ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Virtual Gathering: Topic Series 17 June 2025

ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Virtual Gathering: Topic Series

Panel: Managing collections of software-based art

Date: Tuesday, June 17th, 2025

Time: 8:00 a.m. Los Angeles / 11:00 a.m. New York / 4:00 p.m. London / 5:00 p.m. Amsterdam & Stuttgart

This online Zoom meeting will take approximately 1.5 hours.

Registration is required; register here.

This panel is part of the Topic Series which is a series of virtual gathering organized by the ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Working Group, on specific themes to create opportunities to share projects, experiences, expertise and ideas, to pose questions, and discuss issues related to each theme. 

Panel: Managing collections of software-based art

Software-based art is particularly fragile and as a result, collecting it presents a significant challenge. The actions needed to preserve these works are myriad, resource-intensive in many ways, and difficult to accomplish under the best circumstances. Moreover, the interdependence between technologies, the rapid pace of technological change, and the barriers erected by commercial interests may make collecting these works in the traditional sense all but impossible. Object-focused conservation is often undertaken at intervals determined by schedules of exhibitions or loans, which can be appropriate for artworks in some media but is problematic for software-based art, which cannot survive long periods of passive storage. What, then, are the efforts that conservators and institutions can undertake at the collection level or even at the community level to sustain these works?

This session will touch on collection-level strategies for software-based art conservation including:

• Intake processes and priorities
• Collection monitoring strategies
• Management of obsolete equipment pools
• Preservation of computing environments and supporting software
• Storage and digital preservation
• Networks of care and collaboration

Rather than focusing on the care and treatment of individual works, holistic collection care methods will be emphasized. The short presentations by panelists will be followed by Q&A designed to foster exchange and discussion of shared challenges.

The Working Group Assistant Coordinator Amy Brost (Associate Media Conservator, Museum of Modern Art, New York) will conduct the conversation with the following panelists:

Dragan Espenschied is Preservation Director at Rhizome, stewarding ArtBase, a collection of more than 2200 works of digital art and net art. With a background in net activism, net art, and electronic music, Espenschied’s activities as a conservator are mostly focused on infrastructure and field-wide action concerning web archiving, emulation, and linked open data, rather than singular artworks.

Patricia Falcão is a Portuguese time-based media conservator at Tate and a researcher in the AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral program at Goldsmiths College London. Both at Tate and Goldsmiths she researches and develops strategies for the preservation of software-based artworks and web-based artworks as well as digital components of artworks more broadly.  Her doctoral research focuses on the contexts of preservation and how those determine strategies and outcomes.  She has consistently published on the theme of preservation of Time-based media, Digital and Software-based art over the last 8 years, in the Conservation and Digital Preservation communities.

Claudia Roeck started in environmental engineering before studying contemporary art conservation in Berne, Switzerland, with focus on media art, graduating in 2016. From 2013 to 2016, Claudia worked at the Tate in London as an assistant time-based media conservator, focusing on the acquisition of video- and film-based artworks. In 2024,  Claudia finished her PhD about preservation strategies for software-based artworks at the University of Amsterdam.  During her research period, she worked in different part time positions, amongst other at LI-MA in Amsterdam, an institution for the preservation and research of media art. Currently, she works as a time-based media conservator for the House of Electronic Arts in Basel and for the Art Museum Basel, both in Switzerland.

The event will be opened by the ICOM-CC Chair Kate Seymour and introduced by the ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Working Group Coordinator Anna Laganà.