Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for coming tonight to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.
My name is Chris Waner, I am the Program Coordinator for the Lunder Conservation Center, which is the conservation facility for both of those museums.
Tonight, we’re here with curator, Michael Mansfield, and conservator, Hugh Shockey.
Mainly, because of the title you see on the screen, which is “Watch This! Revelations in Media Art,” which is currently on view on the third floor,
in our special exhibition galleries.
Just above that, is the Lunder Conservation Center, where the conservators work,
all behind glass walls. It’s part of a big outreach program that the center undertakes.
You watch them work, and then we do programs like this as well, to bring conservation to the forefront of the museum world.
We’re here because Michael and Hugh have really a partnership, an ongoing conversation to treat and exhibit the artworks,
and we were focusing on two aspects of two different parts of the exhibition that they’re going to talk more about as we go along.
I’m going to just introduce them briefly, and then I’ll turn the floor over to them.
Michael Mansfield is a museum’s curator of film and media art, where he organizes the
Permanent Collection and exhibition initiatives for digital, electronic, and moving image artworks.
He has identified and overseen additions to the Permanent Collections that include works by Bill Viola,
Eve Sussman, John Baldessari, Robert Watts, Camille Utterback, Takeshi Murata, and Jim Campbell,
and is also investigating previously undocumented artworks of Nam June Paik archive.
Michael has been with the Smithsonian American Art Museum since 2006, and joined the curatorial staff in September, 2012.
He has contributed to a number of exhibitions, including “Nam June Paik: Global Visionary”
and “The Art of Video Games,” and organizes rotating installations of the Museum’s Media Art Gallery: “New Directions in the Art of Moving Image.”
His most recent exhibition, “Watch This! Revelations in Media Art,” is on view now, on the Museum's third floor, and runs through September 7th.
Lucien H. “Hugh” Shockey, Jr., has worked in conservation for the past 20 years.
The last 10 as an objects conservator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lunder Conservation Center,
where he has played a key role in large-scale, institutional projects, and served as a member of
the Smithsonian’s Initial Response Team for the Haiti Cultural Recovery Project,
which launched recovery efforts after the devastating earthquake of 2010.
Shockey holds a Master of Science
Degree in Art Conservation from the
University of Delaware.
His conservation experience has included
large-scale, outdoor installations,
ethnographic and archaeological objects,
decorative arts, furniture, traditional
sculpture, and time-based media art.
Shockey was a Melon Fellow at the
National Museum of the American Indian,
and has worked in the collections of the
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and
Elvis Presley’s Graceland.
Hugh served as president of the
Washington Conservation Guild,
as a professional associate in the
American Institute for Conservation of
Historic and Artistic Works,
and has published on innovative treatment techniques that have been cited internationally.
Shockey recently accepted a position
at the Saint Louis Art Museum as the
Head of Conservation,
supervising a team of conservators,
working in the Museum’s objects, painting,
paper, and textile labs.
Gentlemen, I’ll hand it over to you.
[Applause]
Mansfield: Thank you all for joining us here today.
I hope everyone was able to find a seat.
If you can’t, there’s plenty of room in the
aisles, you can stand in the aisles, but
welcome to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Again, my name is Michael Mansfield,
and this is Hugh Shockey.
Shockey: Hello, everyone.
Mansfield: This is, it’s really a kind of a
a last moment of revelry here, because
Hugh is leaving the museum shortly to
take a new position in Saint Louis,
and we’d like to congratulate him and
send him on his way,
but his work with us has been really invaluable,
and some of which we’ll touch on today,
but he’s going to be sorely missed, and
you will certainly see why.
Mansfield: We are here to talk about
the work that we’ve done together on
the exhibition,
as well as the rest of the permanent collection.
This is going to be a very informal sort
of discussion, so I really encourage you
to pipe up if you have any questions.
I’ll do a brief introduction to the
exhibition, and a couple of the works that
are on view, and
sort of weave a thread through the show,
and we will talk in more detail about one
of the more challenging works of art,
both in the collection and on view,
and I’m going to leave time at the end to
allow you to ask questions
and talk to us about what it is we’ve
done, or maybe just respond to the
things that we bring up.
There are microphones on either side
of the room and in the back, so if you do
have a question,
at least at the end of the session, try to
grab a mic. We are webcasting this show, so
we’d like to capture your question as well
as our answer, if we have one.
Mansfield: The exhibition, “Watch This!
Revelations in Media Art,” is largely
organized as an introduction to media art,
drawn almost exclusively from our
Permanent Collection, so all the works
on view are in
the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s
Permanent Collection of works.
Mansfield: In this sense, we are defining
media art as
time-based and electronic works of art
that engage technology, either in their
making, or in their exhibition.
This is a pretty broad and flexible
definition, intentionally so,
because, mostly because artists and artworks, alike, have long engaged the most advanced materials possible.
It’s a very flexible and fluid field, art-making is.
Mansfield: Sculpture has gone from casting to direct carving.
I see our sculpture curator here, so she’s
probably going to throw things at me
in a moment, but
it’s really gone from direct carving to
casting, to pointing and assemblage.
Painting is both a verb and a noun, and
it reinvents itself at every turn.
Photography once employed glass-plate
negatives that were hauled out into the field
on donkeys with mammoth cameras,
but now employs no negatives at all.
So these incremental procedural changes
in art-making are really common.
In terms of media art, this has really exploded the field of institutional representation and exhibitions.
Shockey: I’m going to interrupt Michael as he moves away from this slide
and say that, the funny thing about photography was that was new technology at the time of that
photo, alright?
And it was, like most new technology, very bulky at the time, and sort of got smaller,
which is a trend we continue to see today,
even upstairs in the works, so it’s kind of interesting sort of timeline that keeps marching on.
Mansfield: It gets smaller and more complex.
Mansfield: The…
The exhibition begins to sort of trace the history of media art from 1941 to the present, so the first work in the collection
that’s on view is a series of works by--I’m going to move my chair a little bit because I’m being blinded
by the projector,
my head’s in the way, sorry about that.
The first work is by Dwinell Grant, it was created
in 1941.
He was an observed…
He defined his work as “observed field.” This was a geometrically non-objective art practice.
He did a lot of paintings and drawings, and was quite revered in his day,
and in the early, the late 1930s, he
was really inspired to add motion and
duration to the works. He was inspired
by Kandinsky and Malevich, and
a lot of the work that was happening in
Europe at the time, and weaving painting
and drawing and
art-making with music and dance and sonography.
Mansfield: He created well over 4
thousand line and pencil drawings and
paper collages on
sheets of paper and photographed them
in sequence to create a stop-motion animation.
This is a very short sequence from that animation.
Mansfield: Sorry, I didn’t know if that
was on the video or not.
[Laughter]
Mansfield: It’s like, “I don’t think that’s
part…” This work is really silent, I promise.
But, so his conceptual intent for this work was,
as he wrote in the letter to the Guggenheim foundation,
his conceptual intent for the work was to
counter the nationalism of the 1940s
with something that was much more
natural and human like a heartbeat or
a thunderstorm.
Photographing these images in sequence
created a way for him to,
it’s a very simple stop-motion animation,
but there’s something really special about
this work, especially created for 1941.
This work was, has been in our collection
since the 1980s.
This exhibition afforded an opportunity for
us to restore this film with the tremendous help
and effort of a film conservator
and maker, filmmaker, an artist, in New
York, Bill Brand, through his company,
BB Optics,
in which he scanned each individual
frame of this film as a 3K, a high-
resolution digital format, and then produced a,
an inter-negative in film prints from the
digital file in order to put it back on view.
It’s really extraordinary to see this fully
restored, the color and the--
it’s looping now, so it keeps going on and on.
Shockey: I was going to say, it’s
extraordinary to see it on film.
Mansfield: Yeah, see it on film, so if you
have an opportunity, please do go
upstairs and see it projected in the
gallery space.
So this was the introduction to the
moving image in a very simple and
material way.
Mansfield: There are several works of art
in there, in the exhibition, that
touch on the multiple dimensions of the
moving image. This is a work by
Hans Breder,
from 1964, titled, “Two Cubes
on a Striped Surface.”
It gets its rather unique title from the two cubes that are on a striped surface.
But this is… Hans Breder was an
influential artist, and is still working
today in Iowa City.
He was interested in weaving or, investigating
the body’s experience with a work of art, and
a space between the body and,
and the art object, the relationship between
the illusory and the real that are reflected in
these two very shiny cubes,
but he wanted to expand on the dimensions
of height, width and depth,
to include the added dimension of duration
with this work, so in addition to encouraging
viewers to walk around the sculpture,
he filmed it in sequence as it was in action.
Produced a number of sculptures and a number
of stop-motion animations by moving
the objects.
You see his hand pop in here in a moment.
It’s a very modest work of art.
We were--there it was--we were incredibly
fortunate to,
to work directly with Hans Breder on this
exhibition and to bring
his sculpture, the 1964 sculpture, “Two
Cubes on a Striped Surface,” to the
collection here,
an object that Hugh was able to work on.
Shockey: Right. It’s funny to me that
Michael says its very sort of simple, and when,
when actually, the fabrication of these is
quite technical.
The, if you can flip back to the other
image with the... So,
you know, it was interesting me when I
was telling Michael that the artist actually
considers the entire work, sculpture,
so the actual acrylic bonnet, or vitrine,
is actually
intended to be part of the sculpture, and it 
s a modular unit,
and when you start looking at the piece,
the sort of repeat of the modular unit
becomes very evident,
but back to the idea of the high-tech material,
so the surface that you’re looking at that’s a
black-and-white surface,
is actually a precision-milled, black plastic,
that has white plastic inlaid into its surface.
All of the aluminum is precision-milled, so all
the metal surfaces are actually aluminum. 
They’re very
high-precision milling that went on, and fitting
that went on, so you see very few flaws.
There is one flaw that I found in this piece,
and that’s really the only flaw that I found.
Shockey: In terms of my involvement with the
actual work when it came into the collection,
really was what I consider a basic, straight-forward conservation treatment,
really just a cleaning, getting everything back, presentation ready,
and it’s sort of, in working with Michael’s
exhibition, it,
it was probably the most traditional type of
treatment that I was, conducted as part of the exhibition.
You’ll see later, that there much more involved, 
non-traditional treatments,
and conservation efforts that went on.
Mansfield: Yeah, I, I included this work, especially
in this presentation, but also the exhibition,
as a way to
sort of invest the exhibition with the
the dimensions of art making that include all
of these things. The physical experience
that exists in time.
I want to step back for a second and
mention that
he was talking about the mill work, or the milling
that went on for the aluminum structure
that Hans Breder’s interest with some of this
work was really centered on the body and
the body’s experience of the sculpture,
and he conceptually engaged that issue by
having the aluminum structure,
the base, milled, or construct, or created by
a pharmaceutical company that was,
I guess, used to, or familiar with working with
medical instruments, because they have a
direct relationship to the body.
So conceptually and materialy, this work of
art weaves these issues together in a way that I
found was really interesting.
Not to mention, it’s really such a modest
little gem,
and this is a single-channel video that
plays on a little square monitor on a pedestal,
so that
these geometric shapes repeat
themselves indefinitely.
Mansfield: It’s one of my favorite works in the
collection, and it's very small.
But the material, the material
engagements among artists with, working
in time-based media
don’t extend only to
sculptural practices, but the material of the
moving images itself.
This is a work of art by Raphael Montañez Ortiz,
that’s been in our collection for a number of
years. The title of this work is “Golf.”
Mr. Ortiz, who teaches at Rutgers, I think he’s
retired now, but still working,
and the subject of a number of exhibitions
at the moment, so keep a look out for him,
he’s a very important guy.
This particular work of art is
created from found footage of 16 millimeter film.
It’s a newsreel footage that he purchased of
the game of golf,
and he physically punched holes in the
film stock itself,
creating these large white voids for the
tiny little white ball.
[Garbled audio from the video]
[Garbled audio from the video]
Mansfield: The holes additionally affect the
audio track, prevents the audio track from
being heard.
[Garbled audio from the video]
Mansfield: The cutting of the audio, which adds
to the texture of the physical experience, or
the visual experience of the image.
It’s at once a kind of a…
[Garbled audio from the video]
Mansfield: Sorry, I’ll stop the audio so you
can hear me.
It’s both a
sort of an artist statement about the perceived
elitism of the game of golf, but also a material
exercise in moving image.
This is a really great piece. It’s on view, on film,
in the gallery, so we can actually see it as the
artist would have
intervened in the film stock itself. It’s very
different than seeing it on video.
So I hope you have a chance to see it.
Shockey: One thing, Michael, that you didn't
mention about the film being on film that I learned
from you is that when Ortiz first made it,
after punching, he then had to make an
inter-negative to do another print, so
you could actually
play the reel, because it had no more structural
integrity to be able to play as a film.
Mansfield: Yeah, I should mention that this
was created in 1957, so it was really
early in sort of
film practices for this kind of work,
and it was not a terribly simple process, the
process of making film,
but it was, it’s an experimental practice, and I
think that the exchange between the artist and
the material
is what led to a lot of the creativity that was
happening in film and video, and
other media art practices, and something
that I think
is really evidenced in the exhibition through the
just volume of ideas that come from
these works of art.
Speed past this, since you’ve already seen it.
I wanted to touch briefly on another work of
art that we didn’t spend a great deal of time
conserving, but
offers an avenue into the work that we’re going
to discuss more at length.
This is an artwork by the artist, Buky Schwartz,
created in 1977, titled, “Painted Projection.”
This was a work of art that he conceived of
in his studio,
thinking about closed circuit video,
so this is a, it’s a very simple relationship
between the camera and seeing what the
camera, actually
visually seeing what the camera is recording.
The camera is connected directly to the television
set, and you’re looking, and there’s a phenomenon
of looking at actually what the camera is seeing.
And this is an issue that many artists were
consumed with, especially in the 1970s when
this technology was widely available and being
used for, and exploited by,
various industries, from surveillance and the
authorities, to broadcast.
Mansfield: So, Bucky painted a series of geometric shapes on the wall,
and then, by positioning the camera, he resolves
those shapes into a perfect cube, so only,
only by looking at what the camera is seeing
can you resolve those shapes into..
He’s fooling the camera through this really simple act of graffiti.
This is it installed upstairs on the third floor. We
painted the wall and the floor directly, and you
get this sort of elongated,
geometric rendering. The positioning of
the camera
fixes that for us, so we’re seeing what the camera
is being fooled by,
but the closed-circuit nature of this is what
I really want to focus on. It’s really kind of…
this is an acquisition and an installation
that can loosely be
aligned with Sol LeWitt wall drawings, so we
have a series of instructions that we follow,
and in this instance, we actually had to alter
them in order to make it work for our space.
Shockey: Right, I was just going to inject from
a conservation standpoint.
While Michael said we didn’t do a lot of traditional
conservation work on this, there was no,
I didn’t have to repair a camera, I didn’t have
to fix an object, clean anything,
but our conservation technician,
[Kaitlyn Richardson],
spent an extraordinary amount of time
documenting the process of actually installing this piece,
because it’s not as simple as it looks.
Every time it’s installed in a different space,
it’s going to be slightly different,
and actually looking at Bucky’s photos earlier,
while we were getting ready for the presentation,
I realized his camera position is higher than ours,
which is why the parallelogram looks slightly
different in his shots than ours.
And it was interesting to me, in a sort of dialogue
both with Michael and our exhibitions department,
they went in and sort of did a trial run
to lay out the stripes and where the parallelograms
were going to be,
but in fact, their trial run was worthless, because
when you get there, and you get there,
and you have the camera, and you have the
monitor, and you’re setting up, and you’re saying,
“This is going to be the position,”
you actually have to go by how it looks on
the screen,
as you’re laying it out on the wall, so you have
to have somebody over looking at the screen
as somebody else has a piece of tape across
the wall saying, “Okay, that looks like a straight
line on the screen,”
and so Kaitlyn was able to capture what this,
as we referred to this, iteration looked like,
as well as precise measurements and angles
for the way everything was set up,
and that will go in and live as part of the sort
of history of exhibition and lifetime of
this particular object.
Mansfield: Yeah, this is a key point to make
about conservation of these objects.
This exhibition has been a fantastic
opportunity to
really document the installation of each one
of these works, which are all unique,
but creating a real iteration record, exactly
what this artwork
is, physically, in the space that can live with
the curatorial file and the conservation record
indef--or, in perpetuity,
will be invaluable in 30, 40, 50 year’s time, or several generations from now when curators
and conservators are looking to re-install pieces
that haven’t been seen in quite some time
or that have
suffered to some degree from technological
obsolescence and things that we’ll probably
talk about a little more in a moment.
Mansfield: Actually, we’ll talk about them
right now.
This brings us to the work that we wanted to
spend the most amount of time speaking about
today because it’s
one of the more extraordinary pieces in our
collection, but also one of the most complex,
from a conservation standpoint and a curatorial
interpretation standpoint.
This is an artwork titled, “Cloud Music.”
It was created from 1974 to 1979.
This is another view of the installation in
the space upstairs,
and I’ll talk about this arrangement momentarily,
but it is a room-sized installation
that is a collaborative effort between three artists.
Robert Watts is pictured there on your left,
David Behrman is in the center, and
Bob Diamond is on the right.
They were artists affiliated with Fluxus, and
experimental music in the 1960s and 70s.
Robert Watts was a truly influential champion
of non-traditional materials. He was trained
as an engineer,
he taught at Rutgers for quite some time, first
in the Engineering department, and then made a transitioned to the Art department,
something I think would be wholly
unheard of today.
Mansfield: But he’s, he was a really influential
artist in his time, and widely respected among
his fellow Fluxus artists.
He was really the conceptual instigator of
the work.
He had this thought, he came from the Midwest,
and when he moved to New York, he really
felt he no longer had access to the sky,
that the sky had been taken away from him
in some degree architecturally,
and that was how he had previously
oriented his day.
It’s a sort of, what’s the weather going to
be like?
Do I need to dress warmly or coolly?
I need to see the sky.
And he had this thought that he might be able
to bring the environment into his own
physical space,
so he started experimenting with photocells,
and light-driven video events,
and he conceived of what was to become of
“Cloud Music.”
He collaborated with Bob Diamond, here,
pictured here.
Bob Diamond was a, was really a video genius.
He was, he left school at the age of 16 to go to
university to study mathematics and engineering,
and was hired by NASA at 18 to work on video
systems for the Saturn Booster Program,
Saturn Rocket Program,
so he really is a rocket scientist.
And he left all of that behind to pursue his
interest in art,
which he told me not long ago, really infuriated his parents.
Shockey: He was really into creating psychedelic
light shows back in the day.
That pulsate in the music, that was his thing.
Mansfield: Yeah, crazy 70s.
Mansfield: So, he, he worked with Robert Watts
to develop a video system that would be
light-sensitive,
and they were introduced to David Behrman,
who was an experimental music composer
working in New York at the time,
who was, has been here to speak not so
long ago, so
he’s really a fascinating character.
But David was working with electronic synthesizers,
which was kind of a hot topic in the late 60s,
and together, they created this incredibly important,
monumental, artwork that is a hybrid sound
and video installation.
They created this.
Mansfield: “Cloud Music” is a…
Sorry, this is the realization of the work in 1979,
when it was, when they considered it “completed”.
It’s installed here in Whitney Museum of
American Art, cool place in New York, you may
have heard of.
Mansfield: It’s, they all had equal billing there
on the wall.
This is another installation shot, you’ll notice
that when they took the official photograph,
it was installed very cleanly, and then by the
time it made it to actual exhibition and was
open to the public,
they put of stanchions to keep people away
from the electronics.
We have electronic versions of those that beep
really loudly now.
But…
“Cloud Music” is a
closed-circuit video system. There is a camera,
this is a drawing by David Behrman, created
in 1979 to explain the very simplistic system,
but there’s a camera pointed at the sky,
collecting video.
The video signal goes into a video analyzer,
designed by Bob Diamond,
which reads the video signal and measures
the electronic voltage inside the video system,
and it sends those six points to the
music synthesizer,
the electronic music system, that outputs six
channels of audio tones.
Mansfield: The video analyzer also outputs
a video signal, so you can see what the camera
is seeing, and where those notes are struck.
It creates a, a harmonic experience, you’re really
listening to video as an environmental
event in the gallery space.
This is another photograph from the
Whitney installation.
The camera is pointed out one of the windows,
and it captures the iconic water tower,
one of the water towers of New York City.
This is one of the video channels.
The 6 points you see there, those are the
reference points inside the video analyzer.
Mansfield: This is the video analyzer,
which is a large box full of wires.
This is the audio synthesizer. This, and we’ll
talk a great deal about how these work.
It’s really kind of a beautiful invention.
These are the input channels, the connections
between the analyzer and the synthesizer,
and you can see
they’re all labeled very precisely.
In addition to acquiring the component-creation
by the artists,
we additionally acquired, compiled and acquired
all of the documentation we could round up
for this work.
I will say that it was exhibited a number of times
in the late 70s, the 1980s.
It was last included in an exhibition, I think,
in 1992, organized by Jonas Micas in Germany.
And then, but Robert Watts died in 1988.
The work was stored by his estate,
and very caringly stored by his estate.
But largely fell out of public memory.
When we acquired the work, we thought it was
important to gather as much information about
this work and its history as possible.
We, as I said, compiled the complete written
record that we could find,
so we worked with Bob Diamond and David 
Behrman, who were both still living and working,
to gather all the correspondence and schematic
diagrams that they had compiled
during the five years that this work was
in construction.
Mansfield: This is from a letter by
Robert Watts.
It’s titled, “Schematic for the layman,” so it
describes, very simply,
how the work operates. The camera feeds into
the video analyzer, which gives you the
video signals,
into the audio synthesizer and the speakers,
and I love his illustration of David’s music
down here.
Sort of a series of triangles and X’s.
But it actually accurately describes the triangle
wave audio system that he created.
The diagrams and papers include the really
frenetic invention of the video analyzer.
This is Bob Diamond’s
original schematic that you can see he altered
a number of times. This gives our paper
conservators headaches, because it’s mixing
pencil and felt tip marker and all sorts of things
that you probably should never use.
Shockey: But is a delight to the objects conservator
who knows how to electronic schematics.
And this, you know, it’s interesting about this,
Michael talks about this being a frenetic
schematic drawing, is
what’s interesting about it, we talk a lot in particularly
in contemporary art, timeless media, about
artist’s intent, and sort of understanding
what is the piece about. Well, we have all
of the documentation.
Not only do we have the documentation, we
have an understanding
in an as-built, because the annotations are
where the corrections are made
from the originally designed circuit. So we have
an as-built, so in the future, it technology changes
to a pace beyond
what, in this instance, is solid-state electronics,
there is the potential that you could think about
how, a way to emulate
what’s actually going on in the hardware of
these two particular hardware devices,
which is really the best way to sort of frame them.
Mansfield: And I think that this is…
Hugh and I have been over these documents
quite a bit to sort of,
in order to interpret exactly what their
function is.
They’re incredibly detailed and organized. This
is David Behrman’s notebook,
in which he’s actually laying out the musical score.
We have several sheets of these where he’s
experimenting with the harmonic form
that give us a sense of what it might have,
or what it was intended to sound like,
and then tying that into exact electronic schematics.
And they become much more detailed, so you
start with the,
you know, really messy idea of the invention,
then it eventually takes shape.
In addition to those schematic diagrams,
the shape is,
it’s given its shape by a series of letters
and really intimate correspondence between
these three artists. They were working across
the country.
David Behrman was teaching at Mills,
in California, and Watts was working
in New York.
They wrote letters back and forth quite often,
describing how their, describing their progress,
but they also mention things in here. They were
looking for a description of the work,
and David’s an incredibly smart guy, and he
talks here about the logic of the circuitry,
you know, exactly how these banks work, and
then he makes this very simple statement that,
“But in spirit, the project might be close to the old,
outdoor wind- and water-driven musical
instruments of Southeast Asia and Polynesia,”
and at the bottom, he says, “Like sailing, the
music is weather-dependent.”
Mansfield: And I think he is largely inspired
by John Cage,
who actually wrote a poem about this work,
that we’ve captured also in the archive, but…
Shockey: I think it’s also interesting, if anyone
attended the artist’s round table that we had
earlier, right after the show opened,
there was a question to David about what notes,
and the answer that he gave was quite interesting.
He basically said he was working around with
chord harmonics,
and he only had a selection of about 40 tones
that he could chose from that could be generated
by the electronics, so he ended up just picking
the tones that he liked the best,
that worked the best for what he thought it
should sound like,
so it’s sort of, it’s another thing that goes into
the record that’s a really interesting aspect of
working inside the limitations, but then being
able to overcome them,
just by his knowledge of music and the relation.
Mansfield: And I, you know,
from an interpretation standpoint, I think that
being able to weave these simple statements
about
the weather-dependence of the work, and the
musical instruments of Asia and Polynesia,
I think that that
gives us a really great grounding for approaching
the electronics, especially in conservation,
if we were looking at how this work was supposed
to operate, we
have some sense of where we might look.
When we brought the work to the museum,
our first step was to,
was very traditional conservation work. We
had to clean the work, it had been in storage
for more than 20 years,
and had been on the road before that, so it
wasn’t in pristine condition.
Shockey: And displayed in venues like in a tent
in a field,
not the traditional gallery space that you
would expect.
Mansfield: Not a lot of climate control in a field.
Shockey: But it, truly, when the piece first came in,
it was very straight-forward,
cleaning, stabilizing some particularly
demarcation tape,
making sure the wiring was seated,
but really it was just a very traditional
conservation treatment,
and that ended up changing pretty quickly after
the first exhibition of the piece.
Mansfield: Yeah, I’ll show you a couple of
photographs of the first installation in a
moment. The,
not only did we re-adhere the tape, and by “we,”
I mean Hugh, re-adhere the tape,
and sort of clean the box and the synthesizer
itself, but we also had to clean, very
delicately clean,
the wiring.
These connections are very fragile, and they
can tarnish, which may have effect on the
audio output,
so we spent a great deal of time looking over
Hugh’s shoulder while he did all this work.
Shockey: And now you know why they put
stanchions up, because you pull one of
those wires out,
and where does it go?
Mansfield: You know, the diagrams are really
accurate, but I don’t know that I’d be able to
interpret them easily enough to put one of those
brown wires back.
We actually set up the work when we brought
it to the museum. We set it up in a very
controlled environment, in the X-Ray Lab.
Wiring all of the, the synthesizer together with the
video analyzer to re-create what the system
should, how the system should be connected,
and then tested the equipment to make sure
it was functioning properly.
You can see the, this is another view of the
synthesizer. You can see the red nodes, located
there in the center of the screen.
Those are event counters that respond to the
signal changes coming from the analyzer,
so all of this we more or less taught ourselves
from talking with the artists and sort of
just trial and error.
Mansfield: I have a video clip here of the original
test that we did. We set up the cameras that
we received from the estate, and
[Audio from the video]
and plugged this piece in.
Video audio:
[An electronic drone underneath the voice continues]
(voice 1:) Alright, so I’ve got a flash light here.
Gonna shine it into the lens. This is sort of
the base state. We’re going to wait for it to
go off right, and then come back.
Or if I do something, will it…
(voice 2:) It’ll kick it on whenever you flash it in.
Shockey: We’re clearly still learning.
[Drone from video audio continues]
Video audio: [The electronic drone changes tones]
(voice 1:) And that’s the flashlight shining into the lens, and it moved away, and back. [The electronic drone changes tones] And back on the lens. Away. [The electronic drone changes tones once more.]
Mansfield: So, each time the [The video audio turns off] environmental happens, if a cloud passes over one of the points in the video signal,
or there’s a color change in the atmosphere, or a bird flies by, or a plane flies by, or a tree is moving,
it is an event that is audibilize by the music synthesizer creating that harmonic experience in the gallery space.
It’s something that you can really feel. It’s weaving these senses together in a way that is truly unique.
You’ll never look at the sky the same way again after really sitting with this piece. It’s kind of, you find yourself rooting for clouds when you’re driving down the road.
“Please, get up there, what do you sound like up there?”
Mansfield: This is from the installation that
we, the first installation that we had here at
the Museum when we set up the piece,
in the exhibition space.
Immediately after we acquired the work,
we worked with Bob Diamond and David Behrman
to install it in the gallery space,
and I’m showing these slides because I want
to stress just how flexible the piece is.
It shapes itself for the gallery space that it exists in.
It doesn’t have a physical form that exists like
a sculpture might, because it’s a soundscape.
Mansfield: The, working with the artists, we
wanted to tell a story about how the artwork
operated,
so we placed speakers on the wall that might
mimic the location of the X’s on the screen,
and built a little pedestal there in the corner
of the gallery.
This is what it looked like in the
Lincoln Gallery on the third floor.
You can see there the speakers sort of look
like those black X’s,
so channel one through six are represented there.
It was installed on the south side of the Lincoln
Gallery, which was not the ideal place for it,
because the sun,
the shifting sun creates a reflection on the
window that kind of interfered with the sounds.
Not in the sense that anyone
else would notice, but I noticed, you noticed.
Mansfield: So we installed it very successfully,
and it really had a dramatic impact on the
gallery space,
and then something happened.
It stopped working,
and it gave us this video signal, and we
immediately panicked.
But not really, because Hugh and I have had
a lot of experience with this now.
We realized immediately that something was 
wrong with the work, the X’s disappeared,
and in our experience, we realized that the
majority of these problems
occur with power supplies, so the first place
we looked was the power supplies.
We knew how to troubleshoot the work,
and we could reference the,
the original drawings that Bob Diamond had
made of the power supply that we had acquired
with the archive,
and Hugh was able to talk with
Bob Diamond directly.
Shockey: Yeah, I would say that, just as a quick
conservation note, one of the sort of things
I’ve begun to do, particularly whenever we have
artworks that are designed and use custom
hardware, is sit down with the artist and really
begin to talk about,
well, what’s your process for troubleshooting
if something’s not going right?
Where’s the first place you turn and start to look?
And it’s been an extremely productive dialogue
with those artists,
because they have often encountered the same
problems that you’re going to encounter as
you maintain them,
and so you begin to have a sort of user manual
guide for something that otherwise
there is no guide for, because it’s built as a
one, individual, custom piece of electronics.
Mansfield: In conversing with Bob Diamond,
Hugh pried the back of the video analyzer open,
and located the original power supplies and
replaced them with components that he had
identified with the artist
so that they could be replaced, and he did this
very carefully so that he could document exactly
what happened.
We retained the original power supplies in the
archives so that we,
we have a really clear record of what the piece was originally, sort of an as-built piece.
Shockey: Goes back to my comment about the change of technologies. So,
the original power supplies, two separate power
supplies, roughly the size of a masonry brick.
The new power supplies, we went from a linear
power supply to a switch-mode power supply.
Both power supplies in a small unit about the
size of a deck of cards.
So, the technology keeps progressing. 
Mansfield: Keeps getting smaller and lighter.
So I know that we’re going to run tight on time,
so I’m going to speed up a little bit, but
the first installation, you might have noticed,
was really quite modern
and was shaped for that exhibition gallery with
the high ceilings and narrow hallway.
For the exhibition on the third floor, “Watch
This!” I really wanted to reference the history
of art-making with time-based media,
and touch on the origin of these works, and
just how experimental and radical they were.
So I referenced, in the archive, a number of
photographs from the very early installations
in 1974,
at the Electric Gallery in Toronto, when
it was still an experimental device.
Mansfield: This is one of the original installations.
You can see the TV’s are stacked up in the
center of the room, so it created a very different 
kind of viewing and listening experience.
You can see the bicycle in the background,
that’s actually not part of the artwork.
It’s just how experimental these exhibition
spaces were. This was non-traditional art.
This was really breaking down the boundaries
that we had come to expect from looking at
sculptures and paintings and
photographs, and changing that experience.
This is another installation shot.
This is an installation in Germany, I think in 78,
in which you can see, this is sort of referencing
the installation upstairs. We laid the
electronics out in much the same way,
but you can still see the linear display. There’s
the camera here,
it goes into the devices here on the table, and
is output to the speaker systems and the TV sets.
It still has a sort of,
a narrative to the experience.
And then we brought the artists here, for the
installation, to help us tune it,
and document that process very closely
so that we
could add that, again, to the record, for, for
our long-term understanding installation
of this work.
This, sorry, this is Bob Diamond here in
those glasses,
and this is David Behrman, here. He’s looking,
they’re both looking at the audio
synthesizer, and
lining up the connections with the video analyzer.
Looking at the, I should let Hugh talk a little
bit more about this, because it’s...
Shockey: Well, yeah, I mean they were…
they come to the museum to tune it, initially,
and then we discovered there was some
instability in the circuitry,
and so really went through a process, a longer
process than any of us expected, of going
through the circuitry and trying to identify where
is this sort of anomaly that we kept hearing,
you could hear it,
and it was intermittent, and so it was really
a matter of troubleshooting and that.
So what you’re actually seeing is an unusual
piece of equipment for the conservation lab,
not so much for an electronics
troubleshooting lab, which you’re seeing an
oscilloscope in use,
to try and be able to trace where the signal
is moving and where there’s an anomaly
in the signal,
and we ended up identifying, surprisingly, in
this particular instance,
the major component that was causing the
instability in the sound, what we described
as a “warbling,”
was actually in the video analyzer,
not necessarily in the music synthesizer.
Although we did find a component, an additional
component, in the synthesizer
that we ended up swapping out and replacing
as well with
historic-integrated circuits, so solid state, but
these particular chips are still sort of available
from electronic supply house today.
Mansfield: Did we get those chips out of the archive? Is that?
Shockey: Yeah, the ones for the day of. The
other chips that I’ve replaced have come from
supply houses.
Mansfield: So, it’s kind of an interesting side
note that when we acquired the work, they
sent with it
a couple of plastic boxes full of extra chips,
and those have come in really handy in fixing
the work.
We’ve been able to use those historic, vintage
chips, to re-insert on the boards.
There’s another picture of David working with
the oscilloscope.
This is what the installation looks like. You
can see the table, built by my
exhibitions department.
The analyzer and synthesizer. But really, I hope
that you can find, if, I don’t know if you’re local
or not, but if you,
if there’s a moment at lunch when you notice
the sky is particularly eventful,
please come to the gallery and sit down for
a few moments, and listen to this piece, and
watch the video, and sort of experience the room.
It’s really quite a moving experience.
Mansfield: I have an installation recording
of the original showing at the Whitney in 1979,
that I’m going to play for 45 seconds or so,
and then I will stop and take questions, so…
[Audio from the recording plays. It is a
consistent, electronic drone, with occasional
changes in tone.]
Mansfield: I will say, fortunately, we have had
really fantastic skies here for the last
couple of weeks,
and it might be a hard fact of climate change, but
we’re really benefiting from it.
So, if you give it a chance, please come back
and experience the work. So, who has questions?
Male voice: If you just want to raise your hand,
if you have a question, we’ll get the mic to you.
Just you, you’ve got to switch that on the bottom.
Female voice: Thanks.
Shockey: Actually, in lieu of a question, until
somebody gets brave, I’ll talk a little bit about
interesting thing about old technology
and new technology,
and so the camera, video camera that we’re
using for the installation is not even, it is more
like a surveillance camera,
but the interesting thing about it, is that it
automatically will adjust to the light levels and
contrast levels outside,
as the sky changes from morning to evening.
And, both David and Bob were very
excited about that,
because one of the challenges that they had
already had, had always had in historic
installations with traditional cameras, was that
they were constantly adding filters or
adjusting the brightness control and contrast,
because it directly influences how the video
analyzer responds to that signal,
and part of the reason they were so excited
about the sort of modern camera
and its ability to automatically adjust is it actually
gives the soundscape
a much broader range of conditions it can 
work under,
so clouds that, like a day like today, where it
was really overcast,
even a little bit of texture in those clouds would
allow for change in the soundscape,
and even the evening of the opening, as
dusk was falling,
the analyzer was still responding to the light
that was in the horizon,
which is an interesting sort of pairing in how
things change over time, and sometimes
get better.
Audience member: Hi. In terms of “Cloud Music,”
you’re talking a lot about
going back to when being able to talk and communicate 
with the artists a lot.
I wanted to know if you had any examples,
whether in this exhibition or others,
where the artist wasn’t available, and you had
to make decisions about changes to the artwork.
In those instances, what kind of principles were
you guided by?
Mansfield: It’s a real privilege to be able to talk
directly with the artists.
They are not always the most reliable source.
Quite often, they see the work as a living object,
something that can evolve over time.
As an institution we really, not to institutionalize
the word, but curatorially, we want to capture 
and represent the moment, and sort of,
the real artistic achievement of the work is
captured at its birth, I guess,
so we don’t really want to change too much
because we want to know and study the object.
That material exchange with, between an artist
and the technology, is both a…
I should say it’s both a sort of testament to
the fantastic advances in electronics,
but it’s also
a testament to the cultural meanings embedded
in them, and those are really locked down on
the historic timeline.
When things progress stylistically, we want
to see it in the first instance so that we, we
really know where it resides. With “Cloud Music,”
we captured the earliest instance of the work,
but we are talking with the artist about how
it can live indefinitely.
We have several works from the Nam June
Paik Archive on view in the exhibition.
He’s no longer with us. We have a great deal
of documentation about those pieces,
and there’s a pretty deep historical record that
we can reference,
from criticism and things like that, but we certainly
can’t ask him about what his intent would be
for the evolution of those pieces.
Certainly with Dwinell Grant’s work, we don’t
have access to the artist, and we just have
to hope that,
and do as much research as we can into the
intent behind the work, but also
into the technology
and exercise some curatorial intervention, I guess.
Shockey: Right, and I think you have to rely
on other people’s interaction with the
artist as well.
In the instance of this exhibition,
we have an artist who,
when the exhibition opened, was a living artist, who’s now deceased. Chris Burden recently passed away.
And, so, it’s in his, the evolution of his work
is quite robotic from the material that we’re
showing in this exhibition,
versus the things that lamposted.
He’s doing out at LACMA. It’s quite different.
Mansfield: I think that’s a really, really
complicated question, but one that’s really 
exciting about our field.
We uncovered a number of early computer
programs that were written by Nam June Paik,
that were captured by the archive, and had 
gone completely undocumented.
One of them is on view in the
exhibition, titled, “Etude,”
which is loosely interpreted as sort of a musical
scale, or trial, to exercise a musical instrument.
He programmed, in a very complex computer
programming language, Fortran, in 1967,
a poetic work that draws, using letters from
the English alphabet.
And there’s a lot of question about whether
or not this was a work that was intended to
be a moving image,
whether this was designed to progress over
time, or whether or not the artwork resides
in the computer program itself,
or in the print that it creates.
Legally, there are fantastic questions about
the intellectual property, there. Is it in the program,
or the print?
But I think, curatorially, it’s great to have this
nebulous area. We don’t know where it is.
But, unfortunately, he’s not here to ask, so we
have to give as much information that we can
to the public, and let them decide.
Pray that some, poor, doctoral student will dig
in there, figure it out in the future.
Audience member: So, what would you say
is the artwork for “Cloud Music?”
I mean, obviously, when it’s not on display, what
do you show people, what do you document,
what do you, I guess?
Mansfield: Right. I think it’s very important to
note that this is not a single-channel video.
This is not
a, this has no beginning and end, or middle.
That it is really a sound, an aural experience,
and that it is a harmonic event that is a
hybrid video and sound experience that exists
in real time.
When we have it not on display, it’s just an artwork
that is not on view,
but it’s, when we’re able to put it on view, it’s
it sort of speaks for itself. The artwork is in
the soundscape, I think.
Shockey: I think it’s a great question. I think
you ask a hundred different curators, you’re
going to get a hundred different answers.
For me, personally, it’s an experiential work,
and it, the piece is being able to have that auditory
and visual experience.
Now, that’s not possible without the
facilitation through the hardware,
because there’s nothing else out there that
does what this, what the hardware does,
and if you go back to the original drawing of Bob Watts,
the idea was to view the sky in a sonic way,
and that’s really ends up being what the final
product of the artwork is.
So you have the components that help
to facilitate it,
but in the end, it’s, unless you’re in that room
and experiencing what it’s doing,
you’re not really experiencing the artwork. Yeah,
I can look at the components, I can
understand the schematics,
but it’s still doesn’t give me access, and every
day is a different day.
Like Michael pointed out, there’s no single channel.
It is live all the time.
Mansfield: You know, it’s interesting, I was, I was speaking at Stanford last week with a number of artists
who work in sound and time-based media,
and Paul de Marinos was one of them, and he
made a really interesting comment about this
piece in that it can be created in probably 15
minutes, using
computer technology today on an iPad,
and you could write something out and have,
you could use the exact score, program, the 
exact score that David Behrman made,
but it would not be the same experience.
It really exists in its moment, sort of
as a completely unique environment, and I
think that these are, these are really sort
of great,
it’s something that bridges the past
and the present.
Shockey: In a, I think you point out
something really important, is, yeah, today,
you can take 15 minutes, generate it,
but I remember David talking about it at the
round table, how he really,
it took him about a year to figure out how to
actually get the harmonic chord, the notes of
the harmonic chord
so that they didn’t fall out of tune.
And if you understand the sort of electronics
and what was possible,
in the end, he discovered that he had to basically
sync them all to the same clock.
But it, in the time period, because this technology,
and the access to the technology was so new,
it literally took him a year of trial, error, scratching
his noodle,
and trying to figure out, okay, what’s going to
make this work? And he did it, and it still
works flawlessly,
but it’s an interesting, if you lose that historical
context, you lose an appreciation for the amount
of effort that went into its creation.
Mansfield: So I think we have maybe one more
question, I think, and then we’re going to get
booted out of here by security,
but we could talk about this, I could talk about
this all day.
Shockey: He can.
Audience member: Well, my question was,
and it actually, you briefly touched on this during
the presentation, but I was wondering if you
could elaborate a little more.
Where do you find yourselves drawing a line
when it comes to emulation versus the original,
because it’s one of the things I run into quite
often in my own studies, is that it seems to
be a very subjective line people draw,
so I was just curious as to where you found
yourself in that position.
Mansfield: You know, I think it’s a, especially
in conservation circles, I think this is a really
interesting question.
You know, the conceptual intent behind a work
could be emulated.
If it really presents the idea, and this is another
thing that I’m sure a hundred different curators
would give you 120 answers,
but you know, the conceptual intent is one thing,
and the material invention is another.
As, as a curator here, I think it’s important we
look at the object and the material exchange
between the artist and that object,
is really sort of revealing. There’s a striking
disclosure there,
about just what they thought about this
technology and how they invest that into their
creative practice.
I think that that’s, that’s quite important.
At the same time, if the material presence is lost,
and it can only be emulated, that’s the only
way we’re able to experience it, then the emphasis
is maybe placed on the conceptual intent,
and there’s something incredibly valuable about
that as well, so ideally I’d like to avoid
emulation and show the original, but
you know, ultimately, it’s the idea that counts.
Shockey: I agree with Michael, and I think,
often, it appears as if it’s made in an
arbitrary way, but,
you know, I like to think in best practices
and in conservation,
we really take it on a case-by-case basis, and
come to a meeting of the minds
between the curator.
What’s both fiscally possible, and what is
physically possible, to actually provide.
Because, and that’s really the thing about
time-based media art, or media art,
is it must reveal itself over time, which
necessitates that it’s an experiential thing, and
without that experience, it’s a dead image
on the print-out
that you get some idea of what it might have
sounded like from someone who recorded it,
but because, you know, we, we have to rely
on somebody else’s experience, we’re denied
the opportunity to experience it ourselves,
so I think, on a case-by-case basis is where
you really have to start thinking about where
am I going to draw that line for emulation.
Mansfield: One more question before the security
guard gets up here. He’s pretty far away, it’ll
take a second.
Audience member: Before the security throws
us out, and before Hugh gets a chance to exit
stage left,
I’d like to just make a comment.
First of all, Hugh, on behalf of the Smithsonian,
I’d like to thank you for your stewardship
over the years.
Mansfield: Hear, hear. Thank you.
[Applause]
Audience member: Your stewardship of the
collections entrusted in your care,
especially time-based media,
and helping the institution in a profession to
really figure out, how do we conserve this type
of material.
Also, your contributions to pan-institutional
initiatives, especially the Haiti Recovery Project,
and for your leadership with the Washington Conservation Guild.
We wish you the best in your new endeavors.
We’ll hear from you in the future as part of the
larger profession, but just remember that
Smithsonian doors are always open to you.
Shockey: Thank you, I appreciate it. 
Mansfield: What a great way to end it.
[Applause]
Mansfield: Thank you all very much for coming.
I really hope you get a chance to see the show.
Thank you.
[Applause]
