Bio
Patricia Falcao is a Time-based Media Conservator with a background in video and photography conservation. She has worked at Tate since 2008.
Currently her main focus is the acquisition of time-based media artworks into the Tate Collection. She also collaborates with both the Research and Information Systems Departments in the development of Tate’s strategy and infrastructure for the preservation of high value digital assets. Her main area of interest is the preservation of the digital components of contemporary artworks.
Patricia completed her MA at the University of the Arts in Bern with a thesis on risk assessment for software-based artworks. She continues to develop research in this field within PERICLES, a pan-European project that “aims to address the challenge of ensuring that digital content remains accessible in an environment that is subject to continual change.”
Abstract
What Goes Where? Decisions and Challenges of a Digital Repository
Tate received the first digital elements for time-based media artworks at the end of the Millennium. Now, in 2017, we expect that within the next decade more than 95% of time-based media artworks will have digital master formats. This shift to digital started to take form in the 2000s, with a few essential aspects; files replacing tapes as the master material supplied by artists for video-based works, the need to migrate existing works in the collection from tape to file, and finally the acquisition of software-based artworks into the collection. It soon became clear that to preserve the increasing amounts of digital data, Tate would require not only different processes and infrastructure, but also different skills from our staff, new experts and new collaborations. This talk will focus on the ongoing work implementing the new infrastructure and tools and adapting the existing workflows for digital elements of artworks at Tate. Key decisions in policies and the challenges of the process will be highlighted and placed in Tate’s institutional context.
