DIRECTOR

Restaurierungszentrum, Düsseldorf (DE)

BIO

Joanna Phillips is the Director of the Conservation Center in Düsseldorf where she leads an interdisciplinary team of conservators who are charged with the care and research of the city’s art and cultural heritage collections. Prior to her appointment in 2019, Joanna acted as the Senior Conservator of Time-based Media at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she founded the media conservation division in 2008. As the founder of the museum’s CCBA initiative (Conserving Computer-based Art), Phillips partnered with New York University’s Department of Computer Science to research and treat software-based art from the collection including web art.
Prior to the Guggenheim, Phillips specialized in the conservation of contemporary art at the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich and as a researcher in the Swiss media conservation initiative ActiveArchives. Phillips holds an MA in paintings conservation from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

ABSTRACT

Introducing Conservation Standards to the Care of Web-based Artworks

This talk investigates the special needs of web-based artworks in a collection context and demonstrates how established conservation ethics and practice guidelines can serve to inform the development of new practices and methodologies in the care of web art. To cultivate new and crucial expertise in the intersection of art conservation and computer science, the author launched the CCBA initiative (Conserving Computer-based Art) at the Guggenheim Museum and partnered with Prof. Deena Engel from the Department of Computer Science at New York University. Over the course of five years, an interdisciplinary team of conservators and computer scientists examined early web artworks from the Guggenheim collection and developed new methods for the documentation and treatment of these works.