Episodes
A very special episode! Today we are chatting with Pippi Zornoza, co-founder of the Dirt Palace, a feminist artist-run collective/residency program/space that has been a pivotal part of the artistic community in Providence for over 20 years, and this interview is part two of a three part series focused on the Dirt Palace and its two co-founders: Xander Marro and Pippi Zornoza. Pippi’s art and music defy boundaries of media, genre, and context, embodying an intensity and a meticulous approach...
Published 03/28/24
Published 03/28/24
A very special episode! Today we are chatting with Xander Marro, co-founder of the Dirt Palace, "a feminist cupcake encrusted netherworld located along the dioxin filled banks of the Woonasquatucket river, which is to say in Providence, RI USA". The Dirt Palace is a feminist artist-run collective/residency program/space that has been a pivotal part of the artistic community in Providence for over 20 years, and this interview is the first in a three part series focused on the Dirt Palace and...
Published 02/09/24
Help shape the future of the show! Take our listener survey: https://forms.gle/Pr8kThnNUGU6hasF6 If you listen to this show chances are you are familiar with some iconic images of time-based media art that has taken place in Times Square — in fact I think perhaps the first image I ever saw of Jenny Holzer’s work  was a grainy black and white photo of one of her truisms on display on an LED sign in Times Square. Public art has been occurring in Time’s Square for many decades, but in fact, as...
Published 11/08/23
Today we are revisiting an episode that aired originally two years ago to the day featuring artist Ian Cheng. This episode was one of our most popular in 2021, so we are pulling it out of the archives for our more recent subscribers to enjoy. Since 2012, Ian has been building a universe of sentient software, creatures, and elaborate systems of logic in the form of self-playing video games, installations, drawings, and prints. In this extended chat Ian shares some of his deepest influences,...
Published 10/03/23
In our latest episode we visit with artist legacy specialist Ursula Davila-Villa. In her crucial work, Ursula helps artists and their families put appropriate plans in place to ensure that their work and archives will exist in a way consistent with the artist’s wishes after they are gone. This unique work draws upon conservation, archives, estate planning, curation, and more. Despite how critical this work is, it isn’t really something you can go to school for. Tune in to hear the fascinating...
Published 09/05/23
In Episode 68, we sit down with Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Before her tenure in Wisconsin, and even before her time as director at the Smart Museum of Art, Jill dedicated over 28 years to SFMOMA. There, she led the conservation department during its formative years, establishing SFMOMA as a pioneer in the field of time-based media conservation. Throughout Jill’s extensive career, from her early years at SFMOMA to her current work in Wisconsin,...
Published 08/08/23
Today we are diving deeper into the world of digital preservation in our visit with Crystal Sanchez, digital archivist for the Smithsonian Institution. So far, over the past two years and sixty six episodes we’ve visited with all kinds of folks involved in different aspects of preservation of works of art — but something we haven’t really looked at closely is the infrastructure that makes all of this possible. Without proper digital preservation storage, systems, procedures, protocols, and...
Published 07/11/23
For episode 66 we are back in the conservation lab, visiting with the one and only Joanna Phillips. For any listeners familiar with time-based media conservation, Joanna hardly needs any introduction — she was among the first generation of practitioners in this field,  and the second ever time-based media conservator at a US museum. At the Guggenheim Joanna established the first museum time-based media conservation lab. Her work has been incredibly influential in the field — she developed a...
Published 06/06/23
On today’s show we are visiting with Salome Asega, a true multihyphenate  who not only leads New Inc, the New Museum’s incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design, and technology, but who has also maintained a vibrant artistic practice all throughout the years that her career as an arts administrator has been thriving. This might be due to the fact that when you look at Salome’s work as a professional, it really is just an extension of her work as an artist — delightfully...
Published 05/09/23
This month we’re in the studio visiting with contemporary artist Nikita Gale. Gale's work employs objects and materials like barricades, concrete, microphone stands, and spotlights to address the ways in which space and sound are politicized. Last year in episode 32 we visited with gallerist Ebony L. Haynes, director of 52 Walker, and it was in preparing for that conversation that I visited the gallery, and had the treat of seeing Nikita Gale’s work in person for the first time in the...
Published 04/04/23
For this episode we are back in the conservation lab, visiting with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Melva Bucksbaum Associate Director for Conservation and Research at the Whitney Museum of American Art. If you were to visit the Whitney today and see the lab and the department that Carol leads, you might find it hard to believe that none of it existed back when she joined the Whitney. In 2001 Carol not only became the museum’s first director of conservation, but also its first staff conservator. In our...
Published 03/07/23
Today we are visiting with the one and only Shirin Neshat, who hardly needs introduction. If you’ve ever taken an art history class that covers video art, photography, international cinema, or for that matter contemporary opera, you’ve definitely seen Shirin’s work. Since her debut exhibition in 1993 at Franklin Furnace, Shirn’s work has offered a deeply personal yet universal perspective on womanhood, power, corruption, trauma, and the female body as the battleground of social and political...
Published 02/07/23
We are closing out 2022 with highlights from eight incredible artists that graced the show this year. Tune in to hear the voices of Gary Hill, American Artist, WangShui, Meriem Bennani, Alan Michelson, Tourmaline, Arthur Jafa, and Hito Steyerl discussing how they think about the preservation and documentation of their work, as well as intimate inside glimpses into their practice and studios. Sending a huge heartfelt thanks to everyone all of the listeners that made 2022 such a memorable year...
Published 12/06/22
For our 60th episode, we are visiting with artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator, Hito Steyerl. In addition to being able to find Hito’s work in museums, biennales, collections, and bookshelves all over the world, a good deal of her single-channel moving image work can be watched freely online, which of course is a good thing, but Hito’s work has also explored the darker side of what the global dispersion of images can entail – starting with her deeply personal pre-internet short film...
Published 11/15/22
This week on the show we are visiting with Rebecca Cleman, executive director of Electronic Arts Intermix. EAI has of coursed already come up on the show many times, and recently in episode 54 we visited with their director of preservation and media collections – today we will be going deeper into this history and evolution of EAI, and getting a look behind the scenes of an organization that has been incredibly central to the history of video art, and incredibly impactful for countless...
Published 11/08/22
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...
Published 11/01/22
This week on the show we travel to Switzerland to visit with media conservator Martina Haidvogl. We’ve heard the conservation program at the Bern Academy of the Arts mentioned a few times on the show so far, as for a long time it was really the only formal conservation training program that had time-based media as a specialization. With time spent in Bern, and as an alum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Martina was one of the few first conservators to arrive in the US with formal...
Published 10/25/22
This week on the show we are continuing to expand our perspective on the time-based media conservation ecosystem in Taiwan, with our guest Yuhsien Chen. In the handfull of years that she has been dedicated to time-based media conservation Yuhsien has been up to some incredibly exciting things. We heard her name come up back in episode 46 when visiting with her colleague and collaborator Tzu-Chuan Lin, about work they did together at the National Taiwan Museum of Art – and as you’ll hear in...
Published 10/18/22
Since 1991 when he somewhat accidentally landed a curatorial position at the Guggenheim, Jon Ippolito has been passionately dedicated to building curatorial projects, research initiatives, and collaborations revolving around the preservation of time-based media art. Through projects such as the variable media questionnaire, exhibitions such as Seeing Double, and books such as Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (co-authored with Rick Rinehart), Jon’s thinking about how to...
Published 10/04/22
This week we’re visiting with media conservator and conservator Caroline Gil Rodríguez, who last year became director of preservation and media collections at the Electronic Arts Intermix. EAI played an incredibly pivotal role in cementing video art’s place in history, and there Caroline is doing exciting work not only to safeguard their important collection, but also to help shape and rethink what role a place like EAI plays within the broader time-based media conservation ecosystem today,...
Published 09/27/22
This week we’re visiting the the one and only Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design and Director of Research and Development at the Museum of Modern Art. Paola is quite frankly is a legend  – not only because she made MoMA’s first ever homepage on the World Wide Web in 1995 – but for decades she has been pushing the envelope and really reshaping what it means for museums to collect. For instance, what does it mean for a museum to collect something that is in in the public...
Published 09/20/22
This week’s guest, Paul Messier, is an excellent example of the potential for creativity that lies within the unique brand of entrepreneurship that is running an independent conservation practice. Although working as an independent art conservator comes with many unique challenges (Paul’s journey being no exception) it also has great potential for extending beyond what most people imagine art conservators do; far beyond just restoring or documenting artworks. Over the years, Paul has been...
Published 09/13/22
This week on the show we’re visiting with Signal Culture director and co-founder Debora Bernagozzi. In our chat we delve deeply into the niche and history-rich dimension of video art practice where the video signal itself is deconstructed and the flow of electricity becomes a medium that is synthesized, manipulated, and performed by the artist in real-time. We’ll hear all about the incredible work that Signal Culture is doing to collect, preserve, build, and restore incredibly rare and...
Published 09/06/22
This week on the show we’re in the artist’s studio visiting the one and only Arthur Jafa. From his extensive work in cinema, to his video art, sculpture, and other mixed media work shown in a contemporary art context – AJ’s work is often an embodiment of Black identity in America, and he is often cited with being a leader among a generation of artists creating defining a distinctly Black cinematic language. This extends as well into current projects on the more infrastructural / business side...
Published 08/30/22