Interview with Pip Laurenson (part 1/2)

PACKED: How did you arrive at the Tate and more generally how did you get involved in the conservation of time-based media art?

Pip Laurenson: I did a three-year conservation course in polychrome, wood and stone. I then came to Tate as a sculpture conservator under the Henry Moore Foundation² internship. It was while I was doing this internship that I started working with time-based media works. At the time Tate had just acquired Bruce Nauman’s ‘Violent Incident’.³ When I began to work on this acquisition I realised that we didn’t really have a plan regarding how best to deal with such works. That’s how my research started and I was lucky enough to win a travel scholarship from the Gabo Trust.⁴ From there, a post was created: at the time the job title was for a Sculpture Conservator for Electronic Media. Later in the run-up to the opening of Tate Modern two other posts were created, one additional conservator and one technician. Time-based media conservation officially became its own conservation section within Tate’s conservation department in 2004.


PACKED: What are your missions at the Tate?

Pip Laurenson: My work as the head of Time-Based Media Conservation is to manage the team of conservators and technicians who are responsible for designing preservation strategies for the time-based media works in Tate's main collection, and also for delivering the programme. By programme I mean the work we do for displays, exhibitions, loans, acquisitions and caring for the collection.


Packed: How many people does the Time-Based Media Conservation section involve?

Pip Laurenson: Apart from me, there are two other time-based media conservators and one conservation technician. Tina Weidner deals with exhibitions and displays as well as some collection care and acquisition work, but her main responsibility is to support exhibitions and displays in time-based media conservation. Patricia Falcao, who is covering Kate Jennings who is currently on maternity leave, is responsible for acquisitions and loans. Patricia was our intern and will go back to being so for just under a year when Kate Jennings returns. There is Lee Cavaliere who is our conservation technician. On top of that, we have Frederico Fazenda Rodrigues who is currently working in a freelance capacity on recent acquisitions. Processing new acquisitions makes up approximately 50% of our work. It’s a very large part of what we do.


Packed: What amount of artworks are you in charge of?

Pip Laurenson: We currently have nearly four hundred works. Tate didn’t acquire single channel pieces;⁵ historically we have acquired more complex installations. We have quite a small collection but it’s one that tends to involve complex works.


Packed: How is the video content preserved?

Pip Laurenson: Our collection is migrated. A migration programme has been in place since 1994. It’s currently all on D5.⁶ At the end of next week, we should have Ingex system⁷ set up so we can start testing this as a future migration route. This system has been developed at the BBC⁸ and we are hoping to build on this for the heritage sector. We are working with the Electronic & Electrical Engineering Department at University College London. This system will be able to hold uncompressed video⁹ wrapped in a MXF¹⁰ open file format¹¹ and it will be stored on LTO.¹²


The storage shelves for videos. (Photo: PACKED vzw).

Packed: How do you manage the equipment for all these complex works?

Pip Laurenson: On top of the conservation team for time-based media, there’s also a specialised installation team that works with us. They are the people on the ground dealing with display maintenance. They also work with the exhibitions team and curatorial department on new commissions and works which are loaned in, often from the artist. We have two pools of equipment for Tate. There is a pool of equipment that is used for loans in, and there’s the collection's equipment pool. The collection equipment is divided into three categories as each work will have a different relationship to its technology; understanding this relationship so we can manage it appropriately is a very important part of our role. The very generic equipment, DVD players¹³ for instance, can be used for a number of different works. The very specific items of display equipment have often been modified by the artist, for example Gary Hill’s¹⁴ monitors in ’Between cinema and a hard place‘ and they are dedicated to one work.¹⁵ Then there’s a group of equipment between these two categories that tends to include things like slide projectors or film projectors; equipment that’s used for, and is absolutely essential to, a group of works. For example it’s very important for James Coleman’s¹⁶ works such as ’Charon (MIT Project)’¹⁷ that a particular type of slide projector is used. These pieces of equipment are dedicated to a broader group of works. It is possible that the generic equipment can become more important and more key to a group of works as time passes and that technology becomes rare. If a piece of equipment is totally generic at the time the work was acquired but then becomes more significant to a group of works as it becomes obsolete, we can take the decision to dedicate that item only to that group of works. It is a flexible system which helps us to make decisions as to how the equipment should be managed.


Packed: The highest end is the equipment dedicated to a work?

Pip Laurenson: Yes, I guess we can call it ‘level one’ or something like that. It is the equipment that we would never use for another work. ‘Level two’ is when we use equipment for a specific group of works for which it’s very important, and maybe that equipment is becoming rarer. And then ‘level three’ is totally generic.


Packed: Even the ’level three’ equipment is only used for the display of works in the collection, not for another purpose like transferring tapes for example?

Pip Laurenson: No. We might use it if we need it to check a work. If we need an SDI¹⁸ input for example we might use it temporarily, but it’s not used in the education department or anything like that. It’s just used within the context of the collection. It is also the case that if the installation team needs to borrow an extra DVD player, for example, for a loaned-in work they can borrow these. There is a great deal more flexibility with this group of equipment.


Packed: You talked about the equipment used for the loans in. Could you describe it more?

Pip Laurenson: Yes, we have a pool of equipment used for works which Tate borrows. Although we lend a lot of works to other museums, we borrow very few from other collections. The works we borrow are often directly from the artist and sometimes they are commissions. The team that deals with these works has its own pool of equipment. And because they’re not looking at the long term, in terms of preservation, it gets managed differently.


Packed: And when you lend a work do you always lend the equipment with it?

Pip Laurenson: We lend quite a lot of time-based media works to other museums. It depends on the work and the nature of the loan as to whether we lend the equipment with it or not. We try not to because it’s time-consuming for us. But obviously sometimes works have very specific equipment and it’s not possible for people to hire it locally. It may also be that the equipment has been made or modified specifically for that work and has to be lent. It really depends on the type of equipment and on the work. Within the UK we have something called the National Partnership. This is a group of museums that have a special relationship with Tate, and our agreement is to support them to show more challenging works. In this case they may need us to lend equipment.


Packed: Could the fact that you have to provide the equipment be a reason to refuse to lend a work?

Pip Laurenson: It’s all part of the negotiations that are part of responding to loan requests. The first thing that happens in the loan process for Tate is that the institution who wants to borrow the piece puts in a request six months in advance. It’s the same for all works in the collection. These requests are considered at a meeting of the loans group. If there’s an agreement to support the loan and lend the work, then it’s always discussed in principle. At that point we would clarify the terms. It’s just the start of the negotiation. In some cases it is probably cheaper for the borrower to hire display equipment locally because it’s very expensive to ship equipment around the world. We just need to make sure that they can get the right equipment and that they have the means to support the loan in a sensible way. At the end of the day we are responsible for making sure that the work is displayed as the artist designed it to be.


Packed: What type of space do you use to store the equipment?

Pip Laurenson: It is stored within the art stores which are approximately 45% RH¹⁹ and about 18 degrees °C.


The TATE's art stores. (Photo: PACKED vzw).

Packed: And the shelves?

Pip Laurenson: It is stored on metal shelves.


Packed: Are these the best storage place and conditions you could imagine for the equipment?

Pip Laurenson: Yes, I think so; unless we start thinking in terms of very sophisticated packaging such as oxygen free packaging. Some items could do with better flight cases.


Packed: Is the equipment stored with other parts of the installation?

Pip Laurenson: No, our collection management system allows us to track each element separately with the location of its components number. What we do is to give equipment its own collection management number. They have EQ numbers²⁰ rather than component numbers for the artwork because they might be used for different pieces, depending on what their status is.


Equipment on shelves in the art stores. (Photo: PACKED vzw).

Packed: Even if they are part of this ’level one‘ group of equipment?

Pip Laurenson: ‘Level one’ equipment is somewhat borderline. Sometimes they’ll be listed as components as well as equipment. Listing all equipment items as EQ numbers is important in terms of maintenance. It is something we need to resolve to be consistent.


Packed: In the case of long-term storage would you consider removing some parts, like the rubber belts or springs in video players for example?

Pip Laurenson: The only thing that we remove at the moment is batteries because we know that they create a problem. We are interested in developing a more detailed strategy around maintenance, for example ensuring that certain equipment is fired up annually. But we haven’t had any problems with rubber belts. We don’t have a lot of video players because for the playback equipment of the video works we use external facilities houses. We don’t have the tape decks here. The historic playback equipment is mainly LaserDisc²¹ players, and I think we also have a few VHS players.²² There are only a few works which require a specific historic playback device. For example, we have two ¾” U-matic players²³ that are part of an artwork. They are more important for their sculptural properties than because they are U-matic players. The artist would agree to have the video played back from a different source, for example a flash drive concealed in the U-matic deck. Where we have a number of rubber belts is in the film projectors, and I actually have to say that film projectors get used all the time at the moment but that might change. Maybe we should get more sophisticated about that.


Packed: Do you have an accurate inventory of the equipment?

Pip Laurenson: We do. And we’re proud of it because it’s hard work! It’s part of Tate’s collection management system: TMS, The Museum System.²⁴ MoMA²⁵ uses the same system; it’s a quite common collection management system. We have got 1.623 items in the EQ category. Various pieces of information are held about the equipment on this system, for example the current location of a projector and a location history etc. We have a number of searchable fields: the manufacturer, the model, the dimensions packed and unpacked, shared accessories, etc.

We hold both operation and service manuals for the display equipment. In some cases we attach these documents to TMS but in other cases that’s not possible, for example in the case of the D50 CRT projectors²⁶ where the schematics are in a big binder. Where we have electronic copies, we link them to TMS.


Packed: The hard copies of the manuals and the schematics are linked to the equipment. How can you find them if they are not digitised?

Pip Laurenson: By the EQ number. We have created folders for each EQ item. They contain all the files for the equipment, hard copies of the service manuals and also documentation. This information should be kept in the folder. The records of examination are the most important information.


Packed: Does it contain a maintenance log?

Pip Laurenson: Yes. Anytime anything happens, it’s logged and we also keep more detailed information about servicing. If a repair is done, we register it.


Packed: How do you manage maintenance?

Pip Laurenson: Every time something comes down from display, it is serviced so that it’s ready to go when we need it again. That's fundamental. Our displays tend to be up for about six months to a year, usually a year. It’s quite a long time. We have to hold spares for all displays. During that time it’s quite likely that equipment has to be regularly swapped out for maintenance. There is an ongoing maintenance regime whilst a work is on display which has to be carried out before the gallery opens. This is planned as part of the display planning. Most of our maintenance happens around the use of the equipment. What we’re looking at now is what we should be doing for equipment that’s in storage; whether we should be firing up CRTs²⁷ and things like that.


Packed: Who’s in charge of this? Is it someone at Tate or is it someone external?

Pip Laurenson: Our team manages it. Lee Cavaliere, our conservation technician, is the one responsible for that. If Lee can’t do the servicing or repair in-house, we might send it to a company externally. For example we had a problem with a Pioneer DVD player that stopped looping properly. Something like that we would send to Pioneer and we would just pay for it to be repaired externally. Most of the companies are represented in the UK; that’s the advantage of being in London. Either we can send it back directly to the company, if it’s not very far from London, or they have designated a company to deal with their repairs. But we’re doing more and more repairs in-house. Where I think our expertise has really improved in the last couple of years is in the maintenance of slide and film projectors. Lee Cavaliere and Tina Weidner are incredibly knowledgeable about slide and film projectors. It's quite rare that we send them out for repair.

The day to day maintenance in the galleries is a joint effort but largely carried out by the installation team.




The folders containing the artworks files. (Photo: PACKED vzw)

Packed: What about CRT monitors?

Pip Laurenson: We’ve had a few CRT experts, who’ve worked for the major companies and are now retired, come and help us. We ask them to come in for a day or two to work alongside our staff, thanks to which our conservators and technicians have been able to increase their knowledge. There was a point where we had the expertise to change tubes in-house for CRT projectors.²⁸ We wouldn’t want to change tubes for a monitor but changing tubes for a projector is a bit more straightforward. Now this expertise is a bit borderline because we don’t do enough of that kind of work to be very comfortable with it. There was a point where people felt relaxed enough about doing such work because they had enough CRT tubes that needed changing and enough CRT projectors to keep their skills honed. Probably if we needed to do it now, we’d bring somebody in to bring everyone up to speed again. This is a problem with older technologies; we quickly lose our familiarity with handling it.


Packed: What is the equipment that requires the most maintenance and is the most at risk?

Pip Laurenson: I would say that 16 mm²⁹ film projectors are the equipment that fails the most; probably because we’re using them a lot at the moment. But it’s also because a film projector is a mechanical thing and it needs to be very precisely adjusted to work well. Then slide projectors are also a bit of a ‘labour of love’ because again they require a lot of maintenance. Both film and slide projectors are, at the moment, well supported by small companies and individuals who are very knowledgeable and many of the spare parts are, remarkably, still available. What we are most worried about at the moment are 4:3³⁰ CRT monitors, in fact any kind of 4:3. 4:3 LCD³¹ monitors are also becoming rare now. Works that require CRT monitors and works that require 4:3 aspect ratio on a monitor are the big problems.


Packed: Because projectors will be easier to replace?

Pip Laurenson: In the majority of cases yes, because then you don’t have the aspect ratio issue. Concerning CRT projectors, I think a lot of artists who are very attached to that technology will move on to some of the different hybrid projectors³² that are coming out now. CRT was often loved because of the wonderful contrast they could produce; they are one of the few projection technologies which can really produce black. But recent technologies are improving in this regard and in their rendition of colour. I think that it’s actually the monitors that will bring the biggest problems because they have their own sculptural presence which is sometimes valued. You can’t show a 4:3 work on a 16:9 monitor without adding black bars on the sides or altering the picture in some fairly drastic way.


Packed: Do you collect a lot of spare equipment and spare parts?

Pip Laurenson: We do collect spare parts. We also collect spare items of equipment. For example for Gary Hill's work ‘Between Cinema and a Hard Place’ we have a spare set of CRT monitors because these are very important for the work and the work includes a range of very specific size monitors. We’ve probably got the most comprehensive set of spares for film projectors, partly because we have built up the most expertise in-house in terms of dealing with them. We simply had a great deal of film works on display in the galleries for a long time. This enables us to build expertise in terms of what will fail and what needs to be replaced. In terms of other technologies we are very interested in doing a test where we look at different methods for reconditioning CRTs.


Packed: How is the knowledge about equipment distributed from one person to another in Tate?

Pip Laurenson: We try to host study days if there’s maybe a big issue that we all need to understand more about, or simply think or talk about what we should be doing. For these we might bring somebody else in to help us talk through or learn about an issue or a technology. That’s one way we try to keep learning as a team. When we were using a lot more CRT projectors and a new member of staff joined the team, we would bring someone in with specialist expertise to provide a training day. Everybody would have a chance to talk to him and have a bit of a refresher on how to re-align³³ a CRT. The person we work with is very good at explaining how to line up a cathode ray tube projector and all the ins and outs of their maintenance. We’re not a very big team. We have regular weekly meetings and we also meet with the installation team downstairs and talk about technology changes.


Packed: That’s also how the different departments interact with each other?

Pip Laurenson: Yes, and we would like to do more of it. There are always new things we need to know more about. For instance we’re interested in knowing more about Surround Sound³⁴ at the moment, about High Definition Video,³⁵ etc. There are external courses that we go to. Most of my team have been to a course called ‘Understanding Video Technology’ that was run by a company named VET in Hoxton Square London. There was a day on HD with Mites in Liverpool at FACT (the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).³⁶

Usually our trigger is what we’re acquiring in the collection and what we’re showing at a particular time. Tina for example has been installing Gustav Metzger’s³⁷ ‘Liquid Crystal Environment’, which consists of modified slide projectors where there’s a glass slide that has liquid crystal in it. Basically the voltage varies, making liquid crystal warm up or cool down, creating different patterns on the wall. She’s been working closely with this work for a long time and has built up an enormous amount of expertise around it. Expertise increases, and we all have a responsibility to document it. If we fall under a bus, somebody else needs to be able to install the artwork. Documentation is really important. I guess there are different sorts of questions here: How do we share knowledge within the team? How do we share knowledge between the different teams and departments at Tate? How do we keep up-to-date with emerging technologies? How do we learn more about older technologies for example film projectors? How do we document this knowledge?


Packed: There's no video department in Tate?

Pip Laurenson: No, within Tate there is a team that deals with the education material and supports different staff needs across Tate related to audio visual material – setting up projectors for meetings or helping people to manage their audio visual assets. There is also Tate Media which is largely organised around the web site. Staff within Tate Media have video skills, and they prepare material for the web including webcast events and also shoot and produce video programmes. There are different people actually across Tate who have quite a lot of technical knowledge. But we also have a number of people who we rely on outside Tate who have a great deal of technical knowledge. We consider it really important to stay in touch with such contacts. They vary from people in commercial companies, to people in universities, to people who run their own small companies from their garage. Finding people who have empathy for the artworks and for the kinds of problems that we are faced with on a day-to-day basis is very important to us, as are people who have got good skills in electronics!


Packed: When you acquire an installation, is the equipment also acquired from the artist?

Pip Laurenson: Not very often. When we consider a work for acquisition at Tate, it goes to something called the ‘collection committee’ before the trustees actually agree to it. At that point we write a report. We identify the cost of archiving and whether it has any special equipment needs that we can’t already cover using the pool of equipment we have. It’s very rare that we acquire equipment as a package with the artwork. There are a few artists who provide their works as complete systems; artists such as Gary Hill, Bill Viola³⁸ or Stan Douglas³⁹ have this type of special expertise in their studios. Their works might often contain bespoke systems that have specific computer control elements for example. For this kind of artwork we might get the equipment as part of the work, or perhaps some of the equipment. But usually because of warranties, etc., it’s not a good idea to get equipment from the artist. The other thing is that galleries will often try to sell you their equipment because they bought it to show the work and they don't really want to keep it. But then again, it might not be the ideal equipment, we wouldn’t have the warranties, it might not be very well maintained, etc. We try to avoid equipment coming as a package, unless it’s actually a good idea and useful or necessary in some way.


Packed: Or unless it’s really hard to find?

Pip Laurenson: Yes, unless it's hard to find. Although artists will specify hard to find equipment without supplying it and we spend time finding it on eBay. Sometimes elements might be specially fabricated such as the units which are used in Metzger’s ‘Liquid Crystal Environment’ or it might be that the artist’s studio has the expertise in-house to build a system.


Objectives and lenses for projectors in a storage box. (Photo: PACKED vzw)

Packed: Do you also buy spare equipment at the moment of acquisition?

Pip Laurenson: To be honest, the actual purchasing usually happens when the work goes on display. If an artist wants to use equipment that is going to become imminently obsolete, or hard to get hold of, then we will try to buy it when we acquire the work. Otherwise we usually wait until the work is on display. And when we display a work, we always have a spare. We have to because the galleries are open for such long hours. That’s when we tend to do the buying.


Packed: When you’re looking for rare equipment, do you mainly use eBay or do you have any other way of finding it?

Pip Laurenson: No, eBay. Sometimes we get hold of it through other people (we have some specific suppliers for some things), but mostly through eBay.

Click here to read part two of the interview.


Notes

¹Tate is a family of four art galleries housing the UK's collection of British art from 1500, and of international modern and contemporary art: Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Tate Modern holds a collection of international modern and contemporary art from 1900 to the present day, and is housed in the former Bankside Power Station in North Southwark, London.
²The Henry Moore Foundation is a registered charity, founded by the artist in 1977 to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts, and in particular the works of Henry Moore. Its main responsibilities are preserving Moore's legacy at his home in Hertfordshire and through exhibitions worldwide; funding exhibitions and research at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds; and awarding grants to arts organisations in the UK and abroad. The research department of the Henry Moore Institute runs the Institute's residential fellowship programme and has strong links with the University of Leeds' School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, as well as having established relationships with academic departments around the UK. See: http://www.henry-moore.org/
³Bruce Nauman (° 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. After having earned a reputation as a conceptual pioneer in the field of sculpture and having worked with film, he produced his first videotapes in 1968. Using his body to explore the limits of everyday situations, Nauman explored video as a theatrical stage and a surveillance device within an installation context, influenced by the experimental work of Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass.
⁴ The Gabo Trust was founded in 1988 by the family of the sculptor Naum Gabo (1890-1977). Aware of problems with new materials in modern and contemporary sculpture, they intended that the Trust should increase resources for sculpture conservation in institutional collections, and support for the further education of professional conservators. See http://www.gabotrust.org/
⁵The term ’single-channel‘ refers to video or media work that involves a single information source (such as a DVD), a single playback device (such as a DVD player), and a single display mode (such as a flat-screen monitor). To cite a familiar example, when you play a DVD and view it on your television at home, you're watching a single-channel work. Source: http://www.eai.org/resourceguide/glossary.html?sabre
⁶D-5 is a professional digital video format introduced by Panasonic in 1994. Like Sony's D-1 (8-bit), it is an uncompressed digital component system (10-bit) but uses the same ½” tapes as Panasonic's digital composite D-3 format. D-5 standard definition decks can be retrofitted to record High Definition video with the use of an external HD input/output box. The HD deck conversion does not allow for any error correction that exists on standard definition recordings, as the full bandwidth of the tape is required for the HD recording. A 120 min D-3 tape will record 60 min in D-5/D-5 HD mode. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D5_HD
⁷See http://ingex.sourceforge.net/index.html
⁸The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the largest broadcasting organisation in the world. The BBC was the world's first national broadcasting organisation and was founded on October 18th, 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd. The preservation department looks after the BBC's TV and radio collections. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/preserving.shtml
⁹Video compression refers to reducing the quantity of data used to represent digital video images, and is a combination of spatial image compression and temporal motion compensation. Most video compression is lossy — it operates on the premise that much of the data present before compression is not necessary for achieving good perceptual quality. Uncompressed video files don’t use compression, and are often large files. The fact that no data is lost is one of the requirements for good digital archiving.
¹⁰ Material eXchange Format (MXF) is a a "container" or "wrapper" format for professional digital video and audio media defined by a set of SMPTE standards. It supports a number of different streams of coded "essence", encoded with any variety of codecs, together with a metadata wrapper which describes the material contained within the MXF file.
¹¹An open file format is a published specification for storing digital data, usually maintained by a standards organisation, which can therefore be used and implemented by anyone. For example, an open format can be implementable by both proprietary and free and open source software, using the typical licenses used by each. In contrast to open formats, proprietary formats are controlled and defined by private interests.
¹² Linear Tape-Open (or LTO) is a magnetic tape data storage technology originally developed in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the proprietary magnetic tape formats that were available at the time. Seagate, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM initiated the LTO Consortium, which directs development and manages licensing and certification of media and mechanism manufacturers. The most recent version (LTO-5) was released in 2010 and can hold 1,4 TB in one cartridge. Since 2002, LTO has been the best selling "super tape" format and is widely used with small and large computer systems, especially for back-up.
¹³DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc (or Digital Video Disc) and is an optical disc storage format. DVDs are made up of a reflective aluminium layer, a polycarbonate substrate, a dye layer and a clear lacquer. DVD is not a suitable archival format for video mainly because it uses a lossy form of compression – MPEG-2. Many artists use DVD as an exhibition format and this has replaced LaserDisc as a popular display format for many museums and galleries. As an exhibition format DVD tends now more and more to be replaced by MPEG-2 files played from a flash card player.
¹⁴Gary Hill (° 1951, Santa Monica, California) is an American artist and one of the pioneers of video art. He is one of the most important contemporary artists investigating the relationships between words and electronic images. His inquiries into linguistics and consciousness offer resonant philosophical and poetic insights, as he explores the formal conjunctions of electronic visual and audio elements with the body and the self. With experimental rigour, conceptual precision and imaginative leaps of discovery, Hill's work in video is about, and is, a new form of writing. Source: http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/hill_cv_e.html. See also: http://www.garyhill.com/
¹⁵’Between cinema and a hard place‘ (1991) is a work by the American artist Gary Hill that comprises twenty-three video monitors of various sizes (stripped of their casings): twelve 13” colour, five 9” black-and-white, and six 5” black-and-white. See Pip Laurenson's essay on Gary Hill's installation: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/time_based_media.htm
¹⁶Although the Irish artist James Coleman (°1941, Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon) has worked with film, video, photography and theatre since the beginning of the 1970s, he is best known for the installations in which he uses different projectors to project slides in synchrony with a soundtrack. With photographic and film media, he redefines the traditions of representation and of the creation of images which are primarily associated with painting.
¹⁷See: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cinema/coleman.htm
¹⁸Serial Digital Interface (SDI) refers to a family of video interfaces standardised by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).
¹⁹RH stands for Relative Humidity, a term that is used to describe the amount of water vapour that exists in a gaseous mixture of air and water vapour.
²⁰ EQ numbers are equipment numbers.
²¹A form of optical media that, unlike DVD, stores video as a composite analogue signal. The LaserDisc was first introduced by Philips and MCA in 1972, and has been on the market since 1978. LaserDiscs can be glass or plastic. There are essentially two types of LaserDisc: those mastered for constant linear velocity (CLV) and those mastered for constant angular velocity (CAV). CAV discs store approximately 30 minutes of video, can be controlled in a frame-accurate way and can be still-framed. CLV discs can store approximately one hour of video but cannot be controlled frame-accurately and cannot be still-framed. Once a popular display format for many artists, the LaserDisc has now largely been superseded by DVD. LaserDiscs could not handle saturated areas of colour, and would produce artefacts appearing as herring bone patterns. CAV discs did, however, have the advantage of frame-accurate external control. Source: http://www.eai.org/resourceguide/glossary.html?laserdisc
²²VHS (Video Home System) is a consumer-level video standard developed by the Japanese company, JVC, and launched in 1976. A VHS cassette contains a ½” wide he magnetic tape and holds a maximum of about 430 m of tape, giving a maximum playing time of about 3,5 hours for NTSC and 5 hours for PAL at "standard" (SP) quality. Several improved versions of VHS exist, most notably Super-VHS (S-VHS).
²³¾” U-matic is an analogue video format that was developed at the end of the sixties and consisted of a ¾” video tape in a cassette. It was the forerunner of the analogue Betacam
²⁴The Museum System (TMS) is a collection management system developed by Gallery Systems. See: http://www.gallerysystems.com/products and http://www.gallerysystems.com/tms
²⁵MoMA stands for Museum of Modern Art (New York), one of the most important museums in the world for modern and contemporary art.
²⁶Sony introduced the D50 CRT projector in 1997, together with the higher end G70 and G90 models. The D50 are small and quiet sets with 7" ES focusing tubes, 800 lumens, digital convergence, on screen menus (and lots of built-in test patterns), video, s-video and component inputs. 64 Khz scan rate makes them 720p/1080i (HDTV) compatible.
²⁷The Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun (a source of electrons) and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen. The image may represent electrical waveforms (oscilloscope), pictures (television, computer monitor), radar targets and others.
²⁸A CRT projector is a video projector that uses a small, high-brightness CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) as the image generating element. The image is then focused and enlarged onto a screen using a lens kept in front of the CRT face. Most modern CRT projectors are colour and have three separate CRTs (instead of a single, colour CRT), and their own lenses to achieve colour images. The red, green and blue portions of the incoming video signal are processed and sent to the respective CRTs whose images are focused by their lenses to achieve the overall picture on the screen. A main advantage of CRT projectors is the superior black level compared to LCD and DLP based projectors. But compared to LCD and DLP based projectors they are larger and heavier, they require far more time to set up and adjust and the absolute ANSI brightness achievable is lower.
²⁹16mm film was introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1923 as an inexpensive amateur alternative to the conventional 35mm film format. 16mm refers to the width of the film. The format was initially directed toward the amateur market and was often referred to as sub-standard film by the professional industry. But 16mm has been extensively used for television production, and is still used by experimental filmmakers and other artists. The two major suppliers of 16mm film today are Kodak and Fujifilm.
³⁰The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of the width of the image to its height, expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. The 4:3 ratio for standard television has been in use since television's origins and many computer monitors use the same aspect ratio. 4:3 is the aspect ratio defined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a standard after the advent of optical sound-on-film.
³¹A liquid crystal display (LCD) is a thin, flat electronic visual display that uses the light modulating properties of liquid crystals (LCs). LCDs have displaced cathode ray tube (CRT) displays in most applications. They are usually more compact, lightweight, portable, and less expensive. They are available in a wider range of screen sizes than CRT and other flat panel displays.
³²Here Pip Laurenson refers to hybrid LED projectors that are developed by Casio and that use a hybrid of LED and Laser technology (in combination with a processing of the image with a DLP chip) which allows for a significantly brighter image than all other projectors using LED technology.
³³Because most recent CRT projectors have three separate CRTs (a separate CRT for red, green and blue instead of a single, colour CRT), and their own lenses to achieve the overall picture, one must each time again re-align the projector so that the projected image does not exhibit colour halos and the colours are mixed correctly.
³⁴Surround Sound encompasses a range of techniques for enriching the sound reproduction quality of an audio source with audio channels reproduced via additional, discrete speakers. Surround Sound technology is used in cinema and home theatre systems, video game consoles, personal computers and other platforms.
³⁵The term High Definition (HD) today refers to video formats which have a higher resolution than the Standard Definition (SD). Today, there are two resolutions for HD: 1080 or 720 picture lines.
³⁶FACT is a Liverpool-based cinema, art gallery and the UK's leading organisation for the support & exhibition of film, art and new media. See: http://www.fact.co.uk
³⁷Gustav Metzger (° 1926, Nuremberg) is an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966. Metzger was also involved in the Fluxus movement and famously declared an Art Strike from 1977 to 1980. Concerned with environmental issues in art already in the 1970s, many of his projects are now seen as astonishingly prescient. ‘Liquid Crystal Environment’ is a mixed media work made in 1965, and remade in 2005.
³⁸Bill Viola (°1951, New York) is an American artist who is regarded as one of the pioneers of video art. His work has contributed to the recognition of video art as an important form of contemporary art and to the expansion of the scope of video art in terms of technology, content and historical reach. Viola’s video installations – spatial environments which immerse the viewer in image and sound – are characterised by the use of the very latest technology, but at the same time they also stand out for their direct simplicity and precision. See: http://www.billviola.com/
³⁹Stan Douglas (°1960, Vancouver) is a Canadian artist who is best known for his film and video installations and his photographic works. He has been praised for his enlargement, in both a sensual and intellectual way, of the experience of the cinematic and museum space. With recourse to the intellectual, cultural and ideological traditions of modernity, his works exemplify a critical revision of Western history, past and present. The failure of modern utopias and the “ghosts” they spawned form the central themes of his work.