Interview with Ben Fino-Radin (Small Data Industries): Digital Preservation and Media Conservation, Part 2

A Particularly Memorable Project

Since founding Small Data Industries (hereafter Small Data), Ben has worked on numerous projects. I asked him which of them has been personally unforgettable and especially memorable.

Each of the projects so far has had an incredible impact, and many have been deeply rewarding. It is really difficult to choose just one, but if I had to name one, it would be the project we carried out in 2018 with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

Several years ago, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum acquired Wolfgang Staehle’s Untitled (2001), which had been exhibited at Postmasters Gallery in Manhattan in 2001. The work is a real-time video installation, and it is well known because the events of September 11 were recorded as they unfolded in its livestream.

Ben and his team worked with the museum and the artist to migrate the work from obsolete software, and succeeded in restoring and installing it for exhibition for the first time since its original presentation in 2001.

The following year we worked with the museum again to install a large-scale multisite installation. Imagining the impact this project would have on people, and being able to empower the museum to realize it, was a great joy for us. It was truly meaningful.

Current Projects and Projects About to Begin

In addition to the aforementioned Archive Academy and Art and Obsolescence, Ben is currently working on the acquisition of several private collections, the intake of artworks, preservation management, documentation of those materials, and the construction of digital preservation infrastructure. As part of that work, this spring he is supporting a large-scale exhibition featuring many works from the collection of one of his clients, the philanthropist and wealthy collector Robert Rosenkranz (¹1A philanthropist and chairman of the investment-related company Delphi Capital Management, which has more than 35 billion dollars in assets under management.). The exhibition is organized by curator and art historian Chrissie Iles.

As mentioned earlier, work on digital objects is continuing with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (hereafter Cooper Hewitt), with whom Small Data has maintained a project for five years. Ben is always working on projects with Cory Arcangel, who is known for creating works by modifying computers and video game systems, and he is about to begin a large-scale preservation project with the aforementioned artist Gary Hill to revive a major installation from the 1990s.

Problems and Challenges

Through my 2015 research in New York, I learned that many institutions were advancing archival work in collaboration with outside companies and developers. During that research, I also interviewed Dragan Espenschied, digital conservator at Rhizome, a musician, and media artist who had focused on preserving art on the internet since 1996.

He believed it was essential for many art institutions to move beyond the role of simply being art facilities and become something like research institutions that also conduct various forms of research and development. For example, the collection management system The Museum System (TMS), made by Gallery Systems, is widely used in many institutional collections, but Dragan said that many parts of it no longer fit the times, and that more stakeholders need to be involved in developing and improving tools. He recognized that there is a wall between the domains of art and engineering, but argued that museums would increasingly need people who understand both. I asked Ben for his opinion on this perspective.

First of all, museums and related institutions do engage in research concerning the preservation and conservation of archives of all kinds, but these activities often do not generate revenue. For that reason, museums and related institutions are, in principle, the only places where this kind of research can be carried out for its own sake. But when it comes to research and development, the reality is not so simple.

What does this mean? Certainly, archivists and media conservators like Ben and Dragan, who are deeply knowledgeable in both the field of art and engineering, are rare even at large museums. The reasons seem to include the following.

I have seen, again and again, a brain drain in which excellent people who had been working on the technical side of nonprofit institutions such as museums leave that environment and begin working for private companies. The reason is obvious to anyone. Technologists can earn far more money working in the private sector. In addition, museum digital teams are sometimes not given the respect they deserve or the space needed to make something meaningful. Or the investment needed to maintain such things continuously is not made. Over the past decade, most of the people I know on the technical side of museums have stopped working in museums.

Cultural institutions also often use words such as disruption and innovation, but a contradiction arises: the practical workers who have the ability to create innovations that would break through the status quo leave for other places, or are in the process of leaving in order to make such things possible.

Leaving aside the question of whether museums and cultural institutions should be centers for developing new technologies to achieve their missions, I think that is impossible when we consider underinvestment, talent drain, and a fundamental lack of understanding of software development and infrastructure. I think there are only a few examples of small-scale open source projects being carried out collaboratively between institutions, and these are often unstable grant-funded projects. If that helps people in the near term, that is wonderful. But I do not yet see much lasting change here.

During my 2015 research, the wall between the domains of art and engineering was also conspicuous within each museum and related institution. Yet in order to carry out stable digital preservation and media conservation, institutions need to consider from an early stage whether to hire technologists and realize this work in-house, or to collaborate with outside organizations such as Small Data, and they need to take steady action.

Archival projects hold considerable potential for creating the next generation of society and for technological development, and they are also effective means for establishing an institution’s originality and branding. They contribute to access, and the longer they continue, the more value they acquire as legacy. For that reason, it is important to allocate budget and personnel actively, to advance them, and not to abandon projects halfway, but to continuously pass on archival technologies and operations to the next generation. At the same time, for the general public, the key is how broadly one can communicate the message of “what the archive is for.”

Ben also says that, in the art world and its surrounding fields, the reality remains that even when people of color hold leadership positions within organizations, there are still few cases in which they are active as representatives of those organizations. As Small Data, Ben has continually asked what contribution he can make to this issue of minority representation. In response, he established Small Data Scholars, a scholarship program aimed at minorities with broad backgrounds outside the conservation community, in order to increase equity and inclusion in the professional field of archival conservation, and launched it in 2020. The program awards scholarship funding to attend the annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC).

Future Plans for Small Data Industries

Ben says that, in addition to developing the projects and services currently underway, he is also planning something new.

Right now we are planning to launch a new facility in upstate New York. I think it will be able to provide ample space for carrying out larger and longer-term projects together with clients. One of the characteristics of time-based media art is that “it does not exist until it is installed.” Securing space for careful conservation work and research is a luxury that even major research institutions often do not have. Creating that kind of space and making it shareable with others who need it is something I have wanted to do for many years, and I feel that now we can actually make it happen.

Around Ben there are a handful of consulting companies active in the broader field of archives, a fair number of freelance conservators and independent archivists, and several large privately run contemporary art conservation labs. It is not that there are no competitors, but those competitors tend to specialize in only one aspect of the services Ben and his team provide. Small Data, which addresses a broad range of needs related to archival preservation and conservation, is still a rare presence.

I then asked Ben whether he had plans to carry out archival projects in fields outside the arts in the future.

No. But there are moments of interdisciplinary crossover. Right now, for example, we are working with Carnegie Mellon University to develop a digital preservation strategy for robotics research, and for me that overlaps considerably with time-based media art. In 2019, for instance, we worked with Protocol Labs and the Shoah Foundation to create Starling, a prototype command-line interface for facilitating data storage on Filecoin. In fact, we held a workshop at the Creative Time Summit, giving artists and collection professionals an opportunity to learn how to use it. Art and culture have always been and will continue to be my passion, and they must be at the center of everything I do. Otherwise, it is neither fun nor interesting for me, and it is not rewarding. I think people do their best work when they are in the context that fits them.

What Prompted Him to Work Independently in This Way?

Tracing the source of that driving force, he says it lies in a teacher he had in middle school and high school.

For better or worse, ever since I can remember, I have wanted an environment where I could freely carry out my own ideas, and I have wanted to make things that would bring lasting change to the world around me.

In high school, I had a woodworking teacher named Mr. McClure. Over many years, he communicated his hobbies and passions to students and created spaces inside the school that he could share with them. He drew me into helping start a black-and-white photography darkroom, audio and video production rooms, a student Amnesty chapter, and eventually even a radio station (I think it was completely illegal!). I remember him teaching students very early forms of graphic design and playing guitar late into the night. In a relatively ordinary public school in a remote place, that one teacher gave many students enormous inspiration and influence. Former students would often go back to visit Mr. McClure. Having him as a role model made me want to try first, and then give form to the things that interested me. It was exactly an entrepreneurial impulse. I also think that, from an early point, he instilled in me the desire to have a place I could share with others. And I realized early on that doing independent work, making something myself, was the only way to integrate what I had learned into my own professional life.

Today, Ben brings great inspiration and influence to people in the New York art world, much as Mr. McClure did for him.

Digital Preservation and Media Conservation Toward the Future

I asked Ben about the impact of COVID-19 on the New York art world.

COVID-19 forced everyone to rethink everything. In the New York art world, it accelerated trends that were already underway. Some things ended, some things were born, some things changed, some things became larger, and some things became smaller. If we are not talking about humanity in a broad sense, or about the suffering, prejudice, and anxiety of the past two years, but only about the art world, then in my view COVID-19 can be said to have been merely a trigger that accelerated change.

Looking from the present toward the future, I believe Small Data’s work in digital preservation and media conservation is an extremely useful reference for museums and related institutions in Japan as well.

Finally, I would like to introduce an impressive opening passage from the project outcomes report on the work Ben carried out with Cooper Hewitt. I hope readers will imagine it together with me.

Imagine that, fifty years from now, a school class takes a field trip to Cooper Hewitt and sees an exhibition devoted to technologies designed in 2018. We can immediately understand the functions of the objects on display there today, but what will be visible in the future? And what will they see, and how? How will they experience, touch, and interact with the exhibits? How will they understand the technologies that are shaping our world?

Ben Fino-Radin is the founder and lead conservator of Small Data Industries. Before founding the company in 2017, he led initiatives as Rhizome’s first digital conservator and later served as associate media conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He graduated from Pratt Institute and holds master’s degrees in library and information science and in digital art. https://smalldata.industries/ https://benfinoradin.info/

URLs were last checked on February 10, 2022.