Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random discussion, the first of a series with the most significant digital curators of the last 30 years. We're going to be getting their perspective and the museum perspective on collecting value and today's emerging technologies. I'm Peter Bauman or Monk Antony, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random.
And today, I'm so fortunate to be joined by Douglas Dodds, the longtime Senior Digital Curator at the V&A. Douglas Dodds is an independent curator currently and researcher. But previously, he was a senior curator in the Word and Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He was responsible for developing the department's digital art collections, which range from early computer art to recent-born digital works.
The V&A now holds one of the world's largest public collections of computational art. Dodds has been responsible for several V&A exhibitions and displays, including Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers, Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life, Digital Pioneers, and The Book and Beyond. So Douglas is this seminal figure in the collection and preservation of digital art over the last 30 years. And I'm so lucky to get to talk to him.
So let's get started. Maybe we can just start with the challenges for museums of collecting digital art. And what are some of those just broader challenges? Is it just the diversity of all the materiality? Is it budget? What are some of the main concerns that museums are thinking about? Basically, as I'm sure you understand, there are many challenges for museums.
There always have been, and the challenge is just It's changed from one generation to the next. But when I started trying to build up a digital art collection, it was 20 or 30 years ago, frankly, when I first started thinking about it. And in some ways it was a lot simpler then because there wasn't so much digital art around for a start. And equally, there wasn't that much interest in it in the wider population.
So it was a bit of a blank field, an unknown, if you like, which in some ways made it difficult, but in other ways made it a lot easier because there were a few other people doing what I was trying to do at the time. Nowadays, as I say, there's a massive amount of digital material out there, whether you call it digital art or just digital culture more broadly. But it ranges, I suppose, from essentially amateur work to what we would both recognize as being highly sophisticated, culturally rich, aesthetically highly developed, complex digital objects. You're looking at a very broad range of things which can be quite simple to understand and to collect, to being very difficult to understand, very difficult, if not impossible, to collect in the traditional sense. Those are the challenges, really, I think, that are out there. How do you identify worthwhile artworks? How do you acquire them? If you need to you acquire them at all? How do you preserve them? How do you make them available for present and future generations? These are not simple topics, and they vary so much from object to object, from artwork to artwork, that it's not always possible to come up with a simple set of solutions to it.
That's, I suppose, the fundamental challenge is dealing with a very broad range of material with a very broad range of requirements, some of which are simple and some of which are far from simple. One of the things that's always struck me about digital art, generally, is that the artists tend to be at the leading edge of things. They're always experimenting with new software, new hardware. They've moved on from last week's stuff, never mind last year or stuff they were doing in the last decade. And by definition, that tends to be slightly flaky, slightly problematic. The software is a bit unknown, a bit unstable.
It's here today, it's gone tomorrow. So do you imagine that an institution can collect that and maintain it when it barely works? Sometimes today is a big question, really. A big demand.
Yeah, you mentioned a lot of the topics that I wanted to talk about today or maybe dig deeper into. One thing that maybe we can talk about first is identifying objects that you want collect or sourcing objects. I know you just got finished saying that it's difficult to talk about, broadly speaking. But can you just talk about the process of identifying what exactly it is that the museum or you as a curator want to collect? Where do you begin? Well, I suppose in broad terms, in the abstract, as it were, a museum like the one I worked in, the V&A, is really trying to build up a collection of objects that speak to each other in some way, or tell stories, or demonstrate some innovation, or demonstrate some particularly important movement, and to be able to do it not just now, but continue to be able to do it and reuse it in the future.
When I was looking at acquiring particular digital objects or perhaps physical objects that were created digitally. I was thinking, how does this fit with what we've got already? Is it something that is novel in some way and present It represents some new technique or innovation that people are still going to want to know about in the future? Does it have some aesthetic aspect to it that makes it highly exhibitable? There's so many factors like that that you want to take into account. But fundamentally is, does it actually fit? Does it offer a viable prospect of being able to be shown in the future as well as now? If not, then we shouldn't be acquiring it. There are other ways in which you can show things or make things available to people that doesn't necessarily require you to retain them forever.
That's true of other media as well as digital art. If you think of theater and performance, you don't necessarily capture a theater performance forever. You might video it, you document it in some way, but you don't actually retain it forever. There are different strategies for different types of material.
Although the default case historically in a museum would be to try and collect something and put it on display, that's not necessarily appropriate for a lot of the digital works that are being created today. You need to be able to reference them, but you don't necessarily physically need to have them or even have them stored on a hard disk somewhere in the premises. Is the approach ever artist first? You start with the artist? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, one would always have a mental hit list, if you like, a wishlist of artists that you felt ought to be represented in some way in a a major public collection.
Certainly all the time when I was doing this at the V&A, I was essentially trying to plug gaps in our collection, knowing that we were particularly strong in some areas and much weaker in others, perhaps geographically, perhaps chronologically. I would also be constantly adding to that wishlist as well as managing to acquire some things along the way. But it's a constant evolution. It's not the status the classic process. I do want to get back to the process of collecting, but this can be a little detour.
You said that you were plugging gaps with the collection. Can you talk about what your goals were, what you aim to achieve? Then also at the end of your time there, What was unique about the collection? Well, to start with, the V&A has actually been collecting digitally created works from as long ago as 1969. It was very early in that game, if you like.
Perhaps not particularly consciously, but there was this iconic exhibition, cybernetic serendipity, that took place in 1968. The museum amazingly collected a series of prints that were created in conjunction with that exhibition. Those were probably the first digitally created artworks to go into the V&A collection. A couple of things were added over the next decade or so, individual works by Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnar in particular. But in no sense was the museum attempting to create a digital collection in the way that we would recognize it now.
They just happened to come into the collection alongside many, many other things. The Vera Molnars, for example, were a part of a big portfolio. So at that time, the museum wasn't focusing on this, really.
It's only a much more modern period in recent times that that happened, and I was very much involved in that. I started working at V&A in 1990. For 10 years, I actually worked in the V&A's National Art Library, building up digital collections there, among other things. I've always worked with digital things. And it struck me that really a major institution interested in the history of art and design, generally, really needed to tackle digital things as well as physical things.
I started almost as a sideline to begin to do that and Coincidentally, the library merged with the Prints, Draws, and Paintings Department. I found myself in this much bigger group of curators, and essentially I needed a specialism, and my specialism was digital. Even though my day job was doing other things most of the time, I would often get to meet people or go off to conferences and things and suddenly get interested in these things off the side that weren't really the reason why I was there and begin to build up the collection. Yeah, it was very consciously done, but a bit under the radar at the time because most people in the museum didn't really regard digital as an appropriate format for a high really prestigious organization like the V&A to be involved with. Yeah, that was a really good overview.
That's really interesting of how museums maybe make those changes. It does seem like it's often just individuals that are spurring the change. We thank you. It can't just be a change from a small group of people.
By the time you left, what was unique about the collection? What do you think you have maybe achieved with the collection? Well, obviously, there have been many people involved with it over the period, not just me. The museum, for instance, has also been collecting physical representations of the digital era, Macintosh computers, Sony walkmans, iPhone, computer games, all sorts of things. But we're talking specifically about digital art, so I'll focus more on that. I suppose the V&A's digital art collection is It is unique in the sense that there are many individually unique objects in it that can't be reproduced. It might be a plotter drawing or a file that only exists in one manifestation. So it's unique in that sense.
But I think it's also unique in the broad scope of it, which is attempts to cover many countries, many artists in varying levels of detail. So the geographical spread of the collection is probably stronger than many. There are other collections in public institutions around the world which are major collections.
In Bremen, for example, there's a fantastic collection of similar early work. There's places like ZKM that have a much more specialist knowledge of, for instance, digital preservation. They're able to do things that are more broadly-based organization like the V&A or the Tate or whoever, just can't really do in that depth. The V&A's collection is one of the few that has a very large range of early computer-generated artworks. Its main strength still, I think, is in that early period, largely because very few people were interested in that when I started acquiring it for the V&A.
There was There's so much competition, really, for it. Yeah. Maybe we can get back to the track of the acquisition process and identifying. But then also, once you've identified a piece, then you actually have to find it or source it. Can you talk about that next step, or is that the next step? But once you've identified, this is what I want to collect, then how do you actually go about finding it and sourcing it? I suppose the step before that is just becoming more familiar with the broad range of the digital art world out there, the whole history of it, the whole ecosystem, if you like, that exists or existed in the past to create the works.
Now, what you can't just do is to rock up in front of some artist and say, Please, can I have all your artworks? It doesn't really work like that. You need to have a good understanding of what's going on, what went on before, how this fits in a bigger scheme of things. I spent quite a lot of time doing that, getting to know people, becoming familiar with some of the organizations, spending time looking at artworks, going to exhibitions, etc, visiting artists studios. With all that as a context, then it becomes easier to identify particular artists, particular works, particular movements, if you like, but would be of interest. If not now, then at some future date in some future project. I spent a lot of doing that, quite often stepping outside of my day job to go and visit someone or talk to somebody or go to an exhibition that happened to be on in the city that I was in at the time and parked it for future reference and then went back to it.
Maybe when I got back to the office, started to pursue it. That's essentially how it works, but that's no different to people collecting digital artworks now, I hope. You need to understand what you're after in a broader context.
Otherwise, you're just collecting things at random, which maybe you like. I've always collected things I like as well as things that have some cultural wider significance. But essentially, you need to understand the context a bit more. Yeah.
Then once you've identified what to collect, then how do you actually source it and find it? Or what's the next step after identifying what to collect? Yeah. Well, once you've identified something and you know you want to acquire, for example, a good example of a particular artist's work. Ideally, you get to know the artist or depending on how well known they are, how successful they are, you might be working with a dealer as well, an art gallery, an agent. But ideally, and certainly in the early days when most artists had no real representation, most digital artists had no real representation, you would work directly with the artist and perhaps identify specific examples of their work that would be good representation of what they were doing or had done in the past. Then you'd begin to formulate a proposal to them, but also internally to the museum, to persuade the museum that it was appropriate to obtain an example of their work. Within the museum, certainly the museum I worked in, there It was a very formal system for doing that.
That was intentional. It stops people from doing things which they might regret sooner or later. It also takes a bit of pressure off the curator because the curator can tell the artist that, I've got to go through this process. I've got to get permission. I can't just say yes, which is generally true.
You've got to persuade your superiors in the organization that it's the appropriate for you to go down this path and acquire this office work. So you would prepare a proposal, you would identify various issues like conservation requirements, storage requirements, things like that, practical things like that. Explain the context, explain, if you like, the art historical significance of the work or the design historical significance of the work, and then try and reach agreement with your colleagues that it was something to go with. Depending on the scale of the acquisition and the complexity of it, that might be a relatively light touch process, but it's still a process.
If it's something much more complicated, perhaps more expensive, perhaps it requires some ficky digital preservation aspect to it, perhaps needs particular hardware, then you would need to go through more hoops to get agreement, generally within the institution before you could go ahead. What you're describing, is that the formal acquisition process? That's the first step in it. That's getting the approval to go ahead. Maybe that's getting your immediate team all on board. Yeah, but there might be a finance... Well, there is a resource aspect to it, you see, for a museum.
The resources, it's not just whether or not you're paying for the object, it's the resources implied in doing all the things with it after you've acquired it, which is a significant commitment, in some cases, huge commitment. So you don't do that lightly. You're conscious that you're storing up trouble for the future if you don't think that through at the point when you're thinking about acquiring it. But once you've got that agreement and once everybody's on board with it, then you get into the next phase, which is to physically acquire it or digitally acquire it, I suppose, in some context. Give it a formal museum acquisition number It exists as a museum object, and then catalog it and so on and so forth.
Before you actually formally acquire it, what are the other sourcing you might do? You might visit an artist. Do you work with galleries or do you work with large individual collectors? Of course, you have, and I do want to talk about Patric Prince at some point. Maybe what are some other ways besides working directly with an artist that you source work? It varies a lot.
We work with specific galleries, too. There are some specialist digital art galleries that have existed for a very long time, long before the current interest in NFTs and blockchain and so on, and have an accumulated knowledge of the subject, and they have very good contacts with the artists themselves. So a digital art museum, DAM for instance, down in Berlin, was one that I certainly work with quite a bit, bitforms in New York for more contemporary pieces, although there are other galleries elsewhere, but sometimes they tend to be more generalist galleries. It just happen to have digital artists on their books.
But typically it would be a much more specialist gallery who understands the requirements much better. Typically, if you're working with a gallery, there might be some cost involved. You're not getting things for free necessarily. You're probably having to make a case internally for the money to buy the artwork from the gallery rather than direct from the artist. Sometimes you find there are much more complex negotiations around these things. Occasionally, you might find that an artist, or gallery, or an artist will offer you work in addition to the work that you buy from them.
Depending on the artist and the work, obviously, that might be interesting or it might not. It's all done on a case-by-case basis. But equally, you Patric Prince. Sometimes a collector might offer to donate works to the museum, to the institution. And that's often very attractive proposition as well. But it all needs to be considered carefully. Are these artworks genuinely of interest to the institution, to the museum? Why is the collector offering them to the museum? What's the bigger picture here? You really need to think that through.
In the early years, when I started to build up the historic collections, as I say, there wasn't a great deal of interest elsewhere. So Patric Prince, for example, I know that she was hoping to place her collection for altruistic reasons in an institution, probably somewhere in North America, because she was based in California. And at that time, I'm told that some of those institutions essentially wanted to cherry-pick the collection and just have some works and not others. Whereas for me, the interest in her collection was the whole collection, the context of it, how everything related to everything else in the collection, the documentation that came with it, the letters between her and the artist, the library that she built up, the ephemeral that she built up.
All this was equally important, not just the polished, finished artwork that she also collected. In the case of Patric, I spent a lot of time getting to know her. I happened to be in California quite often at the time anyway.
So I'm going to visit her while I was doing something else, built up a relationship with her. And eventually she offered to donate her entire collection of something like 250 artworks to the museum, along with her library, her archive, her ephemeral. So suddenly the V&A had this very significant, very important collection of early digital works. It's quite complicated in detail, that transaction, but that was one of several major acquisitions in the early 2000s.
It really established the V&A as a center for digital art, specifically for early computer art. We're still very grateful to Patric for that. In fact, the museum put on a small display about her quite recently in one of her galleries upstairs the museum. It was showing some of the ephemeral, not just the big works that everybody knows already from her collection.
Yeah, I got to see the little exhibition earlier this year. I love to go back to Patric maybe a little later and just to talk about maybe her impact. Yeah, that's really interesting about how you actually acquired it in the first place. Yeah, that it's about building a relationship. It seems like it was a process that took years.
Yeah, several years, certainly. That brings up a couple of different things in the acquisition process, donations versus actually purchasing a piece. Before we maybe get into that formal final acquisition process, how do museums think about donations? From Their point of view, obviously, it's very attractive, like you said, to get a donation, especially from such a prestigious collection like Patric Prince's. Once the piece is actually in the collection, does the museum think about that distinction any longer in terms of how it was acquired exactly? Not particularly. I mean, a purchase and a donation, they're just different forms of acquisition.
At the end of the day, the museum still has the object. They might have had to pay something for it initially upfront, or they might have been given it for free. But essentially, once they've acquired it, they've got it. There are a few constraints that are sometimes applied, but But the only major one I can think of is you essentially always acknowledge the donor in any future things that you do with the artwork.
So the catalog record that you'll see online will typically say donated by. If you ever display it, the label will say donated by, ideally. Similarly, if you're using money from an external body, somebody who's perhaps helped to buy something, you would also acknowledge that on their labels and on the online records and things. But beyond that, I don't think it really makes a great deal of difference whether you paid money for it or not. It's just good to have it.
Is there any indication or presumption of the prestige of the piece that because the museum bothered to pay for it or maybe bothered to seek it out in a more direct way, that it's more important? Is there any sense like Well, for the museum, perhaps not. I always like to say that the V&A collects things which tell stories, which demonstrate something to the audience, whoever the audience is, multiple audiences. The financial value of the object is very much secondary to that, although obviously you have to take it into account in some circumstances. Security, for example. But the value of it is not in what you paid for it.
For the artist, though, it's not uncommon for an artist to think that it would be more prestigious for an institution to pay money to them for their work. That's not unreasonable, is it? Artists need to make a living. Everybody understands that.
But sometimes the economics of this are rather more complicated than just a straightforward transaction. It's often in the interests of the artist and the artist's dealer, gallerist, however as we call them, to have their work in major public collections. You're conscious that as a curator, when you're having a conversation with an artist or their representative about something like that, it's not just them necessarily being altruistic and wanting to give their work to the museum.
It appears on the artist's CV that they're in this public collection, so they get a benefit from it. But equally, if you're a collector and you're donating things to an institution, quite often you get a benefit from it. There might be a tax incentive, for example, for a collector to donate something to a museum. These things are loaded. You just need to understand that while you're having the conversation. If you like, put it to one side, because what you're really interested in is the significance of the work, the importance of the work, the value of the work to the collection rather than its financial value.
As a curator, that's the approach you should generally take in whether or not to accept something. I'd like to talk more about value. I guess the reason I'm asking about acquisitions, purchases versus donations, is because I think some people in the NFT space think that if a museum acquires a work through a donation, that it somehow maybe makes it less legitimate or it's viewed less favorably as if a museum purchase the work.
But it seems like you're saying that that isn't maybe as big of a distinction as people are making, or maybe is it? Well, it isn't for the museum, I would say, whereas perhaps individual artists have totally different perspectives on this. On the one hand, you can take the view that as an artist, I need to promote my work. I need to make my work accessible so people can find it. One of the ways of making it accessible is to have in publicly visible places rather than just private collections. So there's that benefit in having it in a public institution, whether or not they pay for it.
Yes, certainly. But there's no legitimacy question in terms of the acquisition of a purchase versus a donation. It's not like a donation is an illegitimate acquisition somehow.
No, not at all. I wouldn't see I think that's what I would like to make that personally. If you flip the question, really, I suppose. In my experience, very few museums have the financial resources to spend significant amounts of money on new and emerging artists.
It just not there. By and large, certainly in Britain, probably in Europe, arguably in North America, too. It's very hard for them to identify the sources that would be needed to pay for some of the high value, born digital of works that are NFTs, certainly at the peak of the market. That's just out of the question for most institutions, and it just wouldn't happen, whereas it might happen for me. No, it would rarely happen in my experience that museums would be able to persuade their authorities to let them spend money in that way. That's the challenge for museums there, I think, as public collectors.
Right. Yeah I guess budget, especially for a museum like the V&A that wouldn't necessarily have an inherent digital focus. No. You mentioned value, and I think it's really interesting.
How do museums think about the value of a work? You stress that it isn't financial as a curator and as a museum. How do you think about the value of the work? Well, the value of it often appears in different ways rather than just the financial value. It's the uniqueness of it, it's the significance of it in terms of its relationship to other artworks, other artists.
Is it the first of something? Is it the best of something? Is it the most likely to survive of something? Those are the things which are really important to public institutions, trying to acquire things and make them available and make them survive, have some hope of surviving. And being viewed by people in the future. It's not how much you paid for it. It's not how much somebody else paid for it necessarily that matters.
In fact, a lot of museums actively resist valuing their collections for that reason, not just digital works, but work more broadly. You have to, for certain purposes, for insurance, perhaps, or if you're lending to another organization, you sometimes have to an actual value on an object, but it's often very notion. It's not a real value, particularly if it's a unique object which you can't replace. The money is incidental. It just allows you to go out and buy something else, but you can't buy the same thing again if it's unique.
Once you've become familiar with the space and the context and you've identified what to collect and you've sourced it, and maybe you've gotten that initial green light, can you talk about maybe the final step in the acquisition process? As part of the acquisition process, what you would also do, particularly with a born digital object, is to have a discussion with the artist about their expectations, their requirements of the object. Well, I'll give you a specific example, Casey Reas. We acquired a work by Casey Reas in the early 2010s from his Process series, and it was essentially a digital find. It didn't come with the hardware. It was was relatively straightforward to acquire the object, the piece.
But there was also the question of what the artist would expect in terms of displaying it. We were able to have that conversation with Casey, and he was able to say, Well, actually, so long as it's shown on a 46-inch screen, which is what it's designed for, I don't mind what the actual monitor is. I don't mind what the hardware is behind it that's playing it, so long as that's the finished product and it's on that screen, which is great because it liberates you as an organization. You don't have to maintain a particular piece of hardware over time and have a backup piece of hardware of the same make. Those are the conversations that you have. In fact, that piece by Casey has been running ever since on display in public in the day of day, in pretty much the same place more than a decade.
But that was because we consciously obviously chose a particular piece that we knew would have fewer issues than perhaps another piece we could have collected by him or somebody equivalent to him that would have had specific requirements. In a way, it becomes self-selecting because you go down one route rather than the other, knowing that that's more likely to work in a gallery over time. Those are the kinds of discussions you would have at some point in acquisition process.
But eventually, you physically own it, you have it in the collection, you would, as I started to say earlier, give it a formal museum number, an identifier, begin to build up a catalog record for it, a description of it, on the museum's database internally. If necessary, photograph it. If it's possible to photograph it or possibly video it in some cases now.
Perhaps there might be ephemeral that goes with it, instruction booklet that goes with it. You You need to decide what to do with all these things as well. You need to store it somewhere, physically and/or digitally, depending on the context of the object. That's always work in progress for digital things. They don't all conform to the same standard. You have to do different things for each object as it comes in.
Then over time, you should really, obviously, continue to monitor it for digital preservation purposes as It might be a flash file, for example, or something that becomes problematic over time. You bring up maybe the last two things or maybe two subsequent steps from ideation to acquisition. Then maybe the next step is something like display.
I'm wondering if you can maybe talk a second about just as a curator who's curated several large exhibitions, What are some of the major display or presentation considerations for you, especially that are unique to the digital? The first exhibition of digital art, I suppose, that I did in the V&A was back in 2009, when I showed selected works from Patric Prince's collection alongside another major archive that we'd acquired at much the same time, the Computer Arts Society. And counterintuitively, most Most of the works in that exhibition were actually not digital in their presentation. They were physical.
They were plotter drawings, photographs, prints, mainly, but not exclusively. What I also did at that time was to borrow in lots of digital animations, videos, and so on that provided context for the physical works on the walls in the gallery. So animation by people like Michael Noll or Lillian Schwartz or a whole range of artworks that at that time we couldn't physically acquire for the museum.
So it was a mixture of objects owned by the museum and objects borrowed, typically videos or whatever, borrowed and shown on, deliberately small loa of monitors to make them look of the period. More recently, it becomes difficult I want to think of how you're going to show something and when you're going to show something. At the point of acquisition, you're not necessarily sure when you're going to show it and how you're going to show it and what you're going to show it alongside. It varies tremendously.
I can think of examples where we showed a work by Ernest Edmonds on a very bespoke monitor in a new acquisitions gallery. But all the other works in the gallery weren't digital at all. That can affect how people perceive the object. It can look bright, for example. The screen might look bright when it's alongside works which are in a low light because they're quite light sensitive.
It just depends so much on the context in which you're trying to show them. Typically, though, what you're trying to do is to, as I keep saying, tell particular stories, probably multiple stories, show things in context with other things relate to them, show them in as good a light as you can. Nobody wants to show something bad, and it's quite easy to show digital things badly. As I know to my own cost, occasionally, you look at things afterwards and you think, Why did I do that? Or why didn't I think of that? But that happens to everybody. Screens have reflections, for example, which a lot of people don't take into account.
You walk into a gallery and you're looking at one thing, and the first thing you is the thing opposite being reflected back in it, which is not what you want. There are those practical things you need to think about. That's interesting what you're saying about the context of the digital or seeing the digital with that Ernest Edmonds piece.
Context is such a challenge with the digital because I know with the show that you're talking about, that 2009 show, I think it was Digital Pioneers, and it was showed alongside another show I think that was Danny Brown's decode. It seemed like that juxtaposition really allowed the show to shine. Maybe that contemporary part helped add context to even the pioneer part, maybe paradoxically somehow. Yeah, it was deliberate, obviously, to pair the two together, but not to show them right in among each other because that wouldn't have worked very well.
The digital pioneer show was essentially a historic show. The context, the history of the subject, whereas decode was about contemporary digital art and design, design mostly, I suppose. But to mix them up would have been very difficult to do.
There are these big landmark shows that attempt to do that, but they have varying levels of success, in my opinion. I think it made a lot of sense to separate them and have them work to, in a way, contextualize each other. I thought that was really interesting. Compliment each other, really. Right. If there's anything else you want to say about digital preservation or archiving, feel free. But then, yeah, very happy to move to Patric.
I don't think she's very well known, but her impact definitely is larger than her reputation. I wonder if you can talk more about her and how did her support and just her interest in this field impact its development? Well, Patric, was heavily involved in an organization called SIGGRAPH in the 1980s. She curated a show, which is a retrospective, even then, a retrospective in 1986 of digital art, going right the way back to the 1960s, 1950s even.
Again, it was trying to present that context for what was happening then, the moment, 1986, when she did it. She predates the V&A's Digital Pioneer show by many, many years. She was involved with a lot of the artists who were active at that time.
Her husband happened to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, JPL, and he essentially ran their computer graphics laboratory. So he was incredibly well connected in that world as well. Artists such as David Em. Went there, Patric knew David Em and many other people. And she acquired their works for her own personal collection. And ultimately gave them to the V&A.
She was obviously one of many people in that SIGGRAPH art world at the time who were all doing similar things to varying degrees. She just happens to be one who was very systematic about it, preserved everything, documented it, and ultimately passed it on. But I'm sure there are other collections still out there waiting to be discovered, similar, if not as comprehensive as hers was.
One of her legacies really is because she gave the collection to the V&A and the Computer Arts Society gave their collection to the V&A at much at the same time, it established it as a place where people could find early digital art. It encouraged a lot of artists who were still alive to think about their legacy and what they should do with their legacy, not necessarily giving it to the V&A, but perhaps putting it somewhere else. ZKM, for example, now has very good archive and collections of particular artist's work.
It's much more common place now than it was. That's part of her impact, I think, as well. She was quite a benefactor as well, right? Was she actively supporting artists as she was collecting? In the sense that she was buying their work, paying money for their work when most of them were hardly ever able to sell them.
There was a gallery in Los Angeles which she helped to co-famed as well. She was active in that scene as well. Some of those artists are still very grateful to her for acquiring their work because ultimately, he ended up in a museum collection. That's the benefit for them as well. But nowadays, I'm not sure what the equivalent of that would be now for people collecting digital artworks on blockchain, online, and what their legacy might be and how they might ultimately preserve that activity that they've been so passionate about for many years.
Maybe that's one thing we can wrap up with is the blockchain and digital preservation, like you mentioned. I know the V&A Maybe this was after you left, I'm not sure. I know that they did come out and say that they will not be collecting NFTs. As far as I understand, I don't know their precise reasoning, but it was something considered. It wasn't just like, No, that's bad.
We're not going to do it. They thought about it. They had discussions. There was meetings. It was a considered choice. It wasn't something flippant. I'm wondering, do you have any insight into that decision? How do How do you feel about NFTs and maybe their place in digital collecting and preservation? Obviously, I can't speak for the V&A anymore because I don't work there anymore.
I'm full of admiration for all the work that my successes are now doing in other ways. They putting on all sorts of events, activities, talks, etc. Not necessarily always acquiring things as we were saying earlier on. To some extent, I'm aware of the the complexities of collecting a new medium, which is effectively what NFTs are for an organization like the V&A, or it might be the Tate, or it might be some other big public institution with a lot of things to think about, not just in this area and being aware of the commitment that that entails long term.
They're having to think hard about, can we really justify doing this rather than doing something else? We have limited limited resources. We don't have the specialist people following this and watching every twist in turn and what the latest platform is to make the stuff available and so on. They just don't have that depth of knowledge and experience to be able to do it well, unlike perhaps another organization that might focus on that and be able to do it well, like yourselves, for example. That's the context, really, for organizations like that.
They can't do everything, and if they're going to do it, they need to do it in a way that's justifiable and sustainable, I suppose, is the thinking. But personally, I'm very interested in some of the artists who do work with NFTs. Typically, they also produce physical things. There's a physical output as well as a digital output. That physicality for me is often quite important, even though it's a digitally created route. Yeah.
Thank you so much. This was really interesting. I mean, I could keep talking for a lot longer, but I want to be respectful of your time. But yeah, I do feel like I understand a lot better a certain perspective that has been demystified a bit more. So thank you so much, Douglas. Pleasure, please. Okay. Take care.
Bye.
2024-10-06 22:50