New Media Museums

Mária Bohumelová, Michal Čudrnák, Lucia Gregorová Stach, Slovak National Gallery

New media is other media, at least in the collection of Slovak National Gallery (SNG). The IM (Other Media) collection of SNG was founded after 1989, with a fragment of the famous teamwork by the artists Stano Filko, Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarský White Space in White Space from 1974 (IM 001) being its first acquisition.¹⁾

The collection can be divided into three lines. One consists of the collection and historical reconstruction of artworks belonging to the new tendencies of “other creativity”, to use art historian Radislav Matuštík's term, which developed in Slovakia from the early 1960s in various positions and non-classical media outputs. Most of these artworks emerged the unofficial and underground art scene as an alternative to the official doctrine of artistic creation associated with academic education and the representation of the socialist state culture. Future acquisitions to the collections aim to continue to record, research, collect, preserve and present works of conceptual art, action art and intermedia art, either through artefacts or, in the case of ephemeral work, through mediated photographic documentation. The second line of the collection is related to time-based new media art (experimental film and video art or video installation) and the third line is related to “contemporary” installations or site-specific art. From the media point of view, the collection maps all media of creation and all non-classical positions and forms of artistic production; its focus is research and registration of the experimental art scene in the sphere of contemporary art in Slovakia within its possibilities.

Due to the circumstances of its creation and short history, the IM (Other Media) collection contains a variety of works from the 1960s and later. Some of them can be found on the intersection of conceptual art and sculpture, such as environments, objects and installations. Also included are time-based works such as films, video art, and intermedia works such as relics and documentaries, happenings and performances. The focus of the collection allows for future acquisitions of artworks combining multiple artistic approaches, as well as works based on an interdisciplinary basis. Through the collaboration of several professional activities that enrich curatorial expertise with the necessary technological and media skills, it will also be possible to engage in a more systematic collection and exploration of performance, sound and internet art. For this, however, new ways of recording and storing data need to be developed.

Traditional gallery documentation in collections management systems (CMS) is not a good fit for documenting new media. The data structures of most documentation schemes and collections management systems have been created to meet the needs of 'old media' – paintings, drawings or sculptures. The standards and rules reflected in the CMS we use do not allow us to record the complexities of new media in detail, or make rather complicated.

The Central Register of Works of Art is an heir to the tradition (or an attempt at) central planning of the socialist state; it is both a union catalogue and a collections management system used by all state-registered galleries in Slovakia, developed and maintained by the Slovak National Gallery and an external development team. The CMS uses one scheme to catalogue all the different collections, created according to the decree of Ministry of Culture (defining the minimum set of fields for cataloguing records for Slovak museums and galleries), rules and guidelines inspired by the Cataloging of Cultural Objects and Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) standards.²⁾

This scheme hasn't been able to ingest the changes brought about by new media – the diversity of materials, technologies, or concepts. This is partly due to historical debt of the collections that focus (at least partly) on acquiring new media - apart from the IM (Other Media) collection of Slovak National Gallery, at the Intermedia collection of The Museum of Art in Žilina. While many seminal and notable artworks have been acquired in periods when collecting has been on the upward curve, there are still gaps in these collections. Paying attention to uncommon materials and hard-to-maintain technology used by many of the artworks wasn't the focus. Time allocated to the curators taking care of the artworks was always running low, expert knowledge of conservators having to deal with unknown material was missing, just as the documentation experts haven't been used to contemporary art terms describing the artworks. Many of the intermedia art positions in the collection are missing precisely because the expertise to preserve them is lacking. The challenge for the future will therefore also be to fill the gaps in the collection, which should at least to some extent reflect the development of art.

At the level of documentation, one example of the drawbacks of the rules and schema we use is the lack of description of the artwork on the level of components. At its best, there are only measurements of the components that make up the artwork, while recording the material and other attributes specific to the components are missing.  Being exhibited sparsely, many of the artworks haven't been photographed and installation manuals are scarce up until recently, and even if there has been some, it wasn't part of the cataloging record in the CMS, or shared on a institutional storage.

In recent years, this has begun to change thanks to projects and initiatives that are paving the way for the preservation and documentation of new media on the basis of collaboration between experts from different fields.

Fig. 1: Catalogue record of Marek Kvetan, ECHO, in CEDVU collections management system.

One of the attempts at documenting the IM (Other Media) collection was the Reconstructions exhibition project.³⁾ This “working exhibition” running through September and October 2015 was aimed both at presenting some artworks from the IM (Other Media) and Modern and Contemporary Plastic Art collections to the public (changing in the course of time, not being exhibited all at once) and at digitally documenting the process and resulting installations as part of the Digital gallery project. One of the results was video documentation from the installation process and informal discussions with the artists regarding their setup, along with multiple installation views, created for the print needs. Lacking detailed and rigorous process, the resulting videos are only partially useful as means to document the installation process or artist's motivation behind using materials (with the common question of whether some components are replaceable by other – current – materials being one of the most pressing ones).

Fig. 2: Ilona Németh installing her work Breathing Floor at the Reconstructions exhibition project. Photo archive of SNG.

Projects like New Media Museums provide a good opportunity to look into the ways how other institutions deal with problems similar to yours. During the initial meetings with Dušan Barok, we got inspired by the best practices he shared with us, one example being the SFMOMA Media wiki. At SFMOMA, the MediaWiki platform is used as a documentation tool “to help represent the aboutness of contemporary art through reimagined, open-ended object records that can accommodate differing degrees of variability in art, and for which collaboration among individuals and teams is key.”⁴⁾ The inherently unstable nature of new media is reflected and supported by the wiki - an low-barrier, collaborative tool used to document the equipment list, technical narrative, software, installation manual, exhibition history with photo documentation and multiple artwork iterations. Every iteration (artwork setup in different setting and environment) is documented in the wiki, resulting in the need to change other parts of the documentation. If a software or hardware component of the artwork had to be replaced or upgraded in course of the time at one of the iterations (artwork exhibitions), the changes in the artwork setup need to be reflected in the installation manual, or software documentation part of the wiki page. The wiki doesn't replace CMS, licensing database, or digital asset management systems (DAMS) used to store images from the exhibition. It serves as an interface in between these different systems and processes.

Along with participation in the New Media Museums project and inspiration from SFMOMA, the impulse to change documentation of new media artworks in SNG came from the long term focus on contemporary art acquisitions, the plan for a major upgrade of the CEDVU CMS and moving of the collection to the new depository (in the newly reconstructed SNG building).

In 2021 SNG received a generous donation to acquire artworks from five Slovak contemporary artists. The acquisition and exhibition of these artworks (You Can't Buy a Butterfly⁵⁾) was a perfect chance to capture complex information related to their installation, technical components and other aspects: from A to Z – Artist's idea to almost Zero questions. Considering this complexity, we realized that one person (the curator) can't do this alone, as it is the case with traditional artworks such as paintings or drawings. Documenting artworks from new media collections in a new way is based on teamwork. 

One of the acquired artworks is a triptych of wooden chests from the Slovak artist Marek Kvetan entitled ECHO. It is a multimedia installation, a triptych of found objects of the wooden wedding chests with the original perforation (original folk motifs), enhanced with hardware and software (diodes, loudspeakers, a 3-channel light & sound program in a loop). Edition 1/1.

We use the ECHO as a case study for the new documentation. Besides the standard metadata such as description, title, date, technique, measurements, or material, we added three important content pillars: artist intention, installation manual and technical rider. Members of the team had two meetings before the gathering and recording the information and process. The group consisted of the curator, the restorer, and colleagues from the digital technologies and installation departments. 

Fig. 3: Marek Kvetan, ECHO (2017). Photo: Adam Šakový.

The curator of the IM (Other Media) collection Lucia G. Stach interviewed the artist, asking questions such as:

Why did you choose the material of wooden chests in connection with audio-visual elements, how is it related to the folk theme?

What if one of the chests is damaged? What is the advice for the future restorer?

What should be the volume of the sound?

Should the chests be installed in a particular order?

Interesting findings: 

• These are wooden chests in which, according to the traditions, a bride gets an endowment; the artist collects these chests and used three of them for this specific artwork.
• A 3-channel light & sound program as a reflection of “trávnice” (“haymaking songs”) - traditional Slovak folk songs performed on meadows of the mountainous regions of Slovakia, where a group of singers answers the singing of other groups as an echo. Installing the three chests in a big room is ideal so that the sound effect is noticeable.
• It was never meant to be installed in complete darkness, so that the visitor can see the beauty and the age of the chests and their ornaments.
• Original shepherd songs by Svetozár Stračina have been an inspiration for the sounds, though all of them are digital – even the sound of the shepherd's pipe (fujara) is artificial. 
• It is an arch carrying a digital mark of our traditions.
• The light traces the sound.

Fig. 4: Marek Kvetan setting up ECHO at the You Can't Buy a Butterfly exhibition. Photo: Juraj Starovecký.

In this case, the installation manual was not crucial, since the artwork consists of only three components to be plugged into electricity. But it should cover the information about the space requirements and limits, along with photo documentation.

This part of the documentation was the most challenging one. It started with the artist's claim “just plug it in and set the volume” and ended with a six-page manual. Our colleagues required as many details about the LED lights, the MP3 player, the source of impulses, and the radio frequency controller as possible. The artist who cooperated with a programmer for sound and light elements of the artworks was invited for an interview and his contact information is listed in the manual. 

Prepare the questions for the artist and his collaborators in advance. Otherwise you might end up with a three-hour video interview with the artist, without answers reflecting the need for documentation.

Invite colleagues from other departments to be part of the process – their knowledge will help you raise more questions useful for the documentation.

Plan for it – all of this is time-consuming. 

Be uncompromising in the quality of audio and video recording. The effort is useless when the audio is unclear to understand all words or the images don't show specific details.

Transcribe the essential information from the recordings into text.

Fig. 5: Wiki page for Marek Kvetan, ECHO.

It is crucial to scale this pilot into an ongoing internal process, used to document all newly acquired or exhibited new media artworks. Everyone involved should be briefed about it and asked to participate. Another step is to upgrade our CMS and its data structure, so that it is able to record the specifics of new media, extend the vocabularies (material, work type) and adjust documentation methodology (describing components of the artwork as items with specific material or dimensions). The team should agree on templates for the documentation on wiki, setting a common structure of the template and quality standards for audio and video recordings. After that, every artwork to be acquired into the IM (Other Media) collection will be documented in wiki in this common template (along with a record in the CMS). As we can't expect all the artworks acquired to the IM (Other Media) collection to be documented this way in near future, we will devise a plan, setting priorities for the artworks and selecting those which are the most challenging from the installation or interpretation perspective.

See also the video presentation You Can't Buy a Butterfly. New Methods for Registering Acquisitions of Intermedia Artworks at the Slovak National Gallery by Lucia Gregorová Stach and Mária Bohumelová in this volume.