At the start of a new decade

2020 has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? For us at Small Data this year holds particular significance – we are crossing the threshold into our fourth year in operation. We wanted to take a moment to reflect and share with you some of the highlights of 2019.

A new mission

Although Small Data was originally founded as a lab for research and conservation of time-based media art, over the years though we have grown and expanded to meet emergent needs in the broader art-world ecosystem. This created the need for us to develop a mission statement to serve as our north star as we continue to grow. Here’s what we came up with:

That is Small Data’s raison d'etre, plain and simple. In 2019 we fulfilled that mission through providing consulting and services in a few key areas of activity. We are excited to share some of the success stories with you – moments where we were able to collaborate with our clients, to help them better meet their own missions of preservation.

Organizational Change

More often than not, the biggest barrier to change is not technology – it is people, and the procedures and protocols they put in place and grow accustomed to. All over the world, institutions find themselves in the position of needing to evolve their methods of acquiring, describing, and caring for their collections, so that they may effectively care for digital or time-based media.

In 2019 we continued to develop our model for mentorship and coaching, and employed it in the service of helping our clients weather these periods of change and growth. We continued our relationship with the 9/11 Museum and Memorial, and added to our roster, the Australian Center for the Moving Image and the 21C Museum Hotels.

Coaching session with Candice Cranmer and Nick Richardson of ACMI

Digital Infrastructure Assessment

Small Data’s Erin Barsan, and AIC’s Kristin Macdonough

Clients often call upon us to investigate and map out their existing information systems, storage, networks, policies, and procedures for the stewardship of digital assets under their care. In 2019 we worked with clients of all shapes and sizes to conduct this sort of analysis: from large institutions, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, to contemporary artists, such as the studios of Clifford Ross.

Both benefited greatly from receiving a meticulous map of their current practices, an assessment of risks posed by gaps between their current state and known best practices, and a vision for how they can iteratively improve their current state over three years.

Cataloging Systems Migration

In 2019 we continued our collaboration with the Easton Foundation to steward the archives and legacy of Louise Bourgeois. This year we launched our work to study the information and research needs of internal staff and outside researchers, design a custom tailored metadata and digital asset management system, and ultimately migrate the Foundation’s legacy dataset away from Filemaker Pro, and into the newly established Collective Access system.

Erin Barsan presenting a data model to the Small Data team (Nick Kaplan, Rachel Egan, and Ben Fino-Radin)

Tool and Product Development

Fortunately for us and our clients, there is a rather wide array of free and open-source software solutions designed for the needs of the cultural heritage sector. Still, we often encounter very severe challenges that are faced by many of our clients, for which there is no existing tool or solution. This year marked Small Data’s first software release.

Decentralized storage has incredible potential for helping our clients meet digital preservation storage standards. Leveraging the power of community and strong cryptography offers an alternative to going it alone, or relying heavily upon the cloud. The problem was that for Filecoin there was no user-friendly app that made it possible for folks to easily get started with decentralized storage. Thanks to a collaboration with The USC Shoah Foundation, and Protocol Labs, we produced Starling.

Conservation of Time-Based Media Art

Conservation continues to be absolutely central to all that we do. This year saw our lab develop new ways of collaboration with contemporary artists on the conservation and display of their work. One example of this work, is our collaboration with renowned contemporary artist Sondra Perry (recipient of the 2018 Nam June Paik award). Thanks to our longtime client and collaborator, the Robert Rosenkranz collection, we had the opportunity to collaborate with Sondra on a conservation treatment for her 2016 piece Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation.

Our research, engineering, analysis, and in-depth collaboration with the artist, has helped us to ensure that Sondra’s artistic vision and intent is better safeguarded than ever before. Her studio is now less burdened by the kinds of ongoing support and maintenance that time-based media works can require, and we have begun applying this support to other artists in our portfolio.

Engineer Matt O’Hare, Founder Ben Fino-Radin, Artist Sondra Perry, and Rosenkranz Collection Manager Georgia Harrell

Display of Time-Based Media Art

Conservation of Time-based media art almost always intersects with issues of exhibition and display. In 2019 we helped the 9/11 Museum and Memorial produce and implement an exhibition of Wolfgang Staehle’s Untitled (2001) that ran simultaneously in six sites – all five boroughs of NYC, and one in New Jersey. We leveraged hardware design and engineering expertise to develop a 5G connected system for ensuring display of the work was 100% reliably in synchronization.

Education and Knowledge Sharing

Sharing our expertise with our colleagues and peers, as well as students and emerging professionals is so important to Small Data’s mission. This year we shared at venues such as Christies, the Library of Congress, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Institute for Conservation, the Art World Conference, and the Art Libraries Society of North America. We were also pleased to host a class visit to our lab from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts’ conservation center.

An attendee of the Art World Conference taking notes during Small Data’s session

The Next Ten Years Will be an Adventure

One half of the Small Data team (Erin Barsan and Nick Kaplan) embarking on an adventure in the Catskills

We wrapped 2019 up, and kicked this new decade off with a week-long offsite retreat in the Catskill Mountains. The team took this time to take a big step back from the day-to-day of our work, so that we could put our heads together and form a collaborative vision of where Small Data Industries is headed and what we will look like in 2030. We came away inspired, and can’t for this future to unfold. In today’s uncertain socio-political climate, our mission to safeguard the permanence and integrity of the world’s artistic record has never felt more relevant. We look forward to empowering and supporting clients of all shapes and sizes over the coming decade. If you’re inspired by what you’ve seen here and would like to talk about collaborating, feel free to make arrangements here.