TVs in ART: Conserving Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs)
August 27, 2021, 1-3 pm EST
August 31, 2021, 1-3 pm EST
Television sets manufactured with cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors have been used in artworks since the 1960s, and are now challenging conservators in museums and collections worldwide. Approaching this obsolete technology raises many questions:
How can these works be sustained into the future?
How can one learn about old-fashioned TV maintenance and repair?
Where can one find replacement components and technical expertise to maintain and service artworks dependent upon analogue technology?
What are the approaches and perspectives of stakeholders who aim to preserve legacy technology in their collections?
The Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, is pleased to offer a free webinar on cathode ray tubes (CRTs) in art to discuss the preservation challenges of this obsolete technology. Presentations will range from the conceptual framework of media theory, media culture, perception, and art history to the technical details of functionality, equipment significance, and the challenges of maintenance, conservation, and future display of CRT-based works. The webinar will conclude with a panel discussion that will address the future of CRT-based artworks.
The free webinar is designed as a resource for those operating in the broader field of time-based media (TBM) art conservation, including educators, artists, art historians, museum curators and directors, collectors, gallerists, engineers, computer scientists, technicians, and conservators. This webinar requires registration, and registrants will receive access to pre-recorded content to supplement technical sessions on August 26th, 2021.
This webinar is offered as part of the project Time-Based Media Art Conservation Education and Training at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Program
August 27, 2021 - CRT Culture - Media Culture
1-2pm EST, Keynote lecture: Never Twice the Same Color
Susan Murray, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and Director of Graduate Studies, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University
Keynote abstract: In 1952, RCA came out with a new highly sensitive single-gun color tube that would make both CBS’ color wheel and RCA’s previous three-gun system obsolete. The tube was demonstrated to the National Television System Committee in the fall of 1952, and by the following January, the organization announced that was recommending the RCA compatible system over the FCC approved CBS system as the standard for color television. A few months later, once the Korean war was over and the ban on color receiver manufacturing was lifted, RCA petitioned the FCC for approval of what was being referred to as the “NTSC system.” While RCA’s system was serviceable in many ways and even proved to have quite spectacular image quality on occasion, it was also unpredictable, often requiring significant technical management to successfully transmit an image without flicker, bleeds, or degradation. In fact, even after the NTSC system was in full and regular use for many years, it was still considered to be so unreliable that the acronym for the NTSC was often jokingly referred to (especially by engineers) as standing for ‘Never Twice the Same Color’, ‘Never The Same Color’ or ‘No True Skin Color’. The reproduction, transmission and reception of NTSC color was a complex process and there was much room for error at all points of the transmission and reception process, leading to distortions and glitches such as no color, no color hold (changing colors or drifting vertical bands of color), incorrect colors, color hum bars, color trails, color flash effects, and color snow. In this talk, I will discuss what these kinds of errors, failures, and peculiarities revealed about electronic color and how its complexity and subjectivity was managed at the points of production and reception by the television industry during the decade following color television approval.
Susan Murray is a media studies scholar and historian who uses television as an entry point to analyze post-war era technology, culture, design, aesthetics, and industry. A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, her research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women. She is the author of Bright Signals: A History of Color Television (Duke University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the 2019 Michael Nelson Book Prize by the International Association for Media and History, and Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (Routledge, 2006). Her work has appeared in journals such as Public Culture, Screen, The Journal of Visual Culture and Technology and Culture as well as popular outlets such as The Atlantic.
She is currently writing a history of the development and use of closed-circuit television as essential infrastructure and form of automation for a set of diverse fields such as medicine, education, business, manufacturing, and the military. The aim of this work is to better understand the technology as an aid to the expansion of U.S. post-war consumer society, industrial science, and social reform, as well as to consider it as a pre-history to our current moment of increasingly expansive and invasive deployment of digital-based surveillance and our even more recent reliance upon digital video connection for social distancing.
2-3pm EST, Midcentury Museum TV: Experiments and Failures
Lynn Spigel, Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures, School of Communication, Northwestern University
In the 1940s and 1950s, numerous US art museum began to explore the uses of television as a medium, art object, and means of public relations. This talk explores a variety of experiments with CRTS and broadcast TV, from museum TV programs broadcast on local stations to closed circuit television to the establishment of archives and TV festivals. I consider the contentious nature of these early experiments among museum directors and the reasons why they often failed.
Lynn Spigel is author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press. Winner of the ICA Book Fellows Award); Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke University Press); TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (University of Chicago Press); and has co-edited numerous volumes including Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke University Press), Feminist TV Reader (Oxford University Press), and Electronic Elsewheres (University of Minnesota Press). She a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on media homes. Her new book, TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life, is forthcoming from Duke University Press (June 2022). Her work has appeared in journals such as Screen, Public Culture, Cinemas, and Cinema Journal and has been translated into French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, and German. She writes and teaches about the cultural history of film, television, and digital media, with a focus on gender, technology, design, and media’s relation to everyday life.
August 31, 2021 - CRT Technology
1-2pm EST, CRT Functionality and Assessment
Chi-Tien Lui, Chief Engineer and President of CTL Electronics
Raphaele Shirley, Media Restoration Consultant, CTL Electronics
In this presentation the specialists Chi-Tien Lui and Raphaele Shirley will analyze the basic construction and functionality of CRT display technology. They will go through during the course step by step recommendations for assessing CRT based artworks. Prepared questions and direct online Q&A will offer a deeper understanding and response to common questions related to CRTs and the associated vintage video technology.
Chi-Tien Lui, the president and chief engineer of CTL Electronics, came to the U.S. as a 19 year-old electrician from Chungking, China. After his arrival, he studied at a variety of institutions: the RCA Training Institute in New York; Utah State University in Logan, Utah; and the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn. He took several jobs in-between, including a position as a technician on the computer fuel tank system of the Apollo Space Program in Los Angeles. In 1968 he started CTL Electronics, which pioneered some of the initial technology that ushered in the age of non-broadcast video. CTL was one of the first corporations to offer equipment and guidance to new users of the revolutionary medium, including businesses, artists, and home enthusiasts. The industry has changed vastly since its initial days but CTL has been there every step of the way, participating in a wide spectrum of video applications and technologies.
Raphaele Shirley, an artist and media restoration consultant, has been working with technology-based art since 1995. She was Nam June Paik’s studio-assistant from 1997 - 2002, helping in the creation and installation of many of his small and large-scale art works. She was a technical assistant for his touring Retrospective “The World’s of Nam June Paik” for the S.R. Guggenheim museum. She worked from 2002-2006 as a technician for the S. R. Guggenheim Museum in their Audio/Visual department and Digital Imaging department. She has been collaborating with C.T.L. Electronics Inc. since 2005 in the restoration of numerous major technology- based artworks for renowned museums and for corporate and private collections world-wide. In extension of her art & technology expertise, Raphaele has led artist collectives and artist initiated projects such as [PAM]Perpetual Art Machine, The New York International Fringe Festival and the experimental arts venue the Times Square Arts Center. She shows nationally and internationally her multi-media installations.
Panel Discussion
2-3pm EST, The Future of CRT-based Artworks
Dara Birnbaum, Artist
Martina Haidvogl, Lecturer, Bern University of the Arts
Florian & Christian Draheim, Colorvac, CRT Specialists
Moderated by Christine Frohnert and Lilia Kudelia, Guest Curator, YVAA program, Residency Unlimited (RU)
Dara Birnbaum was born in New York in 1946 where she continues to live and work. She is a pioneer of video art and has profoundly influenced its visual vocabulary since the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited internationally at prominent institutions, such as: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, Germany (2021); Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (CGAC), Spain (2020); MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2017); amongst numerous others. Her work is in permanent collection at: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; and S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium. Her book Note(s): Work(ing) Process(es) Re: Concerns (That Take On / Deal With), originally produced as a single handmade copy in 1977, has been republished by Primary Information, NY (available August 2021.) She is a recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, in Creative Arts (Fine Arts). She has been lauded as an important artist, and included in the Phaidon Press compendium Great Women Artists (2019) and Hundred Heroines, a UK-based organization celebrating women in photography. She is the subject of a forthcoming retrospective at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022), and a major survey at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2022). In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art created The Birnbaum Award in the artist’s honor.
Martina Haidvogl is a lecturer in Conservation of Contemporary Art at the Bern University of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, she was Associate Media Conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011-2019), where she has piloted documentation and preservation initiatives for SFMOMA’s Media Arts collection. Martina has lectured and published internationally on media conservation and its implementation within collecting institutions. Her research focuses on cross-disciplinary collaboration practice fostered through digital tools, serving the needs of the art of our time.
Florian and Christian Draheim represent a German family of CRT technicians with a long history in CRT service and maintenance. More recently, the focus of their company Colorvac has shifted to preservation services, while being particularly devoted to the needs of CRT-based artworks.
Christine Frohnert (Graduate degree 2003, Conservation of Modern Materials and Media, University of Arts, Berne, Switzerland) is partner of Bek & Frohnert LLC, Conservation of Contemporary Art, based in New York City since 2012. Previously, Ms. Frohnert served for twelve years as a conservator of contemporary art and later as chief conservator at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. She was Chair of the Electronic Media Group from 2008 - 2012 and initiated the conference series TechFocus. Ms. Frohnert was named the inaugural Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies at CC/IFA/NYU in 2012. Since then, as Institute Lecturer at the Conservation Center, she offered instruction in time-based media art, including the course Art With A Plug: The Conservation of Artwork Containing Motion, Sound, Light, Moving Images and Interactivity as well as Topics in Time-Based Media Art Conservation and Technology and Structure of Works of Art: Time-based Media. Christine Frohnert is currently Research Scholar and Program Coordinator for the TBM initiative at NYU.
Lilia Kudelia is a curator and art historian. Her current research focuses on television and art from the 1960s onwards and the challenges in restaging and preservation of broadcast dependent and CRT-based artworks. Born and raised in Ukraine, she also studies closely visual arts and cultural infrastructures in the post-communist countries. Kudelia currently serves as a guest curator at Residency Unlimited, NY, where she develops residencies for the laureates of the Young Visual Artists Awards (YVAA), a network of twelve awards in the counties of Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. She has previously held curatorial and research positions at Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, TX, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Art Arsenal in Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2017, Kudelia co-curated Ukrainian National Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale that featured work by photographer Boris Mikhailov. She holds an MA in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, a BA in Cultural Studies from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Organizers
Christine Frohnert, Conservator of Contemporary Art, Bek & Frohnert LLC; Research Scholar and Time-based Media Program Coordinator at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Aminah Ibrahim, Assistant to the Time-based Media Program Coordinator, Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Hannelore Roemich, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Conservation and Director of the Time-based Media Program at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Please direct questions to Aminah Ibrahim; ai582@nyu.edu
The Institute of Fine Arts provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Requests for accommodations for events should be made at least 2 weeks before the date of the event. Please email ifa.events@nyu.edu for assistance. Access to TBM public lecture recordings can be found at https://vimeo.com/showcase/4262969.