Art and Obsolescence

This week’s guest Jochen Saueracker had some incredible stories to tell – the early decades of his career were spent as a sort of engineer and/or video art roadie for Nam June Paik, traveling all over the world installing complex towers of CRT monitors. Today, in addition to working closely with Shigeko Kubota’s estate to steward her legacy and archive, Jochen works as part of an incredible worksh...

This week on the show we are visiting the one and only Stuart Comer, chief curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art. Stuart is not only prolifically active as a curator at MoMA doing all of the things curators do: building exhibitions, building collections, building relationships with artists, the public, and patrons, etc – but as a department head at a museum the scale of MoMA...

This week on the show we're visiting with another emerging professional in the time-based media conservation field. Tzu-Chuan Lin is currently finishing up a masters degree focused in conservation of new media and digital information at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, and in his studies there, he’s been conducting some very needed research on the documentation and conservation of...

We're off this week, re-running our second-ever episode from back in 2021, featuring curator, writer, and director of The Kitchen, Legacy Russell. We're back to our regularly scheduled program with incredible new episodes next week! Get access to exlusive content - join us on Patreon! > https://patreon.com/artobsolescence Join the conversation: https://twitter.com/ArtObsolescence http...

We're off this week, re-running our second-ever episode from back in 2021, featuring artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. We're back to our regularly scheduled program with incredible new episodes on August 2nd. Get access to exlusive content - join us on Patreon! > https://patreon.com/artobsolescence Join the conversation: https://twitter.com/ArtObsolescence https://www.instagram.com/artobso...

This week on the show we are in the artist’s studio visiting with the one and only Tourmaline. Tourmaline’s work extends across various media and is a magical blend of a very research-oriented practice that brings history to life, and crafting visions of repose, luxury, relaxation, magic and joy – whether it is in the form of video installations,  photography, or fashion. To say that her work is i...

This week we’re visiting with Diego Mellado, an engineer who works in the service of artists. Diego has a formal technical background as a trained engineer but a long time ago after becoming disillusioned with the corporate world, pivoted to using these skills to support  contemporary artists. He has spent the past ten plus years in the studio of artist Daniel Canogar, designing and building elega...

This week on the show we're visiting with legendary curator and researcher of digital art, Annet Dekker. Annet occupies an incredibly unique and important role within the ecosystem of people that steward time-based media art.  In addition to her curatorial work and research, and in many ways serving as a hub and convener within the digital art community,  Annet has also serverd for many years...

This week we're back in the studio visiting an artist. Alan Michelson is a New York based artist and Mohawk member of the six nations of the grand river, a Haudenosaunee community in Southern Ontario.  Alan is an astute and passionate student of history – an incredible fountain of historical facts, figures, and stories. His public art, installations, and time-based media works serve as moment...

This week’s show features Gaby Wijers – with origins in documenting performance art in the 80s and 90s, as well as leading work in the early 2000s at Montevideo, an important Dutch video art orgnization – Gaby has played an incredibly important role in the ecosystem of time-based media art conservation over several decades, always in very close collaboration with artists, and long before the field...

This week we are visiting with emerging conservation professional Anna Mladentseva. Throughout the course of her undergraduate and masters studies at University College London, Anna has been building some very fresh philosophical and ethical frameworks for how we think about the conservation of software based art, net art in particular, and her perspective is refreshingly grounded in a very sort o...

This week's guest has been incredibly influential in shaping not just how art conservators think about preserving art on the internet, but also in building tools to help them accomplish things we never thought possible. As Rhizome's Preservation Director, Dragan Espenschied is responsible for the preservation of thousands of works of art experienced through the web, accessible to the gen...

This week we’re visiting with brilliant curator and writer Mia Matthias. Mia’s current role is as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but not for long. No spoilers, but Mia shared some very exciting news during our conversation, and you’ll just have to tune in to find out what it is. Mia’s background, training, and the collection of experiences she’s accrued over the year...

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

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

This week we’re visiting with artist Meriem Bennani – by popular demand! Meriem has been one of the most requested guests, and is a personal favorite, so we simply had to have her on the show. Meriem effortlessly weaves cartoonish slapstick humor into her videos and animations, even when she is taking on dead serious topics. Her work is accessible and inviting, and her work is equally at home on s...

This week we’re visiting with someone who quite possibly has the longest running career in installing and maintaining time based media art installations. Richard Bloes has served as an AV technician at the Whitney Museum of American art for over 41 years, and has accrued an incomparable wealth of knowledge. If there is a potential way for an artwork to malfunction, break or be installed incorrectl...

This week on the show we’re visiting with brilliant artist WangShui, whose work prominently featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial is very much a continuation of their introspection and exploration of post-humanism, trans identity, and human/machine collaboration – in the form of etchings and paintings on aluminum performed in collaboration with a carefully cultivated AI collaborator, and a real...

This week on the show we’re visiting with conservation technician, software developer, hardware hacker, and artist Emma Dickson, who you may recall as the guest host of Episode 010 with Shu Lea Cheang. Ever since their first foray into the field working to analyze and restore Shu-Lea’s legendary net art piece Brandon at the Guggenheim as part of their Conservation of Computer Based Art initiative,...

This week on the show we are visiting with brilliant gallerist Ebony L. Haynes, who founded and runs 52 Walker, a David Zwirner gallery. As you'll hear in this episode, Ebony has crafted a space where she and the artists she works with are doing things differently. The installations are large, ambitious, and not exactly easy to collect — involving virtually every fathomable medium: multichann...

Over the first nine months and thirty episodes of this little podcast we have heard the stories of some incredible guests: artists, curators, collectors, conservators, and more – and the nuggets of wisdom that they have shared along the way have been truly invaluable. This week we're trying something a little bit new, and we’re calling it The Advice Episode - compiled on this week’s show are...

Although the role that technology plays in a work of art can sometimes be fluid and flexible, stewardship of time-based media art still requires material connoisseurship: a deep understanding and appreciation for the medium, its artistic possibilities and limitations. This week’s guest Lori Emerson, has built an academic body of work steeped in just that sort of connoisseurship, rooted in the worl...

This week, we visit with Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Much like The Walker itself, Pavel's curatorial practice is incredibly interdisciplinary. Although he certainly doesn’t label himself a curator of digital art, media art, or performing arts, it just so happens that for Pavel much of the important artists you'll find him working with at The Walker and bey...

On this week’s show we chat with time-based media conservator Shu-Wen Lin who has led an incredibly prolific career over the past five years or so, serving as the very first time based media conservator at numerous institutions, and working in museums in over four different countries – including Hong Kong, Taipei, Canada, and the USA. Prior to working as a time-based media conservator Shu-Wen also...

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 traditi...