A Conversation With Ben Fino-Radin, Preservation Expert (Part 2)

Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. He is the Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections.  He has also worked with the Whitney Museum, Cory Arcangel, JODI, Rhizome just to name a few.

We are thrilled that Ben has joined us as an Advisor and is working with us on a key part of the Niio platform – – digital preservation.

Ben in his natural habitat.

What do you believe are the biggest misconceptions about digital / moving image art and what would you like people to understand?

The idea that digital means immaterial. So often I hear collectors and institutions describe digital artworks as being fundamentally ephemeral and immaterial. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Take for instance Andrew Blum’s book Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet – Blum travels around the world tracing and documenting the immense and complex physical infrastructure of the internet. An earlier example of this kind of hacker tourism / documentation is Neal Stephenson’s 1996 piece for Wired Mother Earth Mother Board, where Stephenson documents the gritty blood, sweat, and tears involved in laying a transcontinental fiber optic cable.

This same brutally physical reality exists when considering the storage of digital files. Let’s say you had 100 reels of 35mm film prints, and you digitized and digitally restored them. Are these now immaterial?  You’ve now created roughly 206 TB of data. If you were going to stored these on LTO 6 tapes, they would take up 4,684 cubic feet, and would weigh a total of 37 Lbs (16.7) kg. If you stacked the tapes, they would be almost 6 feet tall. Is that immaterial? Absolutely not. Granted, the amount of physical space in the real world that a digital bit requires is very small – but it is still very much physical.

Do you see a time when digital art / time-based media is considered mainstream?

It is. I think we can all agree that MoMA is mainstream, no? The atrium at MoMA is most often the first gallery that visitors see when coming to the museum. Now, consider the kind of artworks that have been shown in this atrium – the most prominent space in the museum – in the last five years. I would estimate that 75% of the work has been at least partially time-based media.

How do you define mainstream? Will media art be mainstream when museums are selling Ryan Trecartin coffee mugs in museum gift shops? Is that something we even want?

What do you think about all the hype surrounding VR?  Do you think it’s a tool that artists and museums will eventually embrace?  

Artists of course started playing around with the various new VR platforms as soon as they could get their hands on them, and I think that the response on the part of museums has been rather rapid.  MoMA in fact has been including VR in its curatorial programming, and it is only logical to suppose that it is just a matter of time before a VR work is collected.

Personally I approach anything that is hyped as hard as VR with a great deal of skepticism, but having tried various examples, it is absolutely an incredibly rich area for artistic exploration. The sensation is rather astounding. 

As an artist yourself, what drew you to “digital” vs. a more traditional medium?  

I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to take things apart, figure out how they work, put them back together (or not), and make something from the parts. I think that anyone with this predisposition is naturally attracted to working with computers, and time-based media in general.

Many of the professors I met in art school had been heavily involved in the upstate New York video art scene of the 60s and 70s – and they had built our studios accordingly. I became very immersed in real-time video synthesis and processing – hacking, circuit bending, custom electronics, etc. I was lucky enough to have spent time at the Experimental Television Center in the early 2000s, before it’s closure in 2011. Throughout this time I was still drawing, making sculpture, prints, painting, everything really. I was fortunate to have a very interdisciplinary art school experience.

Niio Co-Founder in front of a work by Cory Arcangel in the Lisson Booth @ Frieze NYC.
Niio Co-Founder, Rob Anders, in front of a work by Cory Arcangel in the Lisson Gallery Booth @ Frieze NYC.

What was the first piece of digital art you remember experiencing?

Either Paper Rad or Cory Arcangel

Who is doing really cutting edge work?

Tabor Robak continues to amaze

If you could own one piece of art, what would it be?

Any Ed Ruscha

Favorite museum (aside from MOMA)?

The New Museum is always a favorite for a weekend afternoon.

Favorite city for exploring art?

New York, naturally

 

Read Part 1 of our interview with Ben.

BenFinoImageDiskStoragePhoto

About Ben Fino-Radin

Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. He is the Associate Media Conservator at the world-renowned Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections.

Prior to MoMA, Ben worked as a Digital Conservator at Rhizome at the New Museum where he structured preservation and collecting practices for collections management, documentation, and preservation of born-digital works of art. As an Adjunct professor at NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program, Ben taught a course on Digital Literacy designed to equip first year graduate students with fundamental technical skills for careers in digital archives as well as Handling Complex Media, a course designed to give second year graduate students practical skills for the identification, risk assessment, preservation and treatment of creative works that employ complex and inherently unstable digital materials.

Research interests include: digital preservation, digital cultural heritage, web based creative communities, computer history, information architecture, metadata and animated gifs.

A Conversation With Kelani Nichole of Brooklyn’s TRANSFER Gallery (Part 1)

Kelani Nichole, Founder/Director of Brooklyn based TRANSFER Gallery, started the exhibition space nearly four years ago in order to support and cultivate artists with computer-based practices through solo exhibitions, events and international art fairs.

She’s passionate about nurturing and growing the digital art market via exposure and education and has taken the time to share some of her insights, challenges and hopes for this fascinating medium.  Get to know Kelani. 

Kelani Nichole
Kelani Nichole, Founder/Curator, TRANSFER Gallery

What led to your interest in digital art, specifically computer-based work?

I studied Art History at university and in 2010  joined a curatorial collective in Philadelphia.  As I planned my first exhibition it seemed natural to engage with studios practicing online.  I gravitated toward the avant garde online movement loosely referred to as ‘net art’ and I was hooked.

Over the years, my curatorial specialty has developed along with these studios and I am happy to have a hand in evolving the means of support for artists working with distributed online art practices.

What inspired you to open a physical gallery space dedicated exclusively to digital art?

Opening the gallery was an experiment – I wanted to continue working with the studios I supported in my early curatorial projects.  An article from Claire Bishop in Artforum late in 2012 titled ‘The Digital Divide’ was influential in my resolve to further develop these works through exhibition format in the gallery.

The idea was to focus on solo exhibitions featuring new, challenging work coming from the studio that didn’t have another venue to be realized. The roster of artists was strong right out of the gate and the market came knocking on our door.  

What do you believe are the biggest misconceptions about digital art and what would you like people to understand?

The biggest misconception with ‘digital art’ is that it’s any different than other means of contemporary artmaking. I’m keen to stop using the word ‘digital’ to talk about these practices.  One of the biggest challenges to the appreciation of these emerging formats is our lack of vocabulary to discuss these practices and their implications on the institutions of the artworld.  The practices I support are contemporary art practices that have a fundamentally computer-based process – the works that come from the studios are an even split of moving images/software pieces and physical objects.  

The genres of practice are moving image, photography, sculpture, performance, time-based media, glitch, procedural animation, algorithmic art, installation with a heavy conceptual slant present in my program. I’m specifically interested in Internet aesthetic, distributed art objects, the public space of the Internet, and emerging display technologies such as VR/AR and high-definition 4K formats.  I am working to build a new market for animated GIF artworks, distributed public artworks and application based artworks.

How or where do you see the medium of digital art in 5 years?  Do you see a time when digital art is considered mainstream?

Yes. I believe it is nearly there.  However, there is a grey area in the visual landscape we live in, a world flooded with creators and curators. I believe the art world is still struggling to address these practices and figure out meaningful ways to adapt and contextualize the explosion of creative authorship in our contemporary moment within the canon of art history.

What do you think about all the hype surrounding VR?  Do you think it’s a tool that artists will widely embrace?

Yes. Absolutely.  If you haven’t used HTC Vive go do it immediately.  Go, and you won’t even ask that question anymore. Our world is rapidly virtualizing and I hope artists will deeply engage with VR to help ensure this technology develops with criticality and humanness.  I actively support VR/AR practices and believe this is the future for much of our human experience.

Carla Gannis
‘Garden of Emoji Delight’ by Carla Gannis displayed via Niio.

A Conversation With Ben Fino-Radin, Preservation Expert (Part 1)

PART 1

Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. Currently, he is the Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections.  He has also worked with the Whitney Museum, Cory Arcangel, JODI, Rhizome just to name a few.

We are thrilled that Ben has joined us as an Advisor and is working with us on a key part of  the Niio platform – – digital preservation. 

Ben Fino-Radin. Photo by @textfiles
Ben Fino-Radin. Photo by @textfiles.

What led to your interest in digital preservation?

Early in my graduate work, I learned about digital preservation. Until that time, I had never stopped to consider who was ensuring that contemporary (read: digital) cultural heritage would be around in 100 years.  At that moment,  it struck me as such an incredibly fascinating problem and I knew that I wanted to see how I could contribute to answering some of those questions.

Why do you think digital preservation is so important for artists, collectors and museums?

You cannot simply put something digital on a shelf and expect it to be readable in ten years. Lack of active and systematic stewardship equates to benign neglect.

Artists working with digital materials must actively consider preservation or run the risk of their work being inaccessible some day in the future when an interested collector comes knocking.

For museums or collectors it is a matter of responsibility both to the cultural record, and to one’s own financial investment. If you hold digital materials in your collection and you are not thinking carefully about digital preservation, the odds really are stacked against you.

What is the biggest misconception people have about digital preservation and what would you like for them to understand?

Many people think that if they are just one person or a small institution, that there is nothing they can do because digital preservation is expensive and complicated. While ensuring proper care and preservation of your important digital assets certainly isn’t free, there are many approaches one can take for varying levels of expertise and budget.

Facilitating digital preservation on  small budget, with limited expertise is just a matter of good systems design. Work with someone who  has experience devising actual solutions, and develop an immediate plan, and a five year plan for the preservation of your materials.

How do you think a platform like Niio will affect the medium of digital art  and its multiple entities (artists, galleries, museums, curators)?

I think that Niio has a huge potential to offer to artists, galleries, and museums, in that it offers a turnkey solution for collections management, digital preservation, display, editioning, and distribution. I can confidently say that no other platform can even come close to making that claim.

Read Part 2 of our interview with Ben.

Ben in his natural habitat.

About Ben Fino-Radin

Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. He is the Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections.

Prior to MoMA, Ben worked as a Digital Conservator at Rhizome at the New Museum where he structured preservation and collecting practices for collections management, documentation, and preservation of born-digital works of art. As an Adjunct professor at NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program, Ben taught a course on Digital Literacy designed to equip first year graduate students with fundamental technical skills for careers in digital archives as well as Handling Complex Media, a course designed to give second year graduate students practical skills for the identification, risk assessment, preservation and treatment of creative works that employ complex and inherently unstable digital materials.

Research interests include: digital preservation, digital cultural heritage, web based creative communities, computer history, information architecture, metadata and animated gifs.

NYC TRANSFER Gallery + Niio @ Minnesota Street Project (SF)

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Summer in the City

We are big fans of Brooklyn based TRANSFER. Gallery founder/director Kelani Nichole, started the exhibition space nearly four years ago in order to support and and cultivate artists with computer-based practices through solo exhibitions, events and international art fairs.

This summer, Kelani and TRANSFER have migrated west, installing an outpost inside San Francisco’s brand new, highly anticipated, Minnesota Street Project.

TRANSFER DOWNLOAD @ Minnesota Street Outpost

The TRANSFER Download

Installed as a series of hyperlinked solo exhibitions,  ‘TRANSFER Download’ invites artists to present custom three-channel solo presentations of moving image. Each work is accessible via a playlist, creating a layered salon-style exhibition format first tested during Art Basel Miami in 2014. Selecting an artwork from the control screen changes over the entire installation space to feature a single work – formats include time-based narrative, generative 3D video, and looped moving images. 

TRANSFER + Niio

We’re thrilled to be collaborating with Kelani and TRANSFER during their debut at Minnesota Street. Niio, via its cloud platform + video player (4K/60fps) + remote control app,  will power a dedicated 4K 65″ single-channel screen featuring a collection of artworks from the gallery’s inventory which will give collectors an opportunity to take the Niio technology for a test drive while discovering new works of art.

Garden of Emoji Delights by Carla Gannis
Photo Credit: Kelani Nichole Instagram: “New toy from @niioart – upload on website, watch in 4K ??? @carlagannis ‘The Garden of Emoji Delights’ looks stunning ?”.

 Featured Artists Include:

Claudia Hart – ‘Empire’
Mary Ann Strandell – ‘Tromploi’
Rosa Menkman – ‘DCT’: Syphoning’
Phillip David Sterns – ‘Polar Visions 002’
Rick Silva – ‘Vibes Accelerationist’
Rollin Leonard – ‘Spinning Pinwheel of Death’
Laturbo Avedon – ‘Pardon Our Dust’

Check Out the Show:

July 30th – September 8th, 2016 in San Francisco

Minnesota Street Project
1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA
Open Tuesday – Saturday from 11am-6PM and by Invitation

Learn more about the Minnesota Street Project.

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Niio @ Unpainted Art Fair ’16 (Munich, Germany)

Earlier this year, Niio Co-Founder Oren Moshe had an opportunity to visit and participate in UNPAINTED lab 3.0 in Munich, Germany, a unique art fair featuring 40 international digital artist organized by artistic director Annette Doms in collaboration with New York curator Nate Hitchcock,  Co-Founder of East Hampton Shed and former Co-Curator of Rhizome (NY).

Oren had the opportunity to join colleagues Chris Fitzpatrick (Director Kunstverein Munich), Nate Hitchcock (Co-Curator, UNPAINTED, New York), Ioannis Christoforakos (Collector, Athens) & VT ArtSalon (Taiwan) on the stage for a panel discussion about “The Impact of Digital Media on Our Real World.” 

Fair participants included international curators and thought leaders, art collectors, gallerists, and artists, as well as an interdisciplinary team, who understand the challenges of these new art forms. It’s fair to say that all were “united by a love of art, innovation and the changing times”. 

Some personal snaps from the weekend:

Unpainted 5
Susanne Rottenbacher

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