As three PhD researchers working in the Design and Digital curatorial team, we have a unique opportunity to interact with the museum in different ways, informed by our individual research interests. In this first post, we discuss our projects and how we came to be working with digital objects. In a follow up post, we’ll reflect on what it means to be a researcher in an institution and how we hope to create wider-reaching impacts through our work.
Katherine Mitchell: We all met here but come from different disciplinary backgrounds such as design and art history. To kick off, Anna T, can you tell us a bit about your background and how has this informed your approach to researching digital objects?
Anna Talley: I’m currently undertaking a PhD in Design at the University of Edinburgh, funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities. I’ve spent the summer at the V&A, working on a 3-month project looking into the history of digital collecting at the museum and creating a questionnaire to help guide the acquisitions process for digital objects. My background is in history of design and material culture, and I have this very situated way of thinking about production, designers’ processes, the way in which an object mediates something, and how they’re used. I’m also interested in contemporary history, and the way that engaging with contemporary history enables places like museums to connect with their audiences and have a voice in current affairs. So, when I approach objects in a museum context, I’m thinking, ‘Well, how do you take that thing and then make it something that my mom would be interested in looking at? How might you make it relevant or expand her understanding of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century?’ And of course, so much of the contemporary world is mediated digitally. If you want to be engaged with current discussions about politics, media or popular culture through the lens of material culture, that material is digital.
But Katherine, you have a background in architecture?
KM: So, I’m completing an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD with the V&A and Birkbeck College. But yes, I came from working in architecture, although my academic background actually spans art, architecture and film studies. And even within those subjects, I was always working at disciplinary borders. For example, my film studies research primarily focussed on video art and artist’s videogames. And it was the interactive nature of the videogame, and it being an accessible consumer product as much as an artwork, that interested me most. Both things are intrinsically linked to its digitality.
Some years before that, I’d also discovered internet art and found it completely captivating for the way it explored the internet itself as a medium. But these artworks also felt fragile and fragmented. With internet art, I immediately recognised the transience of digital culture. What was compelling was not only the more experimental nature of this creative practice, but also the challenge of telling its future histories. These challenges extend beyond art and design, of course, because as you say Anna, so much of our contemporary world is mediated by digital technologies. So, as well as this interest in materiality and the unique properties of the digital, it’s my interdisciplinary background, and always pursuing new areas of intrigue that’s shaped my approach to working with digital collections now.
AT: Well, it makes sense, right? Having an interdisciplinary background is really important because every object is different, and there are so many crossovers between fields. You’re able to come to these works in a more open way. But Anna, you’re a conservator?
Anna Mladentseva: That’s a big word, but yes, I would say that I am working towards being a conservator. I’ve just gone into the 2nd year of my London Arts & Humanities Partnership PhD at University College London (UCL), which focuses on collecting and conserving software-based art & design in the V&A collection. Like Katherine, I’ll be embedded in the museum throughout my PhD.
My interest in digital objects began with time-based media, software-based art and internet art. During my undergraduate degree in History of Art at UCL, one of the first times I wrote about digital art was an essay on the internet artwork Hosted (2020), by Olia Lialina. The work comprises a GIF of someone swimming in a pool, but every frame of the GIF is distributed across a different website. It’s quite different from her earlier distributed GIFs (see Summer (2013)) in that she would upload the images to platforms such as Tinder using fake profiles and then delete them. What would remain are these hyperlinks to temporary storage locations called “buckets” because, as you know, these services continue storing your images for some time even after you delete your profile. So, she would construct the GIF from these “bucket” hyperlinks. With Hosted, I wrote about notions of storage and tried to undo the dichotomy of “installed” vs “de-installed” works in museums. Computer-based art always seems to be “in storage”, or at least in a direct relationship with storage. This was for a module called ‘Methodologies of Making’, which I’m teaching on in the next academic year, so I’ve really come full circle!
My introduction to conservation also came during my undergrad degree, where I took modules in conservation and material science. After this, I completed an MSc in Digital Humanities. This focussed on managing digital resources, programming, some collections care and digital preservation. So now I can synthesise all these interests in my PhD! But I’m not just interested in the practical questions of how to conserve an object. I’m also interested in the politics of conservation, who gets to be called a conservator, and who gets left out of the process.
KM: Right, because museum work is always collaborative, but digital objects also demand a very different skillset. So many ways to care for digital objects don’t fall under the formal job title of Conservator. But can you expand on this relationship between practice, theory and ethics?
AM: Because I’m looking at software-based objects that may not work anymore, or may not work in a few years, I’m developing processes and treatments to make those objects work again. But the politics and ethics of conservation are also important for me, and I use conservation practice as a means for thinking about theory. For this, I’m approaching software-based objects from the perspective of their infrastructures. I adopt a post-Marxist lens to problematise the systems of knowledge, labour and control that both make these objects what they are and enable, or sometimes impede, their conservation. How does theory figure in your research, Katherine?
KM: I’m also thinking about things that don’t work! My research considers collecting, exhibition and long-term care for digital art and design objects specifically through the lens of breakdown. But I’m steering the idea of technological obsolescence and failure away from being purely a conservation problem to overcome. So rather than a practical conservation project, I’m pursuing a curatorially-driven approach to the inevitability of loss. Where the rapid obsolescence of digital objects means their lifespans are decades at most, the museum has objects that are thousands of years old. By accepting the certainty of repeated breakdown over the extended timeframes of museum collecting, I’m situating my research after failure. With this, I’m thinking more about breakdown in care networks, asking what might become of “dead” digital objects in collections, and exploring alternative approaches to stewardship, interpretation and representation.
But Anna T, you’re in a different position to us as your V&A work is separate from your PhD. Are there crossovers?
AT: My project at the V&A has been built around the need for a more standard acquisitions procedure for digital objects, but this relates to my PhD as both are centred around contemporary design and digital objects. My doctoral research looks at sensationalism in news design between the 19th–21st century. For this, I’m working with digitised newspapers from the 1890s and news websites, which connects my larger interests in communication design, contemporary history and digital objects.
But what connects this is also applied outputs. I hope my PhD will have some outputs that are actionable by designers and policymakers, but the V&A placement has given me a different way to think about digital objects, and to put into action some of my thinking around digital objects. A lot of my experience outside of academia has been in museums, and I find museums to be places where research can really have an impact because of the public audience.
KM: What’s an unexpected thing you’ve experienced in your time here?
AT: I’d say having to significantly shift the way I work day-to-day on my PhD project to working on a multi-stakeholder project in a massive institution. I first thought about the research as being similar to what I’ve always done, but of course, when you’re doing a project that aims to shape working practices across different stakeholders, you need to go out and talk to those people.
AM: So, who have you been talking to?
AT: I spoke to curators, head registrar and conservators at the V&A and at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York. I also spoke with people in archives and ran a workshop with people from across the V&A, because digital collecting happens across departments. What about you both?
AM: I’m split between the Design and Digital curatorial team and Books, Paper and Photographs Conservation. I typically spend a day a week with curators, and another in conservation, so these are the two teams I mainly talk to. But even within conservation, for example, I’ve been talking to colleagues in preventative conservation as they use a lot of software in their work. These conversations have been really valuable for understanding existing IT infrastructures. I’ve also spoken to an artist whose work comprises one of my case studies!
KM: For my research, I’ve been talking to all the above, but also artists, Exhibition Managers, the Technology team, and Visitor Technology, who are responsible for digital interactives and any digital objects on display. It’s really demonstrated the collaborative nature of digital collections care. Anna T, how has this shaped your approach?
AT: I think it’s a shift from objects to people, and thinking about how to create practical outputs, like a questionnaire, that become part of the workflow. This always relates to object histories, but using these histories to shape future working practices requires changing the way you conduct research. Being a researcher in an institution, you can stay at your desk reading about objects, but to me it’s a lot more exciting, and a better learning opportunity, to conduct more collaborative, cross-departmental research. For research to have an impact, you need to really understand people’s needs and perspectives, and to expansively consider applications. I think we say that a lot in research, but saying it and doing it are two very different things.
KM: This question of impact is so critical, both for us and for the museum. Let’s come back to that in Part 2.
