up inside. I mean, people circulating through space, create a lot of, um, detritus? With clothes and skin and hair, it's not pleasant stuff to pull out of crevices. But, the other thing that happens is that the grease will kind of get dirty and gunky and not work so well. So you have to clean the grease out, replace it with clean grease, and then really over time another thing that can happen is just some kind of deterioration plastic can get brittle and it can start crumbling, or it will just crack and kind of shatter. And then you have to pull those shattered pieces out of the crevices. Metal starts deteriorating and getting weird, like accretions on them. So just cleaning everything up and making sure that all of the moving parts can move freely and smoothly, is going to help everything live longer and also show what it's supposed to show in higher quality.
I think for me, the maintenance aspect of things was very meditative but it was a much more immediate present meditation of like, okay, I have a relationship with this piece of equipment. I really want it to work and it's teaching me something. I also enjoyed thinking about these kinds of long timescales, because a lot of the equipment that I worked on was at least 20 years old, if not, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 years old. I guess it helped me understand that that was the kind of timescale that I'm curious about. It's not just the immediate, like, okay, we need to make this work for the exhibition for the next three months or the next six months or the next day or a week, but really, I realized that I was keyed into these kinds of larger questions of keeping things around for a long time. And understanding that I kind of had the power to do that. I eventually got curious about, well, what does that mean?
There was a point when I realized in this kind of media technician career track that I was in. That there was not very much further I could go. There aren't that many positions doing media technician work and at a lot of museums or just kind of installation companies, everything is rolled into just your standard kind of, art handler pool. And there's just not a lot of upward mobility in those positions. But I knew that I had a lot of skills. I knew that I could pick up more skills as I went along because that's what I'd been doing my entire life. And I wanted to keep doing that. But I really didn't understand what I could do. I thought about going into just being a freelancer doing that kind of technician work on my own or even doing creative production work cause I had done a lot of freelance work with artists kind of extending the work that I did at SFAI with students. Some of them graduated or people were introduced to me through, you know, very close knit, creative community in the bay area. And I helped them make looping videos for their traveling installations or interactive audio things. So I thought about going into that work, but it was kind of stressful to make stuff on a tight deadline and with like not a lot of budget. I have a lot of respect for people who do that kind of work because I realized it's just, that's not for me. So there came a point when I was really kind of casting about and trying to figure out, how, what can I do with this set of proficiencies that I have that will actually give me a good quality of life? And at the same time, the bay area was becoming like really hard to afford to live in. So much gentrification and so much decimation of the community that I had been part of because it just, it wasn't affordable anymore and people were moving away or moving farther and farther away, but you know, you can't really like hang out after work when you've got a two hour commute.
So at the end of 2016, I was talking with a friend of mine about what should I do with my life. I am not super happy with my situation right now, but I don't know what else to do. Should I just move to a different city and try to make it work again? And that seemed really weird because I had a more fully developed adult mind at that point. I feel just really, really lucky in terms of timing because. That friend that I was talking to had just learned about the time-based media program that was beginning at NYU and she sent me a link to it. And I looked into it.
I remembered at that point that I had looked into conservation before. I think maybe someone at the Oakland museum had told me about conservation. I remember looking at all of the prerequisites and just thinking, oh my gosh, I'm like already in debt from my undergrad still. And I don't need to do all this stuff. I would be just in debt forever.
I had been working at SF MoMA for about a year at that point. I had worked at basically all of the fine arts places in the bay area except for the fine arts museums. But at that time they were still really, really traditional and just mainly doing kind of static 2d media. So at the end of 2016 I was looking at information for this new time-based media program in conservation, at NYU and looking at their list of prerequisites and what they would accept and, the requirements for, ultimately throughout the whole program and the timeline, I just kind of thought, you know, what this seems really possible. And it also seems like the perfect vehicle to pivot into. I can take all of these weird skills that I've collected along the way I can keep working with artists. I could still be very much embedded in the art world. At SF MoMA the culture is to foreground artists, inviting them into the space, working with them and listening to them and I really liked that mode of collaboration. I thought that conservation would be just the perfect thing for me to do. So the only catch was that at the moment that I learned about the program, I basically had to immediately start collecting prerequisite credits in chemistry. And I wasn't necessarily excited about all of that. I didn't understand how that could be applicable to the work that I had been doing or would be doing, but it wasn't negotiable. So I decided to go along with the program.
So the prerequisites in chemistry are a full like classroom and lab experiences in basic chemistry, but also organic chemistry. I also took a course in JavaScript. So all in all that took me a full calendar year plus another semester. I was working full time and also taking classes through the UC Berkeley extension in the evening and doing homework and all of that kind of stuff. So it was a real time commitment and it also required me to commit to a life path that really diverged from the one that I had been building with a partner at the time. And I just got really focused and really interested and committed and went with it. So it was I think, three semesters of classes, some concurrently. I was able to do that because I did my interview for the NYU program while I was finishing up the last of the prerequisites and they allowed that as long as I ended up passing those courses in the end.
[00:28:32] Ben: I take it you passed the chemistry class?
[00:28:35] sasha: Thank goodness. Just by the hair of my teeth. I had a really tough professor in my organic chemistry two class, and I only passed because she decided to have mercy on us and use the bell curve. You know, I was in these chemistry courses with a lot of pre-med students and they should be held to a high standard. But the unfortunate thing was that, you know, I hadn't done chemistry since high school and it was, oh my gosh, it was such a challenge for me to get back into just going to classes. And then also doing math. When you work with artists, like you don't do math. I was doing fabrication work, like making shelves and making like plinths. I mean, I lived in a loft space where I like made all of the rooms and furniture in the space, so I kind of did math, but it wasn't like chemistry, math. It almost killed me, but it didn't. And I passed.
[00:29:34] Ben: I also take it that you were accepted into the NYU program then. What is it like? What kind of classes do you take? What does a real time-based media conservator learn in school?
[00:29:45] sasha: Well, the time-based media program at NYU in its current configuration is still very much based in the conventional conservation track. NYU is very committed to training every conservator in the principles of conservation and through abstracting conservation training to principals. They're kind of proposing that conservation training can be medium agnostic and I think that I can agree to a certain extent. I do feel in the end, like my first two and a half, maybe even three years were spent learning about kind of historic artistic media that I probably won't come across as a time-based media conservator. And even if I do time-based media is by necessity, such a collaborative field. There's no, way that we can possibly know everything that currently falls under the time-based media umbrella. So we need to know who to talk to who has deeper expertise than we could possibly accumulate in one lifetime let alone just during the work week.
The first year for all of the students who go through the conservation program at NYU is in foundations. That's kind of both in art history and in conservation. We do a dual degree master's program. So we ultimately earn an MA in art history and then an MS in conservation. And the first year is learning about the tech and structure of traditional artists materials and a little bit of contemporary, I think. Hopefully I pushed everyone enough, over and over again to start incorporating contemporary mediums. So I hope that that's shifting a little bit and then we also learn about material science, uh, which is where all of the chemistry training finally came in and it was helpful to understand how that could be useful.
We also do training in instrumental sciences, so kind of learning FTIR and XRF and Raman. And I do think that it's valuable to have some familiarity with all of those options for tools that we can use to identify material. Not only for the purpose of communicating better with colleagues in objects or in conservation science that we'll be collaborating with, but also to just be aware of like what questions you might want to ask about the care of a certain object? One thing that I got really keyed into was learning more about the material science of plastics and metals and the interaction of those two things and, you know, this big red light went off in my head knowing that there are plastic and metal in very, very close proximity in all media equipment. So I'm really curious to find out you know, how those things are going to age and the material disasters that will slowly or very quickly unfold in terms of that.
Conservation thinking is something that has really been instilled in me through the program and just with the example of kind of plastic and metal in proximity in equipment, you might think, well one strategy for preservation would be to separate the plastic and metal, but then you would run into the issue of dissociation. So if I take apart that equipment, I will need to put it back together again in order for it to be useful, but I might not know how to put it back together again, or you might actually break it in the process of taking it apart or putting it together again. So you really have to weigh all of the risks in all these different pathways to figure out what will do the most good in the end.
I think that my background gives me a very direct line to imagining what is going to happen the next time this artwork gets picked up and what is going to happen when this crate is opened or when someone needs to figure out where to plug in this cable or how to find an adapter for this cable. I've been doing this long enough to have run into many situations where, you're picking up an older piece of equipment and you just can't run out to Best Buy or go onto amazon.com and like get that cable. So I think the value that all of my experience brings to me is having a very, hopefully a very accurate picture of what the future of any artwork might look like, and also having a very empathetic view onto the people who will be interacting with it and trying to get it to work and behave correctly.
[00:35:19] Ben: Internships are a super important part of many graduate programs, but especially in conservation. So I'm curious where you have been spending yours.
[00:35:30] sasha: Yeah, we do have so much time in it that we get many opportunities to do internships or work placements and so I've done one every summer and, in some cases we've done them over the winter break too. I've worked with the Art Institute of Chicago, I've worked with the MET, I've worked with the Thoma foundation and, this year for my fourth year placement, which is no coursework, but all internship, I'm working in person, here in New York at MoMA in the media lab. And then I'm also working with Tate remotely on two different projects. At MoMA I'm doing a lot of hands-on work as far as time-based media is hands-on, I'm doing collection assessments of all kinds of different artworks and that is a really valuable experience for me to just be exposed to more artworks. I mean, they're ultimately the whole reason why we're doing this. And each artwork is a little bit different, a little bit unique and has something to offer. So It's been really great to become just really intimately familiar with some of the artworks in the collection here, and to be able to jump onto some loan and exhibition projects to help out the staff here in terms of testing things out, make sure that they work before they go out on loan or preparing CD ROMs for exhibition testing. Like what file format will work best? What kind of equipment is going to be the most reliable, but present the work authenticly.
At Tate, I'm working also on CD ROMs, but from a slightly different angle because a CD ROMs happened to be a really tricky format for museums in terms of cataloging. It's a format that you know, in the mid to late nineties and into the two thousands was used for multimedia content by artists and CD ROMs were produced by individuals who were making stuff on their computers and then they were also produced as kind of supplemental material for books. When that kind of material comes to a museum, if it's a book, it might go to the library or it might go into the archive. It may not be considered an artwork proper that would go into a permanent collection. So the project that I'm working on with Pip Laurenson is kind of trying to understand how that CD rom content that might be held in the library at Tate or the archives at Tate or the permanent collection at Tate can all be given access, given the institutional limitations of like staff power and technological resources and time. And we get to kind of think about big picture things in terms of bridging all of those collections and maybe changing collection practice. I mean, Pip has the power to do that, so it's really fun to do some big thinking in that realm.
The other project that I'm doing with Tate is helping out with their preserving immersive media project. Immersive media is another like a sub umbrella term that encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, 360 video, web VR, things like that, and they're very new and rapidly developing technologies that are coming into collections and they have a lot of really intense preservation concerns. There's very little standardization and there's a lot of proprietary file formats and equipment. That's very tightly linked to the content and because things keep changing kind of within a year's time, even, we're trying to understand how we could possibly show those works even in five years time. And I'm really focusing on how to create documentation with existing technical tools or identifying gaps and then also thinking about user experience because that's such a huge part of immersive works, how to document, user experience. And then ultimately thinking a little bit about, if we can't actually keep the original content, the software and the hardware functional and compatible, how might we use that documentation to represent the work in some way so that future audiences can understand what those works were.
[00:40:24] Ben: That's such important work. So thank you.
[00:40:27] sasha: Yeah, happy to be doing it.
[00:40:31] Ben: Is there anything else that you're working on these days that you wanted to share? Do you have a thesis project that you have to do is that a requirement for the program?
[00:40:38] sasha: Yeah. I did do a thesis. Thankfully that's already done. My thesis was on. Assessment methods for replacing incandescent light sources with led light sources in light-based artworks.
I was at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf a couple of years ago and I didn't really know too much about that collection. And I was wandering around the museum and walked into this room that had some sculptures in it and as soon as I crossed the threshold, these lights came on and I realized, oh, oh, this is a Zero room. Zero is this collective that was . Working with light-based artworks, back in the fifties and sixties. My experience of being in this room, um, it was completely pitch black except for the effects of these lights, kind of bouncing off of little metal pieces or creating shadows on the wall or projecting a view of the tungsten filaments that kind of looked like flames or something dancing around the walls. It was very theatrical and I was all by myself and I felt like I was in this incredible relationship with the works there. They were showing me what they do and kind of turning on and off in a different sequence. It just was so wonderful. I love those moments where art just kind of takes you by the hand and shows you something that makes you smile and I can appreciate that moment even more now, because I learned a lot more about Zero artists and artworks in the process of writing my thesis and doing kind of research on incandescent light sources. So I think that's a really special experience that I'll always hold dear.
Our thesis is for the MA component of our degree, and I was really speaking to a kind of curatorial slash art history audience. Right now I am reworking that topic for a conservation audience, and I'll be presenting at a next year's AIC meeting in the contemporary art network sessions, about the assessment methods that I wrote about.
[00:43:10] Ben: Nice. In your total fantasy world where would you want to wind up after school? There's a lot of different things that conservator can do, you know, so do you have a sense of what would be your dream job?
[00:43:25] sasha: Well, I'm finding myself back in a similar questioning environment that I was before I came to conservation school, just asking myself, like, how can I put all these kind of skills and competencies together to do something that is meaningful for me. And I really don't have the answer right now. I don't know what that looks like. I've worked in institutions for a really long time, so I'm very familiar with that. And I don't know if that's necessarily my path forward. So there are a lot of things that I'm trying to think of, and I really want to open up the possibilities for myself and be really creative about what my future looks like. Really my fantasy is like just trying to be as creative as possible and putting together a life where I can continue to work with art and artists and be myself, be my like weird gender queer self in a safe space with like a really close, supportive community. And you know, I just don't know at this moment.
One thing that I want to circle back to is my queer and trans identities. So I identify as a non-binary person of trans experience. And I don't think that I can really do conservation work without acknowledging that, without being my whole person. And for me that comes up in just really huge structural issues just around recognizing internalized biases.
I have had the experience of being a cisgender person and now being a trans person. I think that, that gives me the privilege of having a clear view of how one positionality really affects one's values and decision-making when nothing is a given, everything has to be considered and that is how I approach my work too. I really don't make assumptions as a habit about what it is that I'm looking at or somebody else's preferences in terms of like how it should be. So I don't think that it's an inconvenience to have to consider other people's values and, desires and representation. So I think that, that is another way that I can approach my work that is maybe different from other people and I really appreciate that about myself if I do say so. And a really wonderful thing is that, you know, I guess kind of making lemonade out of lemons is that I've felt really alienated by conservation culture. And it has prompted me to find allies, you know, in the field and I've been able to, and it's a really wonderful experience to create community and create coalitions of like-minded people who also want to make change. And that gives me a lot of hope for the future of our profession.
[00:47:01] Ben: So sasha, what's coming next for you?
[00:47:05] sasha: Coming next for me is finishing up my internship year, graduating from this program, figuring out what my next big life step is. Converting question marks into exclamation points and just keeping on keeping with me.
[00:47:26] Ben: Well, like I said, you are the time-based media conservation super soldier, so you're going to be writing your own checks pretty soon.
[00:47:35] sasha: If it worked that way, that would be amazing.
[00:47:39] Ben: I'm curious if you have any advice for folks that are interested in getting into the field of time-based media conservation.
[00:47:47] sasha: Definitely. I think that one really special thing about time-based media is that we all have a different skillset and set of interests coming into it. And I think that that is something that everyone should just embrace and go with. So if there's something that you already know about and you want to stick with it, just go with that. If you're like me, and you're curious about everything, like go with it. There's no one track to get into this field. And there's so many things that you'll come across as a conservator. If you, you know, do that career path, the more that you can bring to this work, the better. It's going to benefit, not only yourself, but the entire field.
[00:48:42] Ben: sasha, thank you so, so much for chatting. This has been truly delightful.
[00:48:47] sasha: Yeah. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show.
[00:48:50] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you liked what you heard, I hope you'll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. , which really helps other people discover the show. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can always find the show on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. And lastly, do you have a question or something you want to comment or respond to? You can leave voicemail for the show by calling 1-833-ART-DATA. That's 1 833 278-3282.
Thanks again so much for listening friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art. and Obsolescence.