Conserving Computer-Based Art at the Guggenheim Museum

The Thoma Foundation has awarded a 2-year grant to the Conservation of Computer-based Art (CCBA) initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. Led by Joanna Phillips, the Guggenheim’s conservator of time-based media, the CCBA initiative is a multi-year project to develop, implement and disseminate new and best practices for the acquisition, preservation, maintenance and display of computer-based new media artworks. The project meets the Thoma Foundation’s interest in supporting important, new research in digital art by increasing awareness about the pressing preservation and conservation issues in the field.

The $53,000 grant from the Foundation will support a postgraduate fellowship, a position integral to the Guggenheim’s CCBA initiative. The CCBA is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to study, document and preserve all 22 software-based artworks in the Guggenheim’s collection. To do so, the CCBA team will perform case studies on selected works in order to identify and document their behaviors, and will analyze how best to back-up and store the artworks. The result will be to implement state-of-the-art practices for acquisition, documentation, storage, maintenance and display of computer-based artworks at the Guggenheim, and to disseminate these best practices and resources to colleagues who face similar challenges with their collections.