AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) has been acquiring media works since the 1970s, and in 1987, SFMOMA formed one of the earliest Media Arts curatorial departments in the United States. A cross-departmental collaborative group Team Media began in 1994, but it was not until 2006 when the Photography Department welcomed their first media art accession. PhotoFlicks and PhotoFictions was created by Lucas Samaras in 2005, and it showcased the artist’s interests in self-portraiture and image manipulation. The artist replicated his workstation at his studio for viewers to explore his photographic and audiovisual archives. The work comprises 4,432 photographic files in iPhoto and 60 iMovie files on a Mac Mini, presented with an Apple Cinema HD Display 23” monitor, an Apple mouse, a custom printed mouse pad with instructions, portable speakers, an Ikea Hannes Desk, and three Design within Reach Bellini chairs. At the time of acquisition, interviews were conducted in order to explore strategies related to acquisition, display, loan and long-term preservation.

After learning the work was selected for the Sea Change exhibition in 2023, seventeen years after its first installation, members from Curatorial, Conservation, Registration, and Collections Technical collaborated to revisit past records and documentation. We discovered that speakers and furniture were selected and provided by the gallery. They were neither used at the artist studio, nor were they the same style or model used by the artist. With this key information, we were able to set up our scope of work to focus on the Mac. After experimenting with different tools and options, QEMU was employed to emulate Mac OS 10.3.8 systems. It allowed us to exercise the work in its native environment and observe unresolved and emerging challenges ranging from technological obsolescence to gallery maintenance requirements. We also came across seventeen slideshows in iPhoto that were not listed in artwork medium descriptions. Together, we examined the viability of some past proposed solutions. We carefully laid out a roadmap to perform various levels of migration for both software and hardware components, and investigated potential implications and changes associated with each approach.

We presented our findings and migration plans to the artist’s representative and collaborator to gain their feedback. Approved by the gallery and our curator, we started exploring different methods to export digital content out of iPhoto to Photos in macOS Ventura. During the process, Conservation and Collections Technical worked closely with our staff from IT to tackle unexpected issues. To name a few obstacles, iPhoto 5.0 and Photos 7.0 have drastically different interfaces and display mechanisms, and slideshow was not designed to be transferable. Additionally, we implemented different tools to limit access to a variety of functions in OS Ventura to reduce gallery maintenance. Addressing the rapidly changing and proprietary nature of Apple systems and products, we aim to share our strategies and thinking process to adjust our practices to preserve, assess, migrate and provide access to the work on our internal server and in our gallery spaces.