Episode 058 Morgan Stricot

Show Notes

This week on the show we are traveling to Karlsruhe, Germany to chat with art conservator Morgane Stricot. You wouldn’t know it considering the technologically complex works of art that she cares for today, but Morgane’s first love in conservation was incredibly traditional, initially being drawn to frescos and murals. Fast forward to today and she is wrapping up a PhD in applying a media archeological approach to the conservation of time-based media art in the context of the collection of the ZKM, where she serves as their Senior Media and Digital Art Conservator. The approach that Morgane is taking with conservation at ZKM is quite distinct – and a refreshing reminder that the technologies that underpin works of art are also worthy of study and preservation in and of their own right. What does it look like when art serves a supplementary purpose of helping to preserve the cultural context of the history of technology? Tune in to find out, and to hear Morgane’s story!

Links from the conversation with Morgane
> ZKM: https://zkm.de/
> PAMAL Group: https://pamal.org/en/pamal-group-en/

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Transcript

 ** note - transcript still being edited for spelling errors **

[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. This week on the show, we are visiting with a conservator, doing some incredibly exciting work at an institution that is a pillar in the field of art and technology. 

[00:00:22] Morgane: My name is Morgane Stricot. I'm a media and digital art conservator at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

[00:00:31] Ben: In chatting with Morgane I've found myself thinking back to our very first episode where we visited with the one and only Pip Laurenson and heard the tale of how one of the most influential thinkers in the field of time-based media conservation got her start as a stone conservator. Similarly Morgane's first love in conservation was incredibly traditional, she was drawn to frescoes and murals, and yet fast forward to today and she is wrapping up a PhD and applying a media archeological approach to the conservation of time-based media art in the context of the collection of the ZKM where she serves as their senior media and digital art conservator. I left this conversation feeling so inspired as I think you'll hear that the approach Morgane is taking with the conservation at ZKM is quite distinct and I think is a refreshing reminder that the technologies that underpin works of art are also worthy of study and preservation in and of their own right. What does it look like when art serves a supplementary purpose of helping to preserve the cultural context of the history of technology? Well, you will just have to stay tuned to find out. Before we get started just a quick reminder that if you can not get enough of the show, I highly recommend clicking the link to our Patreon in the show notes where our lovely community of supporters enjoy all kinds of extra and exclusive content. I hope to see you over there soon. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Morgan Stricot. 

[00:02:06] Morgane: I was raised near Paris, which means I was near cultural and artistic, uh, life because in France everything is, uh, more or less centralized in Paris, or at least it was when I was young. And now there's museums in other cities, but at that time, most everything was in Paris. So I was lucky to be born next to Paris and to be raised also by parents that are really big, enthusiastic about art and culture in general. So they took me very early to museums and, you know, encouraged to, read many books and go to theater and watch documentaries. My dad is especially passionate about art history, and history in general. And my mom is amateur photographer, so she is also very, very curious about art. So my education was really about being curious. I was always been curious of everything, not only arts and culture and things like this, but every stuff, even technology at that time already. I knew very early I wanted to work in something about heritage, or about history, or archive. I had fascination for what's left of our history like the artifacts and so in junior high I took classes in Egyptology, in, uh, hieroglyphic inscriptions. I wanted to be either archeologist or an historian. But I was really passionate about Egypt and things like this, so I thought I'm gonna be a professor of Egyptology at Paris-Sorbonne. So it was really precise. I was really young, but very precise and my professor of Egyptology told me, Okay, there's only one professor at the Sorbonne University and everybody is waiting for him to go retired to take the spot. So she said, Yeah, you shouldn't have too big hopes of becoming a Egyptology professor. So she broke my dream but still I was sure I wanted to do something with the past, with digging up things, you know, finding things about, , the history of the human kind. So it's really just in high school that I discovered art conservation. I was doing a trip, um, in Italy and I saw those woman in the white coats doing restoration of frescos in front of me and I said, this is what I want to do because you are dealing with stuff from the past and you are preserving them so that the future curious people like me can see them and know about them. So this is when I decided I was, you know, 15 or something. My parents are both in the scientific world, my dad is engineer and my mom is working in, in the scientific university and they said maybe you do high school in scientific, just to be sure, not to close any doors. If you do scientifics, you can do everything you want after. And I wanted to do art, I wanted to do literature. I was really good at history, but really bad at science. But my parents told me if you get the high school graduation in scientific, then you can do everything you want after. So, I worked like hell and I decided to do conservation program, of course. And there's not so much school in France. There's three schools, one in Paris, one in two, and one in Avignon and there's a university in Paris too that is doing a bachelor and master degree. I passed the exam and I was accepted in the Art School of Avignon. So in the south of France, far away from my parents. It's a small municipal art school. It was really important for me to go to public school and not pay because there's also private schools, of course, for conservation, but you cannot, you are not like a state diplomated conservator at the end so you cannot work for public collections or it's more complicated. So I think it was important for me to go to public school and it's more recognized in France to come from a public school. I spent the two first years at Avignon art school and I was specializing in murals because I wanted to be a mural restorer and so I spent all my summers volunteering in Italy, in Belgium to restore churches murals. For example in Italy, it was after the earthquake from 2009. Some old churches were partially destroyed, and we were there just to stabilize the murals after. In Belgium, it was also a restoration of a church that was damaged during the second War or something like this. So I was really into this. And what happened is that at the same year I arrived at the school the professor, un gu created a new research project inside the school. Called, uh, Labat. So the Laboratory for Variable Media, completely inspired by John Ippolito and the Guggenheim Initiative. So he wanted really to experiment in conservation with the methods developed by DOCAM and the Variable Media Network and so it was offering kind of those classes so, because I'm very, very curious, I just took the class and when it came time to, you know, decide on my topic for the bachelor's degree thesis I joined the lab completely and I specialized in the third year because this was really amazing to see what artists could do with technology. I was familiar with technology, but I didn't know what artists were doing with that and all the question also that were raised by the conservation, the preservation, because I always been very concerned about what we left to future generation. And when I heard about time-based media, I was deeply afraid about what will remain in the future for these artwork if nobody act to preserve them. So it was really like a call, I need to do this and to preserve those art and advocate for them. And retrospectively this decision to specialize in media and digital art it was the best, but also the most challenging choice I made in my education and in my life because the short term consequence before it becomes the best job I have now. But before this, it was a lot of pain for me because Unal the specialization completely from scratch and without any or really minimal support from the institution. So the next three years I spent in the school, in the lab until my master degree was really like a permanent fight against the institution and against the other professors. I don't really know why, but nobody wanted to hear about media and digital art and even less about its conservation. And this is still a mystery because the school was really interested into contemporary art and performance art. So I don't know why when it came to technology the other professor were maybe it's a guess for me, but maybe they were feeling ignorant and the automatically their ego were pushing them to be against instead of being humble and maybe thinking I can learn from my student. Having your own idea and research project is quite hard. But we fought and it's a good education for life to fight like this, to do what you want. But yeah, thanks to Yel and uh our dedication in the program we could learn about media art history, media archeology. We had also classes for programming and electronics. And as, at first it was not really a program, but more like a research laboratory we were mostly learning with case studies and case studies provided by the public collections nearby. They were like completely clueless about the conservation of this type of work. So it was kind of a win-win process. Like we were learning how to deal with those artworks and they we were also rising their awareness about the need for this field. So, yeah. And the first year of the master degree is about internships. So I decided to travel across the Atlantic and to do my research fellowship at the University of Maine in the Stillwater Lab under the direction of Jon Ippolito. I worked with him on the viable media questionnaire by stressing a bit, the questionnaire by having French artists and artworks into the questionnaire and translating also part of it in French. And I participate to classes and so it was really good to be there because like I said, in France it was difficult to get the subject accepted. So I wanted to see in the US how it was, because everybody seems really into this and it was completely okay and normal. So I thought, okay, and actually the legendary enthusiasm of Americans it really allows me to, recharge my batteries before going back to France and be sure that it was the way I wanted to go.

[00:11:32] Ben: So I gather it was shortly after this, that you started at the ZKM as an intern. So, how did that come about? 

[00:11:40] Morgane: I learned about a three year European program called Digital Art Conservation in the Upper Rhine and they made like this big conference in Strasburg so I could go at the conference. And I knew there were people from ZKM and I knew it was the biggest collection in the area. So I thought if there's somewhere I have to do an internship about this. Because my first internship or research fellowship was more about research and I wanted to have some practical internship too. So I went there and I looked for the people from ZKM and I said, hey, I want to do an internship. And they accepted it because they were in the middle of a project about the topic. So they knew the need for a media and digital conservator, and they thought we can start by having Morgane as a intern and we will see from there. And so this is how I ended up at ZKM for three month and do my master degree topic on one of the artwork of the collection. The ZKM is one of the largest museum in Germany, and the collection is really huge, so it's approximately 10,200 artworks but in this collection there's like more than thousand media and digital artworks, with different typologies. We have interactive and immersive installations, web-based and we have two hundred software based artworks that I call also complex digital artworks. And we have computer generated works, video sculpture, a lot of video sculpture, and a video game collection as well. So it's a center for art so we have two museums, a research institute that is called Hertz-Lab this is where they produce art and support artistic creation and the laboratory for antiquated video systems. Which head is Dorcas Müller who is digitizing old tapes for the world, and there's a media library and archives, also artist archives. We are maybe 100 persons. So it's a big institution, but not a really big team. It's a small team and we are hiring for external people for exhibitions set up or things like this. And the team I'm working in, we are around 20 persons, so it's the technical team. And this is where I ended up when I arrived in 2012. So I was 22 and I arrived there in a team of 20 guys actually and uh, yeah, like I said, I was doing exhibition, set up maintenance. I learned so much from them. They were by themself for 20 years without art conservator but they were doing great and they took care of most of the collection really well. They maintain most of the thing. Without them, the collection will be completely dead. And so learning from their experience was really the best for two years I learned so much and they were amazing, but the human power at ZKM is only on exhibition, so they were maintaining and, and taking care of the artworks that were the most exhibited. So everything that was not ending up in an exhibition, it was in storage for years and nobody had time to look at them. So even though they knew, like they were aware of this conservation work that had to be done, like Martin Heley is the former head of the technical department. And before that, Bernhard Serexhe also the former head of the media art museum. They really spend a lot of time and were really aware of the care that needs digital and media art. But like I said, they could focus only on part of the collection. And so when I arrived I worked two years as an assistant and then I went to working to The Centre Pompidou. The Centre Pompidou is really a nice place, but the collection at ZKM is so great that I was missing a bit of this excitement to open new artworks from the collection and look at it. So when they asked me to come back in 2017 I said yes right away, and I arrived in 2017 because, they created a collection department. At ZKM there were no collection department. They were only exhibition, like curator, department and technical department. So this is why also they couldn't afford to take so much time to take care of the collection that is in storage because they were no there of collection, no collection team. So Margit Rosen, she is the head of we call it the Wissen department, Wissen mean knowledge in German. So it's collection, archives and research, which is really important to have the word research into this. And so she called me and said, Do you want to be a conservator, but being part of the collection department and not the technical department, so that you can focus on research, the goal will be for you to develop. A real workflow at ZKM for acquisition, for maintenance, for conservation. So of course I said yes because offering me a job where I can do research in conservation, like Perfect. The first thing we, did when I arrived is doing an assessment, just an assessment of the collection, like seeing what was still up and running and what was in crate for 10 years without backups or without documentation. So this was a really big work and we are still doing it since five years because the collection is huge. So by creating this collection department, they could hire me, but they could also hire a new electromechanical engineer and an IT engineer into the technical team. And really both departments work together. So this is why we're 20 people. It's because the collection department and the technical department, because they have so much knowledge we work together really tightly. So we just assess the health of the collection. It wasn't really good, but we could really start the work, like backups and documentation. There were a lot of things, uh, in the ZKM, a lot of document and a lot of things were also in the head of the technicians. So those new horizons were open and so, Margit said we need to hire someone for like a research program called Archivist in residency. And so I proposed Matthieu Vlaminck for this residency because he is a conservator and a computer scientist and he has a really strong interest into vintage technology, and he's very, very curious and self learning. He is from the same school as me he's a good friend. So he arrived at ZKM for four months, and he stayed two years because we were going so much faster. So we started together to assess the collection and start research projects. We realized that each artwork is a research project, so now we have lot of research project ongoing. But together we could develop the workflows for acquisition for disk imaging because he could also really develop those kind of thing build a computer for us that will work for disk imaging. We could develop storage and maintenance workflows. And yeah for the acquisition workflow, we inspired really from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. He's really a good inspiration for us. And he helped us also start communication with the artists using, the word they wanted to hear and build a good relationship with the artists during acquisition. Also in your podcast, he is saying that he has a team, you know, to take care of his own artwork. This also allowed us to advocate for our team here at ZKM saying it's a teamwork. We need more people, we need more IT we need more electromechanics. So it also helped to understand that it takes a village to, preserve those kind of artwork. And something important before I come to ZKM is that the conservators were not involved into the acquisition process before. The curators were taking a decision and then we had to take care of it. And like having more voice was easier after being inspired by other practitioner and, concepts and paper that were written by others to say we need to be involved into the acquisition choices and, decision making because we are going to take care of those artworks after so please. And so now we are involved and it's really a great improvement into the, ZKM workflows. Usually at ZKM we are acquiring artwork that we are exhibiting already. So it's already a first point is that it's always chosen more or less from the exhibition we have. So we have those exhibition and we commission or have artists coming to install the artworks. Like this, we have the knowledge of how it behave in exhibition. Is it hard to maintain? Did we have a lot of failure or did we have to change the computer three time? So this was already kind of a really good acquisition workflow to take artworks that were already there at ZKM that we could document right away because they were physically here. We don't need them to do like a test setup because it's already set up. So the primary choice from the curators is f or art history, the importance for this artwork for the concept of the collection of the ZKM and for the art historian and so on. But they need at least one pragmatic point of view about the long term preservation of those artworks. So usually they are just asking our point of view. We don't have the last word, we just say this one you have to be conscious that this is going to cost a lot of money to maintain this artwork in the long run. Or this one will be super easy. So like this, they can also make a pragmatic choice according to the money we can dedicate to the preservation of an artwork. We tried to make them understand that they had to commit themself to the preservation of the work. So even though we acquire something that is going to take a lot of time and money to preserve. If they're not committed to give this money, the artwork will enter the collection and just die there. So we are just giving our point of view, saying, Okay, this artwork, it's gonna be hard. We need to invest, like, for example, for spare parts or for a programmer if we need to migrate this and so we just give the numbers and the pragmatic point of view for the long term preservation of the work. And sometime they say no because they know they cannot commit to this artwork and be respectful in the long run for this artwork. So they say no. And sometimes they say yes and , yeah, they know they will invest time and money into the preservation of the work. So yeah, this is how we are involved. 

[00:22:56] Ben: Throughout these years at the ZKM, I know you have also been working on your PhD and you're close to finishing. I'm curious if you could share what you are working on with that. 

[00:23:09] Morgane: So I decided to do my PhD because I was working on Centerbeam, an environmental artwork, which was 66 meter so it's really, really long. And on it, uh, the students and the fellows and the researcher from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies in MIT really bring together all their artworks kind of a energy line. And it was alternative energy like, uh, the sun, the wind, there were manipulation of sound, of light, all of them, the mist with the rainbow. Light defraction, the sunlight reflecting into holography. So it, it was crazy, this artwork. And it disappeared because like most of the performance media art it was shown for the summer and then destroyed. And the head of this project was Otto Piene, and he met with Peter Weibel and he said my dream will be to reconstruct this artwork because it was so amazing. Peter Weibel talked about it, uh, with the team and I thought it's a research thing. Like it's so beautiful to start a research about how to reconstruct such a huge artwork with all of those creation on it. Technology that were developed just for this artwork. And some of them, before any industrial research were made onto, for example, sun tracking, there were mirrors following the sun to enlight the holographic plates for the public. So they were extraordinary, uh, scientific discoveries for this artwork because they were 21 artists and 14 engineers and scientific, working together. Like, it's a dream of art and technology, this artwork. And so I decided to focus on this and do like, a media archeological reconstruction. My lab for my PhD is called PAMAL so it's Preservation Art Media Archaeology Lab, and it was with Lionel Broye, and Emmanuel Guez, the head. And what we developed together, it's what we called the duplication or the second original. This is like this media archeological reconstruction of an artwork within its historical technological environment or , as close as possible. So like this, we can learn about the machines and be on the side of the machines and also create bridges between generations. And we also had this, Dream of reconstructing the social and collaborative process that made those artworks happen at that time. So this is the topic of my PhD. Like by reconstructing artwork, can we reconstruct the social environment and collaborative environment at MIT in the late seventies? And so I spent five years just to think about how to reconstruct this artwork. Now there's too many regulation in the public space for example, to do an artwork like this with lasers and things like this, it's just not possible. And so I explored ways to update the artwork. but as a media archeologist I really wanted to learn about the technology they use, how they cope, you know, with the restriction of their own technological environment. So I met most of the artists that are still living. I met the engineers when I was in a field trip in Massachusetts This research was really incredible. And the exhibition we did with Peter Weibel at the ZKM. , we exhibited some remaining artifacts from Centerbeam, and one room was completely dedicated to how should we reconstruct it and giving the word also to the public and thinking about what will be the expectation if we rebuild this artwork and reconstruct it. So it was really interesting. Margit Rosen supported me also when I arrived into the collection department saying, you can also continue your research on media archeology on the collection of the ZKM. So she really gave me that time of exploring this alternative strategy. We don't say this is the strategy to preserve digital and media art we just say it will be nice, you know, to advocate for history and for historicity and for historical machines a bit and have this time, to explore that. And this is really a chance that I have in the collection department that I have time to explore that. 

[00:27:51] Ben: It's interesting to hear you talk about media archeology as, a strategy, you know, I'm curious in your view, like how does a media archaeological approach to conservation of time-based media art differ from maybe other ways of doing time-based media conservation?

[00:28:09] Morgane: I think when we are using this, the theories of media archaeology, we're on the side of the machines and trying to understand how the machines kind of decided the idea of the artist, the reverse, like the way the artwork ended up being, because the artists had only access to this kind of technology, or maybe they didn't have access to this technology, so they created it. We have a lot of artworks with technology that didn't exist and they created it. So it's also like how they envisioned the technology and what they were expecting from technology. Being on this side we are really trying to understand the machines and how they work and kind of, preserving this heritage too. You know, the industry is not interested into preserving their artifacts. So we created, you know, the technical museums and they ended up showing those artifacts under showcases without function. And so at the end, maybe digital and media arts is the only hope for those machines to stay up and running and to show what they were capable of because they are applied to something. You know, it's hard for technical museum to show what it is to work with an, Mac Classic, for example. But we have artworks with programs meant for Mac Classic that they are really processing something and we can show people this is made with a Mac Classic, even though the Mac Classic is not even visible into the exhibition space. It's just that they can see the potentiality of the machine. And this is why we are trying as much as we can to present, at least at Z cam the artworks within their historical environment. So we are doing tours to explain this because most of the machines are not visible into the artworks, but we are doing restoration preservation tours where we explain our job and where we explain, for example, this artwork was updated, or this artwork is still running onto the original machine. So things like this to be like this nice experimentation space that always been ZKM and we are creating, of course, updated version for loans for other institution because we cannot expect from all the institution to know how to repair a SGI computer or Mac Classic if something wrong happened. Like work with floppy because there's no usb. So things like this, it's too complicated. But we have the chance at ZKM to have the knowledge, the people, the skills so we can. Continue to show them into their historical environment and educate the public to this. And this is really something important to us. And I would say this is what's media archaeology strategy is or to keep this, uh, slow time of technology, a bit like slowing down and not update everything without taking the time to really experience those artwork as long as we can into their original historical environment.

[00:31:19] Ben: Oh, I love that so much. So, you know, one of the things, I have to be honest, I've never been to Zkm unfortunately. I would love to visit someday though. But one of my impressions as an outsider is, you know, most contemporary art museums that have sizable time-based media art collections, they might have, you know, like a handful or maybe if it's a big collection like 10 works of time-based media art that are really complicated, that are these sort of like conservation case studies that will require many years and lots of research. But my impression of ZKM has always been that you have a lot of those

[00:31:58] Morgane: mhmm.

[00:31:59] Ben: So I guess, what is the biggest challenge in caring for the collection? And, it sounds like you have a big team, but I mean, just how do you manage and how do you prioritize all of the potential work that you could be doing?

[00:32:12] Morgane: Yeah it's really hard because we are only two persons full time dedicated to the collection. So we do what we can. The other persons are not dedicated to the collection, so we have to do time management to have some time together to focus on an artwork and we are asking for more people, but as a public institution, we don't also have the means to have more people. And so yeah, I don't know if it, there's a priority, but we focused first on the artworks that had no documentation at all where the artists were still living, but growing old so we could work with them. And, maybe the one that were the less exhibited and stayed in storage for super long. So this is how we prioritized. And also what helped too is that we made a collection exhibition for three years, just before COVID and this also allowed some choices to be made according to the concept of the collection exhibition from the curators. But I think we have maybe 200 complex installations even more. And we did work on maybe 10 or 20 in five years. And projects are taking a lot of time. Like, we are working on odd artworks from Paul Garrin, for example. The three major artworks from Paul Garrin White Devil, Border Patrol and uh, Yuppie Ghetto with Watchdog. And those took us at least two years and we are not even finished. And we just did to make the original, like the historical version working. We are not even at the long term preservation or updating process of this. We just managed to understand how it was working with Paul. Paul came, at ZKM to help us and it was also very old for him in the nineties, you know, so he had to remember all of this stuff and explain us, and, yeah, we spent two incredible weeks together. We worked all day, all night and it was so great to work with him. And yeah, we are just starting now to think about how we gonna exhibit this artwork in the future because it's so complex. To make it excitable is so huge. So yeah, we need more people. So now we are slow, but we make progress for some of the artworks of the collection. And we are trying also to work with external people. We worked with David Link he is also an artist and he is helping us porting 3D environment from SGI to Windows because he used to work on this, so he knows about it and he's helping us. So seeing an artist taking care of other artists work is kind of really cool too. And the other . Thing is that we are expanding we are continuing to acquire, so we are taking care of the old artworks and also of the new acquisition. I'm always in between documenting an artwork from the already established collection and also documenting a new acquired artwork. And in both case, the complexity is huge because in one case, you have to learn things because the knowledge is disappeared. And another side, because now we have, you know, complex machine learning things, blockchain, a lot of stuff that we have to gain this knowledge because it's new knowledge. It's a huge challenge to do both, but we cannot just stop acquiring because we are going to create a gap, you know, into the collection. But, we were really supported and now that we are involved into the acquisition process, it's easier also to manage the time and, and to evaluate how we gonna do the documentation, contact the artist to head, do the setup with them, the dismantling with them. So now they, that we are involved. It's easier. And also, we now have a big, big space Peter Weibel allocated one exhibition floor for us, so we can do the setups because you know, when you are, taking out an artwork like, if you want assess a digital or media artwork, you need to set it up. So we needed a lot of space. When you see the artwork of Paul Garrin, it's taking a room just for the technical stuff. So, he just closed one of the exhibition floor and now we are working there to do the setups, to test the artwork, to maintain, to repair. At first it was temporary and now it's a permanent thing because it's full, it's completely full of odd artworks now we have all, also all the electronic artworks there with my colleagues. We needed space and we need people, but for this we need money. So, we will wait

[00:36:58] Ben: That's incredible. I'm curious, you know, given your research focus and your PhD on this media archeological approach and also what I perceive to be kind of a strong suit of ZKM. Having all of these artworks always in a functional state all of the time obviously is probably impossible. Do you envision a future where maybe some of these would be exhibited from a more media archeological approach in the future? Where, you know, maybe it's not the work on display so much as it's maybe more of a behind the scenes view onto the work. You know, this is the equipment, here's documentation, here's photographs, here's video of the work. Do you think that's something that you could see happening in the future?

[00:37:45] Morgane: Yeah. And actually what we are developing with Matthieu is allowing for a longer time of exhibition because we are duplicating the artworks. I think one of the first duplication we did it was Dalil Fund fits. It's a G3 computer, and we have a lot of spares at ZKM they kept all the machines from the beginning so we could make a complete double of this computer. So if this one is breaking, we can just replace it with the exact copy. And so, like this, we don't have pressure to find out what's wrong with the computer that failed. And also we, by doing this, We have no surprise when we want to test the backup. We put the backup directly into the computer it's meant for, and we test it right away. And we know the entirety of software and hardware is working properly because we have a lot of surprise sometime after making a backup, you put it on the computer and you have a license key problem attached to the processor number or things like this. It's a good strategy for us and I think we can increase the life spam of span media historical versions for five to 10 years because of the spares. It's not so long term, 10 years, but it's already much more than before. One of the frustration now is that sometime we are restoring a piece making it work again into the historical environment and there's no space in the exhibition, or it's not the topic of the current exhibition, so we cannot put it there. And so what we wanted to do is to open the workshop so that people can see the restored artwork in function. And we can also stress out the artwork in longer period of time, like, uh, exhibition time. And it's also like a protected area. So we are here with the public to show the work and it allows us, for example, to show artwork on Apple two or things like this that we are not able to do now because the spare parts are so rare that we couldn't do this in exhibition, like normal exhibition. But if it's in this protected area of our workshop and the people can come and consult the last restored piece it will be, Yeah, I think it's, it will be more like this, like making a black box inside the workshop so we can show some of the really fragile pieces into a control environment, maybe. One of the factors fact is the amazing technical team of ZKM is growing old, you know, they are all there since the beginning of the ZKM, beginning of ZKM is end of the eighties, so a lot of them are going to retire soon. So we were kind of really freaked out about their knowledge about the collection. So this moment of assessment of the collection was also a good moment to hold those knowledge. And for this, we reactivated the wiki. We had a media wiki that the technical team built. But you know, because of this lack of human power, they just stopped putting information inside. But we reactivated it with Matthieu. And now all the documentation, everything we can think about is now inside the media wiki. And we created then a model for the documentation. We created an acquisition workflow explained inside the Wiki in. We are more and more to use it and transfer the knowledge inside this big documentation, uh, pit. And this is really the next challenge. At ZKM, everything was more or less oral history. Everybody knows about those artworks, but nobody started to write it down at one point. So this is what I'm trying to do with the difficulties it has also, because everybody is German and speaking German and I speak German, but I'm not fluent in German I have to be honest. And so is there's also this language issue that I'm writing down everything in English so that everybody can read it. And not only German speakers. Because when we have loans It's easier for me if everything is in English. So it's one of the challenge now and we are afraid of losing stuff when they are leaving for retirement. So we are really proud of this wiki with Matthieu because we are gathering so much. And during COVID because we were completely stuck at home, we decided to share all the things we, developed, like the documentation model, the workflow for acquisition. We made it public from the Wiki. And we also started to do classes, like online classes, conferences, all around the world, like from South America, Europe, Africa. It was quite amazing. We never felt, so much connected to everybody then during COVID it was kind of crazy for us because everybody had the time to educate themselves. You know, they, they were stuck at home and they thought, Okay, now I want to learn about media and digital art conservation. And they were contacting us and saying, Could you give like a small introduction or could you help us? Because we start to acquire those type of artworks and we don't know exactly what to do. And so we were helping each other before everything opens again, and the craziness of life is coming again, like the old workload that we have every day. So this was a quiet moment where we could exchange and educate others and share. It was quite nice.

[00:43:35] Ben: Well, you have taken us through this incredible tour of your evolution as a professional and really taken us inside of ZKM and you know, how you've developed this program over the years. I'm curious, you know, what is coming up next for you? Is there anything you wanted to share with our listeners?

[00:43:50] Morgane: Yeah. Actually a couple of weeks ago uh, Margit Rosen and I organize the conference at ZKM called Just In Time on the status quo of and future of electronic art preservation. The replay will be available soon on our website. One of the aim of this conference was to build up a network of restorers and specialist groups working in the field in Europe and maybe attract more public funding like make the funding institution more aware about the needs of those artworks. And I was happy because I could then include the French institutions that are a bit behind, uh, in this kind of question. So, I also included independent restorers that sometime are not involved in those kind of networks because they are not belonging to an institution. So next is to strengthen this network, continue to work together to help each other and share things because it's sparing money and time if we, if one of us is developing something and sharing it with the others. I know it's completely utopic to think like this, but I think, uh, we know each other, all of us, like, Martina and Patricia and , we know each other and it's just now we wanted to make formally a network together including also the schools of course, and else we are working, for example, on the duplication of interactive LaserDiscs like, you know, Gary Hill artworks, Suspension of disbelief. Ken Feingold, also created artwork with computer control LaserDisc Uh, Lynn Hershman, of course Lorna Paul Garrin Yuppie Ghetto with Watchdog and White Devil are both working with computer control LaserDiscs and there's a bunch of nerds called Domesday 86 on the internet, that is creating this duplication. And there's the Dexter project, which is hardware emulator for Laserdisc. So we are trying to combine those things to preserve the original software of those artworks because it's quite hard to emulate when you have so many hardware dependencies. So the goal will be to just emulate. Hardware emulates the LaserDisc player so that we can maybe make it communicate with an AMIGA, for example, of the Ken Feingold artwork with an AMGA emulator. We don't know exactly how we gonna do this, but we are working with them and it's really exciting. Matthieu, for example, is also reconstructing the virtual sculptures by Jeffrey Shaw. It's an early augmented reality artwork from 1992, so really early and is reconstructing it in assembly language on an Apple II. So this is the cool things that we are doing. And, uh, lately with uh, Bigo Slic she's a student from , Istanbul, we work on how to record serial signal for some of the artworks we have working on DOS that are compiled and we cannot emulate them because of the hardware dependencies. So we are thinking about recording the serial output. We don't know exactly if we want to exhibit it with it or if we want just to use it as a documentation, so we will see. But yeah, and one of the big projects that I have personally is the conservation, uh, and restoration of the tools at Z 22. It's a computer that is in ZKM, as a loan from the state. Uh, it's from 1955 it's a tube computer. And we are working with an Italian team to make it functional. We are working on it since four years now. And the goal will be to, yeah, to make it work and to play some of the generative poems that were created on it. So it's like the dream. And we want also to create a guideline for the preservation of vintage computers because, UNESCO only address software preservation in the guidelines. And there's nothing about vintage computer, especially like, this one, this computer is a National Monument in Germany. So you have to follow some rules before touching it. There's no guidelines. So we are trying to do what we can and we are documenting everything we are changing or touching on it. And we are trying to figure it out how we want to make it work. Should we just replace the tube but there's limits maybe we shouldn't cross. And so we are researching around this and see is it really the functionality or the exact way the electricity is processed to make, uh, one and zeros, you know? It's really the beginning of the computer. And it's really like, understanding how a computer works from the very, very low level. It's really a nice project. We work one month per year on this full time. And it's really rewarding thing even though we are really slow. And oh, also I'm an artist too. After the laboratory closed in my school in Avignon we decided to group ourself with my professor and the other students. We decided to create an autistic media archeological group, and we call PAMAL Group and we are creating and exhibiting second original. And we've just been exhibited in Centre Pompidou with archives of Minitel Artworks. I dunno if you know what Minitel is. It's a French invention and so we are also, um, exhibiting at ZKM at the end of this year for the exhibition Matter, non-matter, anti-matter. And so, yeah, this is my side artistic work,

[00:49:34] Ben: So this collective is focused on making work on obsolete equipment specifically? That's so fun. 

[00:49:40] Morgane: And we are, focusing on Minitel so far because we are just the young group. But yeah, the goal will be also to do new CD-ROM artworks. We are going there, maybe, maybe not, but we do this next to our work, so it's really hard to have the time to develop things. So it took us already a lot of time to do the Minitel. So we will see what's come next after

[00:50:04] Ben: Well now that you have just inspired all of our listeners and they are just dying to get into the field of time-based media conservation I'm curious if you have any advice that you wanted to leave behind for anybody tuning in who may be earlier in their career or just interested in getting into this kind of work.

[00:50:24] Morgane: I think one advice for someone who is a young conservator or going soon out of school is that I see we, I have interns, one interns per year, and I see them a lot doubting, about what the museums are going to ask them to do. Because I see museums also trying to, I don't know how to say this, but they are asking them, to be electro mechanic engineer, a computer scientist, an archivist, an AV technician and a restorer, and a art historian. And nobody can do this. So usually I tell them, you need to be able to say that this is a teamwork and that you cannot do it all at once. What you need as a time-based media conservator is just to speak the same language as the electro technician, as the computer scientist. Like, understand what they say so that you are able to brainstorm with them, and that when they are talking to you about compilation or comment in source code or batch or script or database, you know what they are talking about and you can work with them properly. You just need those basic knowledge just to communicate, but also to communicate with the artists because if they feel you cannot understand what they're talking about, they are not going to give all the very specific information about their work. And so, I just told them it, needs a village to restore those artworks. A village with a lot of people coming from different culture and backgrounds, but that all speak the same language. And this is what's important there. And I like to also learn them to advocate for the work we do and the art artworks themselves because you have to be able to say, I'm not simply a repairer. I don't just follow functionalist approach. The media and digital artworks are not just machines that are to be repaired and to make work. They are really like the vessels for the artists to share their concern, their dream about the world. And they deserve to be respected into their integrity and meaning. And for this needs time, it needs research, It needs not only, uh, screw driver, and a computer to do backup and maybe if you are interested into time based media I can tell you that the best of this field is that you are learning new things your whole career. You learn old languages, you learn new languages, you are always perpetually learning something new or old. And since young I always develop this passion for intergenerational knowledge transfer. And being a media and digital art restorer really allows you to be completely part of this amazing process. And transmitting the knowledge from one generation to another by restoring and it's a really beautiful job.

[00:53:20] Ben: Well, Morgan, thank you for transmitting your knowledge, and being so generous and just telling us all about the ZKM and really getting the inside perspective on all of the work that you do there. It's just really incredible. So yeah, thank you so much for taking the time and coming on the show. I really, really appreciate it. 

[00:53:40] Morgane: You're welcome thank you.

[00:53:41] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's show as always, if you want to help support our work and mission of equitably paying artists that come on the show, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence or if you are more interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate. And there, you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes and last but not least, you can always find us on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence Until next time, have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.