He is the Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Ben in his natural habitat.īen is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. I can confidently say that no other platform can even come close to making that claim. I think that Niio has a huge potential to offer to artists, galleries, and museums, in that it offers a turnkey solution for collections management, digital preservation, display, editioning, and distribution. How do you think a platform like Niio will affect the medium of digital art and its multiple entities (artists, galleries, museums, curators)?
Work with someone who has experience devising actual solutions, and develop an immediate plan, and a five year plan for the preservation of your materials. While ensuring proper care and preservation of your important digital assets certainly isn’t free, there are many approaches one can take for varying levels of expertise and budget.įacilitating digital preservation on small budget, with limited expertise is just a matter of good systems design. Many people think that if they are just one person or a small institution, that there is nothing they can do because digital preservation is expensive and complicated. What is the biggest misconception people have about digital preservation and what would you like for them to understand?
If you hold digital materials in your collection and you are not thinking carefully about digital preservation, the odds really are stacked against you. Lack of active and systematic stewardship equates to benign neglect.Īrtists working with digital materials must actively consider preservation or run the risk of their work being inaccessible some day in the future when an interested collector comes knocking.įor museums or collectors it is a matter of responsibility both to the cultural record, and to one’s own financial investment. You cannot simply put something digital on a shelf and expect it to be readable in ten years. Why do you think digital preservation is so important for artists, collectors and museums? At that moment, it struck me as such an incredibly fascinating problem and I knew that I wanted to see how I could contribute to answering some of those questions. Until that time, I had never stopped to consider who was ensuring that contemporary (read: digital) cultural heritage would be around in 100 years. Photo by led to your interest in digital preservation?Įarly in my graduate work, I learned about digital preservation. We are thrilled that Ben has joined us as an Advisor and is working with us on a key part of the Niio platform – – digital preservation. He has also worked with the Whitney Museum, Cory Arcangel, JODI, Rhizome just to name a few. In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections. Currently, he is the Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). For more than twenty years, Silicium is collecting and building an inventory of this huge collection of machines and documentation.Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. Its member hold a collection of thousands of pieces renewed and enriched each year. Silicium is a French association with the mission to keep and preserve old computers and game consoles to show them to today and tomorrow's audience.
Vincent Leclaire is a member of the Toulouse based French computer collectors and enthusiasts association Silicium. More on About Vincent Leclaire and Silicium Fino-Radin holds an MS and MFA from Pratt Institute in Library and Information Science, and Digital Art respectively, and is an alumnus of Rhizome at the New Museum where he formerly served as Digital Conservator. In private practice Fino-Radin has advised museums and artists, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, artist Cory Arcangel, and the art collective JODI. Presently, Fino-Radin serves as Digital Repository Manager at the Museum of Modern Art's department of conservation, and as Adjunct Professor in NYU's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Ben Fino-Radin is a New York, NY based media archaeologist specializing in the preservation of digital contemporary art and culture.