FOURTH (and last) REPORT FROM "BROWN BAG LUNCHES"

It has been a long time from my last post...
Unfortunately yes, SFMOMA summer interns educational program finished last week, no more lunchs from now on.. But the last meeting we had was one of the most interesting: today is the day of CONSERVATION DEPARTMENT!!!
A Staff of 7-8 people works hard in one of the "secret area of SFMOMA", in a big (but could be bigger) space, dealing with conservation techniques, chemical substances and air pumps, in order to preserve or restore pieces of art.
We have been shown some current works subject to restoration, and has been impressing seeing how long could it take to restore an artwork: I've seen a damaged painting which needed to have parts of the back canvas removed; the technique used required from 30 to 60 minutes to remove a little square (5x5 cm), and the painting was approximatively 80x120 cm.
One of the more interesting issues arised during the meeting was about the fact that SFMOMA currently deals with the restoration of contemporary art pieces, requiring great flexibility in the solving of problems about restoration: one of the pieces shown was made of lamb interiors, because of the choiche of the artist to used only the materials that she could find in the place she lived (somewhere in South America, sorry for the imprecision!); the installation was damaged, so conservation departement staff had to buy lambs interior at a butcher, an try to find samples and pieces compatible with the ones of the original piece..
The department deals with a wide spectrum of media, from painting to sculpture to photography, and sometimes has to deal with painted sculptures made with photographical films.. it could drive you crazy!!!!

INTERFERENZE-NEW ART FESTIVAL

OH, i'm sorry but cause of the fantastic vision of the old video technologies i have forgotten to give u informations about a great new art festival that i attended at the beginning of August. The location was a wood near a little village called S. MArtino Valle Caudina. Some guys of that village started to organize a festival about electronic music and now they have been able to organize a great international festival in which the new art, electronic music and software culture are merged together in a naturalistic and little place in the south of Italy (what i called "Africa").
I watched some interesting screening of the digital animation of an English group ( http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/) and i attended an workshop about a software for mobile device "MOBILE DEVICES FOR ART & EXPERIMENTATION IMPROVe". IMPROve is a software for mobile devices that let the user record sounds and create collabarative music with other users (Zeenath Hasan,Richard Widerberg).
i hope that some of you (tech-ch students) will be able to come to the next year edition of this festival...if u will be not busy with your great professional careers!!!

WHAT I HAVE SEEN FROM THE WORLD OF THE TECH PAST

post production now is easy! if u have used softwares for the video post production u know how it's easy to modify some parameters like the brightness or to correct the mistake of your shots.
Some days ago, i went to a little production company to meet an old cameraman (around 60 years) that sometimes copies the audiovisual material from the 16/35 mm film on the digital beta format (the format used in all the tv). You cannot understand how its fantastic to see a TELECINEMA.
TELECINEMA is a machine that permitts to copy Super 8/16/35 mm films on different analogic or digital format. You can change the parameters (brightness, saturation of the colours) moving some "joysticks" of the machine. It's a kind of machine that needs of all your body for working well: you have to touch the film and all the little pieces for having a good result. It's quite difficult to find Telecinemas now because it's not so useful after the digitization process of all the audiovisual material belonging to the television archives. We have to learn the new technologies for the future, but it's to strange to know that only few persons are able to work with this kind of machines and mainly it's difficult to find people that know how to work on film support. The past is still used...and we' ll never have the experience to manage it .

THIRD REPORT FROM "BROWN BAG LUNCHES" AT SFMOMA; CIA: they are not secret agents!!!

Just went out from another of the interesting lunches of SFMOMA internship program: today was the time of CIA (collection information & access) department.
Their main job is to manage with issues related to cataloguing, copyrights, access and imaging.

Cataloguing and access: and this area concerns issues about the managing of collections database (not only the permanent collection, also exhibitions works are catalogued), according to curatorial interpretations: for instance, it has been shown how the same piece of art has been differently catalogued in 1996 and in 2003, when the curator of the department changed (the label to describe a video installation changed from “double video installation” to “two channels video installation”; it doesn’t seem to be a great issue, but, we have been told that, especially for always growing and changing art branches, such as the one of media art, the change of the curator often bring a renewing in the use of cataloguing terminology). Databases records are not fixed and stable, rather are flexible and always liable to changes, even in cases of well known pieces of art such as “Femme au chapeau”.. of course has been mentioned SFMOMA interest in social tagging/folksonomy issues, but not so in depth as I expected. The department actually uses a CMS (collection management system) called EmbARK, that will be made available through a new digital asset management system (DAM). DAM, in turn, will be accessible via either a web interface or an ODBC compliant database such as Filemaker Pro.

Copyright: this seems to be the hardest area of the department; a lot of legal issues have to be considered when working with artworks: from the concept of “fair use” of a copyrighted image, the one of content transformation (for example the use of a movie scene in a video installation), the use of thumb nailed images on the internet and so on.. using copyrighted images really seems as always working on the borderline of legality!

Imaging: this area is again related to the use of images in different formats; it concerns the acquisition of images of works from external sources, for instance used for lectures or lessons, and the set up of slide libraries for research issues, and issues related to the digitalization of the collection: an interesting example related to Museums use of multimedia with educational purposes is the AMICO consortium, of which SFMOMA is active part.
Hope it has been useful.
Bye.
Amoenus.

Tags: sfmoma, cia, cataloguing, collection, museum, blocus-amoenus, report, brown bag lunches, digitalization

SECOND REPORT FROM "BROWN BAG LUNCHS" OF SFMOMA

OK, OK, OK, I missed to report the last two lunchs, it is completely my fault, just to let you know they were about the Photography departement and the Educational one (where I'm actually interning!!!).

To briefly summarize, when I visited the PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTEMENT I've been brought with the other interns, first in the Museum gallery, where we have been provided of information mainly about curatorial choices in order either to satisfy visitors requests (everybody expects to see at least a Stiegliz picture or a Man ray one!!!), either to povoke and provide a critical perspective about what artistic photography is.
The next step was visiting the BEHIND THE SCENES!!!
Upcoming photos, emerging artists, huge photos,archives and laboriatories..
here the link to the photography collection on the website (more than 2500 phtographies!!!)

I think you all already know a lot about the educational departement and its ongoing activities, like Making Sense of Modern Art (MSOMA), created with Pachiderm, an open-source flash Content management system..
But probably it is difficult to understand how the phisical presence of the "Koret visitors educational center", has deeply influenced the identity of the museum: in fact, beeing in the "heart" of the museum, it has given a great input in the definition of the role a museum should have: not only a place where works of art are stored and displayed, but a place where people can really Make sense and understand what works want to communicate, without banalizing concepts and providing all the necessary tools for the interpretation and enjoinment of subjects that often people consider as mysterious and understandable only for "experts".. catalogues, confortable seats, video screenings, interactive kiosk, many computers with additional contents of MSOMA, kids areas and rooms for lectures.. PLUS a frinedly staff always available for any necessity. Check out the interactive feature to discover more.

But now is time to talk about the real topic of this post; The EXHIBITION DEPARTEMENT: when you go to wathever museum and visit some huge exhibition about some artist, it seems that every piece has its natural collocation in the area, like if the museum has been designed to host that exhibition and stop; well, is not like that: many of the walls present in an exhibition are removable, it is an hard work to decide where and how a piece has to be, it is a decison that involves more than one departement.. There mainly two phases in the preparation of an exhibition:
- The "design" phase
- The hard work!!!

The design phase: there are two kinds of "tools" used for the set up: on one side there are computer, with softwares like archicad difning the virtual placement of each piece. Actually a 3D software that allows to explore a virtual reconstruction of the museum is beiing tested. On the other side the is an "old-style stuff": a room containing a scale model of the museum, with small reproductions of every single piece (even the ones of past exhibitions are conserved, never knows..), and little walls that can be connected and disconnected: here curators meet and set up the exhibition according to their necessities, from interpretative and philological , to security and accessibility ones. But this is the "theoretical" part.

The hard work
Once everything has been decided, a team of workers begins to disconnect and re-connect pieces of the museum, working in physical contact with the artist, rather than relying on written indications by the artist itself. And now a curiosity: in the museum, behind one huge walls, there is an enormous elevator, with which pieces and walls are carryed from one stair to another!!!
The work of this departement is really hard and linked to very narrow deadlines, implies a great part of "manual" work; think for example at the current exhibition of Matthew Barney, in which are present huge works in weird locations (i was impressed seeing the hands of the exhibition departement curator..), but I think brings a lot of satisfactions...
I apologize for the usual "maccheronic" english, but I hope this report can be useful for you all, as it has been for me.
Amoenus.

Tags: exhibition departement, sfmoma, brown bag lunch

Comment moderation

Due to a recent "spam attack", i've been forced to activate the commment moderation.. basically nothing will change, just that I will have the possibility to check in advance the adequateness of comments to the posts.. sorry for the inconvenient.
Thank you.
Amoenus

Tags: comment moderation