Episode 027: Patricia Falcão

Show Notes

This week on the show we sit down with time-based media art conservator and doctoral researcher Patricia Falcão. Through her many years of work and research at the Tate, and elsewhere, Patricia has been massively contributing to how our field approaches the acquisition, documentation, and long term care of software-based works of art. Tune in to hear the winding road that led Patricia from traditional Rococo woodworking, to time-based media art.

Links from the conversation with Patricia
> https://www.tate.org.uk/research/studentships/current/patricia-falcao
> Subtitled Public: https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/subtitled_public.php

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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 that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. Welcome back friends, I hope you are hanging in there in spite of all of the terrible things happening in the world right now and I hope this show can serve as a little reprieve and escape from the news cycle for you even if just for a little while. 

Now on the very first episode of the show back in September, we kick things off with PIP. Laurenson an art conservator who was among the first pioneering generation of time-based media, art conservators before that term even really existed. As we heard in that conversation, Pip really established and laid the foundation for the development of what would become the Tate's flourishing department dedicated to the acquisition and care of time-based media art. Well today we are back at the Tate 

[00:00:55] Patricia: Hello, my name is Patricia Falcão and I'm a time-based media conservator and a doctoral researcher into time-based media conservation.

[00:01:04] Ben: In our chat Patricia shows us what truly contemporary time-based media conservation practices look like. She's been doing incredible work on what it looks like for museums to document and care for software based works of art. We'll also get to hear about her PhD thesis on how artists engage in the care of their own work, outside the walls of the institution. So if that sounds good to you, stay tuned and hey, if you have been enjoying the show and I hope you have you know, it would be super awesome. If you could share the show with a friend, we post little easily shareable clips of the show on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence throughout the week. So you can reshare those if that's your thing. And as a reminder, you can find the full show notes and transcripts at artandobsolescence.com. Now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Patricia Falcão. 

[00:01:53] Patricia: I Grew up in Lisbon. I'm Portuguese and I grew up in this typical Mediterranean middle-class family of you know, lots of uncles and cousins and all that sort of thing. My father was a doctor, my mother studied pharmacy, it was never directly that I had this artistic influence, but it was somewhere there. And it only came to the head when I had to decide what I wanted to do in high school, in my last three years. And basically what I didn't want to do is maths. The way to escape maths was to do a professional degree in woodworking and furniture making in this very posh professional school that was really traditional. The three subjects were woodcarving and you would learn to do, Louie 16 Rocco, all sorts of furniture, but it is really classical furniture. The foundation that managed the school is famous for doing replicas of the furniture in, the Royal palaces in Portugal. So it was that sort of environment. And it was pretty luxurious at that point. We still had access to all sorts of woods that you probably can find now you know, like Ebony and Rosewood that are super rare and you can't even sell them and buy them anymore. It was quite an experience. We also did very intricate marquetry and just proper structural building of wood furniture. So those were the three key subjects and then a lot of drawing as well actually. At the end of the degree, I could make classical furniture in a classical way to a very bad level because I was a terrible furniture maker. But it gave me the experience of the materials, but I was 16 when I finished and it was way too early to start, working in a workshop. I couldn't really picture myself. And the option to continue studying made sense because it was also an introduction in the course was conservation. As part of the degree, we had two subjects on conservation. It opened my appetite and I thought, okay, that could be interesting. It brought me more of the science aspect that I missed because the professional degree we spent good 18 hours a week in the workshops, just working with our hands. We spent so much time in that workshop and I missed the science-y bit because I enjoyed that and I was 16 when I finished. And so the next step that made sense was to do a conservation degree. And so I went into conservation school in Lisbon, which again was quite an amazing arrangement back then, because it was a collaboration between education ministry, but also the cultural ministry so we were working with the national Institute for conservation in Portugal. So again, working with extremely experienced people who were really generous of their time and we worked in their workshops as well.

What attracted me to conservation was the scientific side of things. And to this more academic, I guess, might be the word to use in that. I missed it. I grew up surrounded by science and conservation is this wonderful mix of science and manual work and art, if you choose to go in that direction. So it is a mix of interests that come together. I don't think I even thought that much about it. It was just like, oh, that's the obvious decision when I came out, of vocational school. We did all the basics in conservation, you had the conservation theory and the chemistry and some of the math that I'd been trying to run away from. It was a really good conservation degree, I think even now that had all of those strands that interested me. But then I came to the end of the course. There was a moment where I was like, oh, maybe this is completely wrong for me. Oh, maybe I should be a, you know, someone who designs gardens. I did all these tests about what I should do and I came out and the, person who needs a test, was like, you know, , from the results, you could be a landscape architect, but you know, conservation is perfect for you. So it turned out to be like, no, actually, maybe you should keep going at it. I started talking to a colleague of mine who was doing photography. And she was like, oh yeah, but if you don't want to do furniture, then try photography. The teacher is great. This was Luis Pavão , who was uh, the introducer of photography conservation in Portugal back in the nineties. I followed my colleague's suggestion and decided to try that and this was like, oh, this is also really interesting. And actually I'm probably much better at it than I am with furniture conservation.

That turned into an internship at the municipal photo archives in Lisbon, which at the time was one of the leading institutions in photo conservation and as a photo archive actually in Portugal. They were very glad to have interns. They were very welcoming. And so I was with them for nine months and I wrote my bachelor thesis on the work I did there. And it was really good because also Luis Pavão was writing a handbook in Portuguese about photography conservation. And so I became aware of what he was doing and he was really encouraging and I think that opened my eyes also, to the international practice in conservation, because he was connected to all these people in the U S and and in Europe. So very quickly we became aware of how important these networks were.

After that internship, I was really lucky because, I was 21 and exactly when I was finishing my degree, this Portuguese center for photography opened. The aim of the center was to support Portuguese photography, divulge international photography in Portugal and Portuguese artists abroad. You know, it was a really good combination of historical photography and contemporary photography. They needed conservators and of course there were no trained conservators in photography then at least not in Portugal. And when I came out, they were like, oh yeah, come and start as soon as you can. And because it was a very new institution the boundaries were very fluid. I'd be helping in an exhibition one day and then cleaning glass plate negatives the other day, help out in workshops, you know, in a small town outside Porto for the day. And our director she was super well networked. She was really generous and really enjoyed working with the team. And we were a very young team in general, they had to hire some people. There were no people who had experienced. I think the oldest person there was 31 when we started besides the director and the vice director, of course they were grownups, but everybody else was just having a great time. We worked a lot, but we also had a lot of fun and we learned immensely. 

I think after four or five years the work at the center became less of a novelty, and we were spending a lot of time just cleaning glass plate negatives. And so I was getting a little bit bored and I was really interested in contemporary photography. Completely randomly. I went to visit the friends in Germany, in Frankfurt. I learned German as a teenager and so I thought, okay, maybe I could try and get an internship in Germany. It should be easier to get funding because there's not as many people wanting to go there because of the language. I got to Frankfurt and I called the museum to see if the curator I'd been speaking with would talk to me, as one does, when is 23 and clueless about museums. I don't think I would do that nowadays actually. Um, the secretary was very nice and she was like, oh, you know, Kramer is not in, but you could try and talk to Ulrich Lang who was the conservator and Ulrich took my call. And then he was like, come and have a chat. And I came in that afternoon to have a chat with Ulrich and said, well, you know, I'm interested in the conservation of contemporary photography. I could probably get funding from a Portuguese institution to come and do an internship for a year. Would you want me and Ulrich walk me through the museum of modern art and pointed at a Jeff Wall Lightbox., These objects that hang on the wall. But in fact are quite, voluminous, my recollection is that it was maybe, two by three meters, and then they're like 40 centimeters deep because they have lights behind them. And then a transparent layer with the photography, the photograph that you see. I think what impressed, Ulrich was that I actually described it as an object rather than as a photograph. And so after that it was like, oh, okay. Let's make a proposal and you can come. And so that's what we did. We designed a one year internship with around contemporary photography. And then I was very lucky and got funded to do that. Of course the problem was that I was interested in deterioration, but the collection at MMK was brand new. So they had very little for me to do around that.

[00:10:36] Ben: So was that the place where because it was a modern art collection, you were exposed to more time-based media? 

[00:10:42] Patricia: I would say I was forced into video the photo collection didn't need any special attention, but they did have a video collection and the curator for that had left. And so Ulrich asked me, oh, can you catalog the whole list of tapes? Because there were tapes that are artworks, there were tapes, there were not artworks. The person that had had that overview had left. So in the end, I ended up spending maybe half of my internship just doing that. Without actually seeing much of the images. It wasn't even assessing the image itself was just the physical condition of the tapes and, their status in the collection. And at first I was like, no I don't want to work with video there's no image there. I don't even know how this works. Then I got interested and it was really lucky the moment I got there, because Ulrich had started a discussion group around contemporary art and time-based media. I think he had started at the museum only a couple of years before I showed up and he felt that need. And so part of that discussion group where people like Agathe Jarczyk, Christine Frohnert, Reinhard Bek would come around. So, you know, you had this regular meetings around different subjects it just opened my eyes to this whole profession. And that's where I built many of the relationships that I still have. That same year, there was a conference in Dortmund 4 0 4 Object Not Found which is one of those seminal conferences on the preservation of not time-based media, more software really I think. And Pip Laurenson was there. I was standing in the room and I overheard a conversation between Pip and someone else about measuring color. And that's exactly what I'd been doing. For the internship, I was looking at color calibration and I just had had this conversation with a professor on color. So I had all this fresh knowledge that I completely randomly had acquired and just rattled it out to Pip who somehow was impressed, I think and so we started talking and I think that was the moment where I thought, oh, this could be interesting. You know, and she was just so enthusiastic that I thought, oh, okay maybe there is a chance that I could work in this field and work with Pip. After that I did internship was over. I went back to Lisbon and I just wanted to leave again. So I applied for a role at ZKM, in a project Called 40 Years of Video Art that was led by Rudolf Frieling. So I ended up at ZKM and worked in this project and there, I really learned about video and video tapes and deterioration and the history of video art as well, of course. After that I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do next but I was talking to Johannes Gfeller who was at the time, the teacher for time-based media in Bern and two, Agathe Jarczyk and I kind of was like, well, it would be really good to do a masters because I only had the bachelor's and Bern looks great. And so at one point I was really thinking about this and I was chatting to her and she was asking me, so what are you doing next? And I said, well, I'm thinking about Bern but I'm not sure and all of a sudden I had this email saying how much do you want to work? And how much do you want to be paid? So in the end she hired me for her company at the time, and they came to Bern to do the masters with Johannes Gfeller. And then towards the end of the masters, I had to decide what I wanted to do for thesis and at the same time the Tate advertised for, a paid internship and I applied. So when I did interview and I explained the situation Pip Laurenson, she was like, oh no, that would be fine, you can come and do the thesis as you work and choose a subject. At that point I'd had a little bit of programming in chemistry when I finished conservation that was the only time where I'd learned any programming. So we had one class about Fortran 90, which I passed with a 10 out of 20 so it wasn't really my strong suit either. But then when we were thinking about subjects for a master thesis, it was like well, you can look at HD video or software. And I was like, well, HD video it's just video really. This was 2008 so it was a big deal all of a sudden that you were having all these digital high resolution video but I was like, okay, no let's look at software it's more interesting to me and I spent a little bit over two years just doing that and looking at the risk assessment of software based artworks 

[00:15:12] Ben: What were some of the pieces in the Tate's collection that you were looking at during that process? 

[00:15:17] Patricia: So there's Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's, Subtitled Public and I really lived with it for a long time because we were showing it in Liverpool so I was there installing with Rafael’s team. And that, you know, showed me a lot of the practicalities of installing it and how the software work and the quirks of calibrating it and so on. And the other piece was Brutalismo by Jose Carlos Martinat. Who's a South American artist who's not so much of a software-based artist, I wouldn't say, but he worked with a really nice programmer for the series of works that involve pulling information out of the internet and printing it out for the public. And his programmer was very kind and generous so he took a lot of time just looking at the code with me in the, in explaining what he was doing and telling me what the risks were because of course he already knew what was going to fail in the next year and in the next six years. But it's interesting because the conservation issues of these two pieces repeat themselves in so many other works that popped up again. So they were really good case studies.

My current job at Tate is related mostly with acquisitions and that's a little bit how our team is organized, where we have conservators that have more of a focus on acquisitions and some have more of a focus on displays. And also we have what we call collection care projects, which are things that they're to do with the infrastructure and digital preservation more. I've worked mostly in acquisitions and so I still see that as this core moment where an artwork comes into the collection and where there's this handover of information responsibility from the artist to the institution. For me, that is really this one moment where you know, you really need to learn about a piece. And that's basically what I do along with my colleagues we get involved in the conversations between curators and artists or gallery and try and understand what we are going to receive. And this is sometimes are we getting an executable file as a download? Or are we going to get the computer with everything installed? Or, you know, what is this work that you are acquiring physically and that's usually is an iterative process. So we'll be told something very high level, and then we start to dig down onto the detail. For instance, for a work like Brutalismo we were first told you'll receive a computer and then we had the computer and we started looking, okay, this is the operating system that it's running on, and I can see that there's an application running here. And then we started talking to the programmer and he started explaining what the software was doing. We start digging in and there's always this little discrepancy between how someone describes what an artwork is doing and how it is doing it and what it is actually happening on the technical level. And that's especially the case when you have the artists, who developed a concept, and then you have the programmer who actually developed the code. So that's always an interesting conversation to have. Since I started, of course, this has developed immensely. Specifically with the work of Tom Ensom more recently on how we analyze these works. But literally when I started, it was just basically learning from the artists and the programmers. I think that has changed a lot also with the work, both of you to work with Tom Ensom and also Joanna Phillips and Deena Engel so that there is a framework on how these works can be analyzed. The conversations with the artists and programmers are still invaluable, of course, but there is also a degree of expertise in-house that is growing. And that has changed a lot over the last few years, I think. 

The biggest change over the years is that we went from acquiring one artwork every two to three years, and now we are acquiring like two, three works a year that have an important software element. And, you know, that just raises immediately the question of scaling. And I think we are more and more aware of that. When I wrote my thesis, the collection had eight works and we have two works that were very similar by Michael Craig Martin so there's also very limited experience, right? You don't have enough experience to look at something and go oh, this, this is similar to that. And I think now we have that experience from the work we've done ourselves, but also from work that is shared by other institutions and practitioners. 

Tom Emson, Chris King and I just published some of the outcomes of a project that has been going on at Tate since 2018 I think that is aiming at sort of creating these workflows on how to address the work that is being acquired. What are the main steps that we know we need to take or that we will usually want to take for most artworks. That is based on a lot of work that Tom has done in the last few years. And just by systematizing the way we think about these works. What are they, what are the risks? With the Tate collection what's happening or what has happened so far is we've mostly acquired works that were fairly recent. So we don't have anything prior to 2003 so far. So we are working within things like a Windows XP or operating systems that at least someone in my generation is very familiar with. And so that doesn't raise all of the problems that someone working with an artwork from the nineties, for instance with face in terms of hardware dependencies, for instance. But we do know that operating systems become obsolete, hardware fails. And we know the difference between, the value of certain pieces of hardware versus others. And so that's the first step I think, is just look exactly at what we are receiving and understanding the importance of these different elements. And just thinking about, okay, what can we do now that means that this will be safe for the next 10 years or 15 years, or I don't want to go much further than that.

[00:21:05] Ben: So we've talked a lot about the past, and thank you for that, what are you working on these days? 

[00:21:11] Patricia: So at Tate I'm still doing acquisitions of new artworks. A lot of my time at the moment is dealing with digital preservation and our storage system and making it as user friendly as possible. I'm working on this with my colleagues Duncan Harvey and Jack McConchie and, with our technology team to just make it as easy as possible to ingest artworks digital assets of artworks, that's been on the background for a long time, and now it's again going at full speed. I think it is a core aspect really in the care of any time based media collection is this very basic aspect of keeping your bytes safe and not driving people insane amounts of metadata to be handled. So that's a big aspect of this work. The more exciting work that I'm doing at the moment is to do with my PhD, where I'm working on a specific case study of a piece by Ben Grosser, who's an American artist that works around social media and critique of social media. So very timely and more specifically a work called Go Rando. That is uh, Chrome extension that sort of randomizes your emotions on Facebook. And again, that just shows my recklessness because I don't use Facebook. So I'm having to steal my nephew's account so that I can experience the work. It's fascinating because you know, the work is not collected. So for me, this perspective is really different from what I'm used to at the Tate. For us, it's like: it's being collected. We'll have the resource to take care of this. And of course, working with an artist that doesn't have necessarily that resource. And then in a medium that the work has to evolve with Facebook to keep on working, it's a completely different perspective. And it's really amazing to learn Ben Grosser's work processes how he comes to his new solutions and this detective work that he does around the code and how to mess with it on the Facebook page. So it's really exciting. It's really interesting. This case studies is part of a wider attempt, to understand, what drives an artist to actually want to preserve their work. How does that change over generations, are younger artists coming out of university, some of my colleagues at Goldsmiths that are studying computer arts, what are they learning? Is there any discussion of sustainability at that level? Not that we want to tell people how to do their work, we know that doesn't work very well with artists. But at least so that people are aware, okay, if you're making that choice, then at least, you know what you're choosing. That is the other end of the conversation. I think from that research,

[00:23:45] Ben: That's fantastic. That's super important research. How do you think that you've seen the time-based media conservation field change over the years?

[00:23:54] Patricia: There's more of us, I think and people are much more confident with the medium, right? You are being taught a lot more. When I did my conservation degree, photography was the peak of modernity so to speak. And that's not the case anymore you have degrees, you have people with experience training students. So I think someone coming out of a conservation degree will have a lot more knowledge to start with then than what I had when I finished my bachelor's. I'm really inspired by the work happening maybe not so much in conservation, but in AV preservation of people building their own tools like to work that Dave Rice has been doing where it's like, oh, okay, there is no solution for this. So I'll just find my own, which I haven't seen so much in software yet, but I think that's probably where it's going to head. I think this is sort of the hopeful developments in the field.

[00:24:44] Ben: Yeah, and is there any advice that you have for somebody who's interested in getting into this field?

[00:24:54] Patricia: Just ask. Even though I can be quite shy, I was sort of like, oh, okay. I'll just try and I'll just ask, you know, I'll call the museum up and see if this person has time for me. You shouldn't let your lack of experience and knowledge just stop you from wondering and asking. I just decided to write a master thesis on software based art preservation with very little knowledge of software and it turned out okay. Because you just learn as long as you're happy to do that, then it's fine. It's literally just finding the people that can help you and ask. Because my experience in the conservation field is that you will get replies from people that you think, oh, they're super busy. They're not gonna say anything. They're not gonna answer my emails and you get those answers.

[00:25:46] Ben: Well, Patricia, thank you so much for your time today. It was such a pleasure getting to sit down and chat and like really get to know your story. 

[00:25:53] Patricia: Thank you, Ben. thank you for your questions it was nice.

[00:25:56] Ben: And as always, thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. Hey, if you enjoyed this week's show, share it with a friend. You can find the show notes and full transcript at artandobsolescence.com and you can find clips and highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. Have a great week my friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.