Time: Keeping Digital Art Alive - Episode Artwork
Culture

Time: Keeping Digital Art Alive

In this episode of Immaterial, we explore the challenges of preserving time-based media art, focusing on the work of artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. Through their piece 'Every Shot, Every Episo...

Time: Keeping Digital Art Alive
Time: Keeping Digital Art Alive
Culture • 0:00 / 0:00

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 We should time back here.
spk_0 It's with every sound.
spk_0 What you're hearing right now is a clock that is hundreds of years old, being wound.
spk_0 Every week a collection technician walks through the meds galleries and checks up on clock
spk_0 like these to make sure that they're operating on time.
spk_0 Even though they're incredibly old, they still work.
spk_0 It's 350 year old clock.
spk_0 They may have stood in someone's living room ticking away centuries ago.
spk_0 And to this day, they're still ticking.
spk_0 In this episode of Immaterial, we're going to talk about a particular category of artworks in the
spk_0 Met that, like clocks, need to be kept working.
spk_0 Time-based media art.
spk_0 These are videos, films, sound art, and software-based pieces that unfold over time.
spk_0 All were made with technologies that are, for the most part, less than a hundred years old.
spk_0 And all have hardware that needs to work for people to truly experience the art.
spk_0 If these works of art aren't functioning, they become functionless as art.
spk_0 I'm Camille Dunci.
spk_0 From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this is Immaterial.
spk_0 We'll hear from artists who make some of these works,
spk_0 and the people responsible for keeping time-based art alive.
spk_0 To start off, I want to share a piece from the Time-Based Art Collection at the Met.
spk_0 It's a video work called Every Shot, Every Episode by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.
spk_0 The McCoy's piece is a perfect introduction to why these kinds of artworks are so challenging to preserve.
spk_0 But first, one of our producers had a question about time.
spk_0 I guess I'm guessing he's spent years working on this project.
spk_0 Every shot every episode.
spk_0 No one.
spk_0 I don't know what you're going to get that shit done.
spk_0 It was like, I don't know, it was like six to nine months of just grinding it out.
spk_0 I'm Jen McCoy, and I've been an artist for many years, and I work in collaboration with Kevin.
spk_0 I'm Kevin McCoy, I'm an artist based here in Brooklyn, and work collaboratively with my wife, Jennifer.
spk_0 And our work has taken lots of different forms, sculpture, video, software.
spk_0 We went to speak to the McCoy's at their Brooklyn studio to get a better sense of their work.
spk_0 It was truly a Brooklyn artist's dream.
spk_0 A warehouse converted to an art making space.
spk_0 When they were creating every shot every episode, the McCoy's were living through a transformative period of time-based media art.
spk_0 Technology was changing rapidly.
spk_0 And a major transition was underway moving from analog to digital technologies.
spk_0 This is in the 90s and the late 90s.
spk_0 The transition from analog to digital was happening all around us.
spk_0 And in that context, lots of discussions around the adequacy of the digital, that time film versus video battles.
spk_0 Video is terrible compared to film. Film has all these other properties or whatever.
spk_0 Times were changing, and the way that people consumed media was changing rapidly too.
spk_0 That left Kevin and Jen reflecting on how they consumed media growing up, how different things were back in the 70s.
spk_0 Kevin remembered an experience he had with a babysitter as a child.
spk_0 My sister swears at making this up, but I really don't think that I am.
spk_0 So Kevin had a babysitter back in the day that was really interested in Starsky and Hedge.
spk_0 A popular cop show from the 70s.
spk_0 And this was before VCRs even.
spk_0 So she used to annotate as she watched and make these cassettes.
spk_0 Audio cassette tapes.
spk_0 So you watch on TV, you're watching TV.
spk_0 And you've got a little cassette thing in a mic.
spk_0 And you're sitting there recording the audio in the show in the room.
spk_0 And then as it's happening, you describe this scene there at his apartment.
spk_0 And then happened to the new scene happens.
spk_0 They're in the car.
spk_0 There's a car chase.
spk_0 So she describes the picture.
spk_0 Simultaneous to the audio of the show.
spk_0 And then can listen back to it and kind of have an experience of the show without having a VCR.
spk_0 Just as an audio recorder.
spk_0 It's genius.
spk_0 And so this idea of thinking about a found repository or a found database like the entirety of the Starsky and Hedge season one seemed like it would be kind of funny and weird.
spk_0 And like let's test out those ideas.
spk_0 Thinking about all of these things, the transition from film to digital.
spk_0 And the way that we consume culture.
spk_0 Let them to an idea.
spk_0 Kevin and Jen would create a database of their own.
spk_0 One that used digital technologies to categorize every scene and image in Starsky and Hedge.
spk_0 The artwork has two key components.
spk_0 The data.
spk_0 And a way to display the data.
spk_0 If you look at the piece hanging on the wall, you'll see a huge array of video CDs or VCDs.
spk_0 The precursor to DVD and successor to the classic CD.
spk_0 At the time, VCDs were the way to go for burning and storing huge files.
spk_0 The McCoy's made 277 of these VCDs.
spk_0 And line them up side by side on three white floating shelves.
spk_0 Simple white spines of each jewel case reveal each VCDs descriptive title.
spk_0 In bold, black, all caps, sans-era font.
spk_0 Up close, you have all these category names.
spk_0 So we're looking at every car chase, every bomb, every money, every prostitute, every girlfriend, every leather jacket.
spk_0 And we're reshuffling a bunch of episodes from Starsky and Hedge to look at in this new way.
spk_0 The idea was that each time you would insert one of those VCDs, like say one titled every car chase.
spk_0 You would basically get a compilation of every single car chase in the series playing on the Tiny TV.
spk_0 That's the second and crucial component of the art piece.
spk_0 A still brief case, like the kind you'd see in old spy movies, is played open on the wall.
spk_0 A tiny screen is mounted in the case's upper compartment for viewing.
spk_0 And at the bottom of the briefcase, the McCoy's nestled, affordable clam shell VCD player.
spk_0 Production process for doing this was very arduous.
spk_0 It was okay, we have to digitize the episode.
spk_0 We have to isolate each shot.
spk_0 And then we have to create the database, ourselves in which we classify it.
spk_0 And then it's like we have to retrieve each of those individual files, put them all together, save that as a video file.
spk_0 After all of this work, they presented it to the public.
spk_0 We were showing it with our gallery, and they were at the Armory Art Fair.
spk_0 And then the first preview of the fair, it's like someone from the Met just came and they want to buy the piece.
spk_0 This was one of their first works, and they had interest from the Met.
spk_0 It was kind of a shock.
spk_0 So the work came into the Met's collection.
spk_0 But the technologies used to make the piece like video CDs quickly became outdated.
spk_0 I mean, the project was made with consumer electronics available at the time, and then the technology quickly outstripped it.
spk_0 I think for every artist, you don't know when you're working on it if it's an important project.
spk_0 You know.
spk_0 They hadn't thought about the longevity of the piece, or how it would survive for an extended period in a museum collection.
spk_0 Once artists like Jennifer and Kevin hand over their works to museums, this responsibility of keeping the piece alive, falls into the hands of the art conservators there.
spk_0 When its initial exhibition period ended, the piece went into storage until the next time a curator decided to exhibit the work.
spk_0 As with most time-based art, it was incredibly fragile.
spk_0 And technology evolved drastically in the years that it sat in storage.
spk_0 So we went to talk to one of the conservators responsible for keeping the piece alive, two decades after they first created it.
spk_0 On our way to his office, though, we ran into Nora Kennedy, the head of photograph conservation.
spk_0 She helped us understand the unique challenges of conserving time-based media work compared to the artworks museums like the Med have historically acquired.
spk_0 Nora has an easy example to help us understand.
spk_0 She goes into her office, grabs a post-it, holds it in front of us, and then...
spk_0 So, right.
spk_0 Rips it into pieces.
spk_0 You have a photograph that is torn in half. You can easily explain, I'm going to stick this back together again, and I'm going to make, you know, words joined up, invisible.
spk_0 If a photograph is ripped like this, or a sculpture shatters into pieces, you know what to do as a conservator.
spk_0 You figure out a way to stick the pieces back together.
spk_0 So that's a very physical thing that people can comprehend. You can throw examples of that.
spk_0 Time-based media is different. Breaking is much more abstract. A video file gets corrupted, or there's an issue running an artwork software.
spk_0 Or the format you produce the work on, like the VCDs and McCoy's use, goes extinct.
spk_0 Dealing with that is slightly more complicated.
spk_0 The Met currently has about 300 pieces of time-based media art.
spk_0 Reels of film, hard drives filled with gigabytes of digital videos, 5 channel multimedia installations, and more.
spk_0 The collection is still in its infancy. There will likely be lots more additions in years to come.
spk_0 For a long time, there were no conservators in the museum who could actually answer questions about how to care for works that covers such a wide spectrum.
spk_0 There were art conservators in adjacent specializations, like Nora in photographs conservation.
spk_0 But no full-time staff specialized in the technical side of time-based media works.
spk_0 That all changed when they hired conservator Jonathan Farberwitz.
spk_0 Hi.
spk_0 Hi.
spk_0
spk_0 Jonathan's career followed a slightly less conventional path than most museum conservators.
spk_0 And that strange career path almost perfectly mirror the evolution time-based media was undergoing.
spk_0 It started when he was in college as a film student.
spk_0 I did my undergrad at a time where
spk_0 I saw you Lloyd film, analog video, digital video.
spk_0 Those were all viable formats for production and distribution.
spk_0 The year was 2004.
spk_0 At the time, film was in the midst of a format war.
spk_0 It was a very weird transitional time where digital video had just come on the scene.
spk_0 And you had all of these formats.
spk_0 Digital video was becoming increasingly popular and threatened to relegate film to the past.
spk_0 Jonathan had a job on campus in the film department.
spk_0 He was responsible for transferring tapes and film from one format to another.
spk_0 Film to Umatic, Umatic to VHS, VHS to digital beta cam.
spk_0 I felt like at the time I have to learn all of these formats because if I'm going to be a filmmaker,
spk_0 I have to know about all the technical characteristics of these formats to make the right choices about how I might shoot my movie.
spk_0 Jonathan eventually graduated into a world that had become increasingly digital.
spk_0 He worked a series of odd jobs in film and TV.
spk_0 He worked as a production assistant.
spk_0 Mostly running around New York, but jumping in taxis, taking tapes to places.
spk_0 He worked on reality TV shows.
spk_0 Project runway.
spk_0 Making the band, Shalom in the home.
spk_0 He edited for festivals.
spk_0 One of the editing jobs that was great was working for the Tribeca Film Festival.
spk_0 But he grew disillusioned.
spk_0 You know, it's all freelance. It's very unstable. You're always hustling.
spk_0 It's just not necessarily the life I wanted to lead.
spk_0 So he decided to change things completely, and pivoted to working with computers.
spk_0 He had always been interested in computers when he was a kid.
spk_0 And thought, I might as well try that for a bit.
spk_0 He learned a bit of programming, worked at a tax software company,
spk_0 and even made a website for some programmer friends that was basically Yelp for vegan restaurants.
spk_0 We called it Veg Philly, so it was like a vegan guide to Philadelphia.
spk_0 And all this time, without knowing it, he was slowly gaining the tools needed
spk_0 to become the perfect conservator for time-based media.
spk_0 I mean, sure.
spk_0 I mean, I agree somewhat that somehow I was building the skills without knowing what I was doing.
spk_0 Because I was obviously involved in film.
spk_0 I was involved in technology and all these different things.
spk_0 It was a strange sort of training program, yeah.
spk_0 Eventually, Jonathan settled back into the video world.
spk_0 And got one last gig helping with film screenings at a local community video center called SCRIBE.
spk_0 It's the job that would eventually lead him to finding his true calling as a time-based media conservator.
spk_0 At SCRIBE, Jonathan became interested in their collection of old archival video cassettes.
spk_0 He realized how quickly technology had evolved within his own lifetime.
spk_0 These cassettes were all the rage when he was growing up.
spk_0 And now, in 2013, all these recordings on cassettes would probably be less forever
spk_0 if they did not get digitized.
spk_0 It reminded him of stories he heard about the beginning of film in the early 1900s.
spk_0 When film initially hit the scene, you know, it was like dirty theaters that were very inexpensive
spk_0 and it was considered a very coarse medium where like, you know, you might go to a theater
spk_0 and people would be throwing stuff at the screen.
spk_0 That's come a long way to now where we do consider some films to be art.
spk_0 He said the vast majority of silent films were never preserved and subsequently lost.
spk_0 And so he got interested in thinking about what types of new media might be considered the silent films of today.
spk_0 Video conservation and the conservation of cutting edge software art are relatively new fields.
spk_0 As fine artists increasingly use innovative technologies to create their work, they may be at risk of being lost.
spk_0 If there are not museum conservators who know how to shepherd these works through time,
spk_0 Jonathan eventually went to graduate school to hone these skills.
spk_0 Fast forward to a couple of years after he graduated.
spk_0 Norik Kennedy and the Met were also hoping to solve their time-based media conservation was.
spk_0 It was more like, oh my gosh, what the heck are we going to do with all this time-based media art?
spk_0 We need a specialist.
spk_0 When Jonathan applied for the job with his experience in the worlds of film and TV,
spk_0 software programming and media conservation, they knew they had to hire him.
spk_0 So back to every shot every episode.
spk_0 How do you get a piece made using 2001 technology to run in 2021?
spk_0 We were dealing with obsolete technologies, and we were dealing with custom hardware.
spk_0 The Met started an initiative to revive the work.
spk_0 Initially, a fellow at the Met, Alex Nichols, and Comtrak conservator Sasha Arden, began working on the revival.
spk_0 When the team was asked to revive the work, the VCD was all but extinct.
spk_0 And the VCD player, the McCoy's originally used for the piece, was incredibly fragile.
spk_0 The manufacturer wasn't even making them anymore.
spk_0 So one of the conservation team's first questions was, how important was it to display the videos on a functioning VCD player from the 2000s?
spk_0 This is really fragile equipment, and this artwork is going to be in an exhibition for several months.
spk_0 Did it make sense to use such an obsolete and delicate piece of tech to display the work?
spk_0 Sometimes time-based media artworks require very creative solutions to these sorts of things.
spk_0 The team, Sasha Arden, in particular, had an idea.
spk_0 They could bypass the archaic VCD player altogether.
spk_0 Use this player as a prop to stay true to the original aesthetic of this piece.
spk_0 But then, put a head-in media player in the back to play the actual videos.
spk_0 If you're facing the work, you're seeing a tiny LCD screen, and in the bottom half, there's a VCD player.
spk_0 That's what you're seeing as a visitor.
spk_0 But what you're not seeing is that behind the case into the wall is this digital media player.
spk_0 And that's what's feeding the video and the audio signal into those elements of the case that you're seeing and hearing.
spk_0 This was a compromise.
spk_0 But one that would help the work to live on.
spk_0 For the Met, the priority was preserving this work.
spk_0 And the McCoy's were on board.
spk_0 These pieces require a specific kind of constant care to remain alive.
spk_0 These artworks, they can be a bit like people.
spk_0 There's the baby artwork, and then there's the toddler and then the child and then the teenager.
spk_0 And they often go through different stages as they're exhibited more.
spk_0 Where sometimes the artist's opinions on what's necessary and how to show the piece, you know, they change a little bit.
spk_0 So it's not like a showing a time-based media artwork is it's not always a case of, oh, we just go back to the instructions and we install exactly how the instructions say.
spk_0 These are sometimes dynamic things over time.
spk_0 Conserving every shot every episode was a process of adaptation.
spk_0 But it was still a work rooted in the physical world.
spk_0 Today, there are other time-based media works that pose an even greater challenge to people like Jonathan.
spk_0 Software-based works.
spk_0 Software-based works rely on technologies developed by corporations that are constantly changing and being updated.
spk_0 How do conservators preserve works like these that don't have a fixed state?
spk_0 Artists Hoseunian's work provokes these kinds of questions.
spk_0 Meet him after the break.
spk_0 My name is Hoseunian.
spk_0 I'm an artist. I live and work in Singapore. I work, I would say, mostly with moving images.
spk_0 In 2012, Zoo had an idea for an extended video piece.
spk_0 A collage of clips that responded to words and labels that he felt to find Southeast Asia as a region.
spk_0 It took the form of a dictionary of terms in alphabetical order.
spk_0 So using the structure of A to Z, right, and there are 26 letters in the alphabet, so there are 26 different concepts and different ways of reimagining Southeast Asia.
spk_0 He would call it the critical dictionary of Southeast Asia.
spk_0 And in this dictionary, A was not for Apple.
spk_0 But A was for Anaki. And A was for altitude.
spk_0 So for example, the first term, things about the relationship between altitudes and anarchism in Southeast Asia.
spk_0 So traditionally in Southeast Asia, anarchism survives in very high altitudes, which are areas that are far away from the lowland empires.
spk_0 So there's a saying that armies run out of breath on high altitudes.
spk_0 He looked at movies, home videos, and animation, that evoked high altitude anarchism.
spk_0 An old clip panning through Missy Mountain Ranges.
spk_0 A movie excerpt of a giant titanium hand descending from the heavens towards children at a hilltop temple.
spk_0 Images of men with guns moving through tall grasses.
spk_0 But as he put the pieces together, Zoo had a problem.
spk_0 I was stuck for three years, at least.
spk_0 Back in 2011, basically I was still very much a video maker.
spk_0 You should videos and you have many different shots.
spk_0 And there's always this notion that there is only one best of all possible versions that this work can take.
spk_0 So I was working always with one single timeline.
spk_0 To make any video, artists edit footage together in an editing software, stringing different shots in a particular order.
spk_0 And that is the timeline, right?
spk_0 Like it's literally called a timeline on our editing software.
spk_0 And that was the problem of why I couldn't finish this work.
spk_0 I found it very violent to reduce the work into one single timeline.
spk_0 Because my whole conception of Southeast Asia was that it was a region that couldn't be defined in a simplistic way.
spk_0 Southeast Asia is a region that has not been unified by any religion or political systems.
spk_0 Even the term Southeast Asia, I would say, was not indigenous to the region itself.
spk_0 This term kind of came from outside forces.
spk_0 So I would say for me, Southeast Asia is a kind of a paradox.
spk_0 It's a region which is not one.
spk_0 It is simultaneously a region and is simultaneously not a region.
spk_0 So that immediately forms a contradiction with the notion of a single editing timeline, right?
spk_0 Where everything is forced into one timeline and it has to be clear and resolved.
spk_0 So I was stuck with that for three years.
spk_0 Until I had a chance meeting with a programmer in Helsinki and we had a conversation and then everything kind of clicked.
spk_0 Zool and this programmer, Sebastian Lutker, talked about the idea of making a software-based artwork.
spk_0 And you know, thinking about how we could use algorithmic systems to constantly generate new versions of the video.
spk_0 So that there's not one single version but endless multiple versions of the video.
spk_0 So rather than edit the video on one single timeline, Zool and a few programmers, Sebastian and his collaborator Young Gerber,
spk_0 could code an algorithm that edited the video in an infinite number of ways.
spk_0 Zool could present infinite ways of understanding Southeast Asia.
spk_0 It was almost an immediate kind of like click for me that the project finally found its form.
spk_0 After three years of like wandering.
spk_0 We started on that in 2015 and we presented it in 2017.
spk_0 They created a website to host the work.
spk_0 cdosba.org.
spk_0 If you go to the website, you'll encounter a solid black screen with an index of the alphabet at the bottom.
spk_0 And then images and videos flash across the screen.
spk_0 The images they range from snippets of movies to home videos, to videos that tourists shoot in Southeast Asia,
spk_0 to documentaries, to animation that are cut up and rearranged.
spk_0 And at the same time, you will hear a voice over track.
spk_0 Sometimes sung, sometimes spoken, sometimes whispered,
spk_0 describing certain concepts related to Southeast Asia in combination with this footage.
spk_0 Every time you refresh the website, you see new videos in a different order,
spk_0 responding to these terms that Zool has set.
spk_0 All generated by this algorithm that his programmers coded.
spk_0 So it just keeps generating new versions and new renders.
spk_0 Sometimes it fits perfectly.
spk_0 Sometimes it is, I would say it's a strange.
spk_0 Sometimes it's strange in a beautiful way.
spk_0 And sometimes it's just strange.
spk_0 And you would have to live with the just strange.
spk_0 If you want also those moments of unpredictable beauty that can happen.
spk_0 So exactly how many versions of this work are there?
spk_0 I have thought about that, but the mathematics of it would be beyond me.
spk_0 Instinctively, I was going to say it's probably in finite.
spk_0 But then infinity is such a strong word.
spk_0 So I hesitate to use that.
spk_0 But I would say that the combinations are already a lot.
spk_0 There are 5,066 video clips, 277 sound clips, and 260 voice tracks.
spk_0 Multiply those and you get a number that would take way too much time to recite out loud.
spk_0 And Zoo regularly adds new videos to the algorithm to draw upon for the dictionary.
spk_0 So I remember a discussion with a museum and they were...
spk_0 This was maybe 6,7 years ago.
spk_0 And they were basically just quite disturbed by the fact that there is no one single video that they are purchasing and entering into their collection.
spk_0 For Zoo, creating a work using technology solved a problem.
spk_0 But when a work like this enters a museum collection,
spk_0 the idea of caring for something that is constantly changing is a huge challenge.
spk_0 When museums contacted Zoo to ask about purchasing the work about 7 years back...
spk_0 Many of these conversations always were tinged with some kind of a fear.
spk_0 So the fact that this video is mutable, that it changes, disturbed the museum.
spk_0 And they couldn't kind of like quite deal with this.
spk_0 And then also in the end they mentioned that they probably didn't have the adequate staff who could deal with this, even if they entered their collection.
spk_0 And that's when the conversation ended.
spk_0 Some museums didn't have the bandwidth to care for software-based work.
spk_0 And again, most conservators just don't have the expertise to deal with these challenges.
spk_0 But I would say in the last 3 to 5 years I would say that it's been a kind of a shift in attitude.
spk_0 So rather than complications and complexities being a conversation and...
spk_0 So now I think there is kind of interest and willingness to explore together what is the best way to preserve these works.
spk_0 Thanks to people like Jonathan, these kinds of acquisitions are more possible in museums now.
spk_0 What does that process even look like though?
spk_0 It's a matter of documenting exactly how the work was created.
spk_0 So really going through every single component of the hardware required to run it.
spk_0 But also the software part of it.
spk_0 So for example, the language that it was written in, the coding language and what kind of operating systems etc.
spk_0 But I would say the conversation after this would have to go one layer deeper.
spk_0 Which is when one starts to imagine that these operating systems are no longer in existence.
spk_0 What happens to the piece in the future when new technologies no longer support Zeus code?
spk_0 Probably there are two possible answers.
spk_0 The first would be we have to try to ensure that they can be migrated to different systems.
spk_0 But the other strength of the conversation which is interesting, it goes back to the intention of why you programmed these systems in this specific way.
spk_0 In other words, your conceptual goals for the piece. What do you want this piece to do?
spk_0 And the only way to describe this is in a non-technical way.
spk_0 So we go back into concepts and intentions.
spk_0 And I would say these kind of instructions in the end, they could be just as important as the technical ones.
spk_0 So hopefully with this second set of conceptual parameters or directions.
spk_0 I imagine that if one could describe them so precisely, maybe it's possible to reconstruct your work just based on those sets of instructions with entirely different systems.
spk_0 This is kind of quite speculative, but I would say we are doing both of these things at the same time.
spk_0 Actually with all the different museums interested in the critical dictionary of Southeast Asia, this is where I see the conversations finally heading to.
spk_0 When the critical dictionary of Southeast Asia is acquired by a museum, zoom hands over the algorithm and all of the video assets that the piece uses.
spk_0 But the museum only receives the video assets from the moment in time that it is acquired.
spk_0 Not the videos that Zoo adds to the repository thereafter.
spk_0 So when the work enters a museum collection, it becomes only one version of itself.
spk_0 In the context of a museum, does the work lose its ever-changing quality?
spk_0 Does the piece stop living?
spk_0 I would say there is an interesting tension there and I'm not sure if this tension can ever go away.
spk_0 We are talking about whether the artwork goes into the collection to live or to die.
spk_0 And to choose either life or death seems very extreme to me.
spk_0 I would rather have a state in which it is both alive and dead at the same time.
spk_0 I suppose a slightly negative way of looking at that would be a zombie.
spk_0 But maybe a more interesting way to think of it is like showdinger's cat.
spk_0 So showdinger's cat before the experimental lifts the leap to see whether the cat is dead.
spk_0 The cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
spk_0 So I would like to imagine my works in the storage of all the different museums
spk_0 as being showdinger's cats before the experimental lifts the leap.
spk_0 So refusing this either-all choice and being both at the same time.
spk_0 In material is produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise.
spk_0 Our production staff includes Salman Ahad Khan and Collins, Samantha Henneck, Eric Newsom, Emma Vecchioni, Sarah Wombold and Jamie York.
spk_0 Additional staff includes Laura Barth, Julia Bordelan, Skyla Choi, Maria Cosineca and Rachel Smith.
spk_0 This season would not be possible without Andrea Bayer, Inca Dragomieler and Douglas Heggley.
spk_0 Sound Design by Ariana Martinez and Kristen Muller.
spk_0 This episode includes original music composed by Austin Fisher,
spk_0 fact checking by Mary Mathis and Claire Hyman.
spk_0 Special thanks to Ottawa Jimma Brimpong and Avery Trouffleman.
spk_0 In material is made possible by Dasha Zukova-Niarkos.
spk_0 Additional support is provided by the Zodiac Fund.
spk_0 This episode would not have been possible without associate conservator Jonathan Farberwitz, conservator in charge, nor Kennedy,
spk_0 collections technician Sam Winks, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy and Ho Su Nyen.
spk_0 And special thanks to associate curator Leslie Maugh and associate curator Lauren Rosati.
spk_0 To learn more about this episode and see pictures of the artworks featured,
spk_0 visit the Metz website at metmuseum.org slash immaterial time.
spk_0 I'm your host, Camille Dungee.
spk_0 Cut down.