Episode 040 Anna Mladentseva

Show Notes

This week we are visiting with emerging conservation professional Anna Mladentseva. Throughout the course of her undergraduate and masters studies at University College London, Anna has been building some very fresh philosophical and ethical frameworks for how we think about the conservation of software based art, net art in particular, and her perspective is refreshingly grounded in a very sort of hands-on technical approach. In our chat we delve into the ins and outs of studing Flash, reframing how we think about an artist’s relationship to their source code, and what it means when a conservator is flagged as a hacker :-) Our chat finds Anna just wrapping up her graduate degree, and about to embark on her doctorate studies where she will be (among other things) studying the digital collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Tune in to hear Anna’s story!

Links from the conversation with Anna
> Anna’s paper “Responding to obsolescence in Flash-based net art: a case study on migrating Sinae Kim’s Genesis” https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2021.2007412
> Fetchish Magazine: https://www.fetchish.net/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben vena Radin. And on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week, we are yet again, visiting with an emerging professional. 

[00:00:17] Anna: Hi, my name is Anna Mladentseva and I am a masters student doing digital humanities at University College, London.

[00:00:23] Ben: I recently had the great pleasure of seeing Anna speak at this year's annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation, and just knew that we had to have her on the show. Over the course of the master's degree she's just wrapped up as well as the PhD she is about to begin, both at University College London, she has done great work building what I found to be some very fresh, philosophical and ethical frameworks for how we think about the conservation of software based art and net art in particular. Her perspective is refreshingly grounded in a very sort of hands on technical approach. I am just so thrilled to have Anna on the show this week and share her story with all of you. Before we get to that, though, just a reminder that if you are enjoying the show, I would very much appreciate it if you could leave us a review, it really helps other folks discover the show and helps in my fundraising efforts to ensure that I have a budget to equitably compensate artists, guests. And if you leave a fun note on your review, you might just hear it on the air. Now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Anna Mladentseva. 

[00:01:31] Anna: I was born and grew up in a town called Nizhny Novgorod which is about 450 kilometers east of Moscow. And I guess my introduction to the arts began with the internet and digital culture, which makes sense why I'm so interested in net art specifically because, you know, I didn't really go to museums or galleries until I visited Moscow and my family moved to Moscow in like 2010 or so. I guess I spent a lot of time in front of my computer. This was post-Soviet early two thousands Russia where a lot of people were recovering from like the chaos and the instability of the nineties and there was kind of a lot of hope associated with the internet and the technology that's coming from the west. So one of the things that I loved doing is just kind of like, playing flash games which is probably why I did a lot of research on Adobe flash because I have a personal connection to this type of content. And also social worlds, like IMVU and Zwinky and all of these early social 3D worlds. I guess gaming was a big part of, my exposure to the arts as well and going to like gaming parties with my friends. The first kind of exhibition that I remember going to this was like a traveling exhibition of Picasso. And, there was a huge queue for it as well. We had to queue for it for like the entire day, pretty much. There was a lot of, excitement around the entire exhibition and I always questioned why, certain art forms are more privileged than others. Why are people queuing up to see Picasso, but are not killing up to see kind of more local forms of arts or more underground forms of art. I was always really torn between computer science and art. I was one of the first people that did the computer science GCSE, which is an examination you take when you're 16. And after doing that, I just really enjoyed the subject and decided to pursue computer science for my IB, which is the examination that you take when you're 18. I lived in Moscow for a bit, and then I moved to the UK to pursue my education here. And you know, I was looking at universities in the UK, so, I ended up in London in UCL. I just ended up . Choosing UCL for the whole material studies science aspect. And you know, they had a conservation lab and everything. That kind of really learned me in. I was always encouraged to computer science at university, but I just really liked art and I was making art back then. I was a painter and I was also experimenting with like cathode ray tube televisions, but more from like a sculptural perspective, rather than like an electronic kind of engineer perspective. I'm really glad I did the degree I did because that's how I got introduced. into time-based media conservation because the UCL history of arts degree is very different to other history of arts degrees. Like they have this whole material science and focus in the degree. During my undergrad, I ended up doing like modules in organic chemistry, just like traditional conservation modules. Just like to learn about, and like learning about ceramics and photographic media, like polymers and I remember doing my coursework on cellulose acetate degredation and there was also a lot of theoretical modules, like theory and history of conservation, methodologies of making that focused on the materiality of the works and yeah, it's just through those modules that I think I got introduced to time-based media. In that module, we looked at traditional conservation texts, but also looked at the variable media questionnaire, we looked at the work of conserving computer-based arts initiative at the Guggenheim and the ways in which Deena Engel and Glenn Wharton apply conservation ethics to the source code. So ever since I did that module I knew that I wanted to get into the field and at least do my dissertation about it. And as I was taking that module, I was also taking a module called Methodologies of Making, taught by Hélia Marçal. And I did my coursework on Olia Lialina's work and her recent work Hosted, commissioned by arebyte gallery in London. So it's a pretty recent work and the ways in which time-based media notions of the storage differ from software based art conservation notions of the storage and how storage functions in networked works basically. That's where it all started. After doing my undergrad in history of arts where I was able to get a taste of conservation more broadly and contemporary arts conservation as well. I decided that I wanted to get into the field and I knew that I wanted to specialize in software based art rather than for example, time-based media more broadly. So I really needed to gain those kind of hard skills associated with programming. And that's why I decided to pursue like a programming based degree. In the digital humanities degree, they have two pathways. They have an MA pathway and an MSC pathway, and I'm on the MSC pathway. And they essentially introduce you to all aspects of the intersection between computing and the humanities. We look at the ways in which historical texts could be analyzed with texts analysis, you know, network analysis, sentiment analysis, and gain insight into that. And we also looked at the more traditional information science topics like XML, linked open data, semantic web. And there's a bit of digital curation data curation as well, learning about metadata and I did a module on digitization where I focused on the conservation of like 3D assets made from photogrammetry. We did data visualization as well, programming in R, but I guess the dissertation is where I'm really able to focus on my interests and for my dissertation, I'm looking at VRML the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, which as you probably know, is like one of the earliest I guess languages slash formats that was able to deliver in an accessible way, 3d assets and 3d worlds onto the web. Virtual reality doesn't necessarily mean you wear like goggles to access it. It's just mainly like a 3d kind of world that you can navigate as an avatar and a lot of the excitement for these types of worlds came from the social capacities and the networking capacities. So the fact that she can bring almost like a game, like environments onto the web was really exciting, but yeah, I know that VRML didn't really take off as much as other technologies of the early two thousands did like Adobe flash. Not that many people have heard about it, but I'm currently in contact with an artists called Grégoire Zabé, his French, I don't speak any French, so I'm really sorry if I'm with sharing the name. But he had a work called Inframonde that used VRML and it's basically this collaborative landscape where people can upload photographs and those photographs essentially make up the virtual world and there are also used to be. A multi-user function as well. It doesn't work now because obviously the plugins for VRML don't really work in modern browsers anymore. And Zabé used Black Sun, the plugin for the networking parts of the work. So there's a bit of dilemma there with proprietary technology. Because Black Sun I think is defunct now as of 2002. Through that coursework, I'm hoping to get into learn kinda more about visualization and emulation. Rather than migrating the work. I'm probably going to restore access to it using a virtual machine and yeah I'm excited for that.

[00:10:06] Ben: I gather that you have been doing some interesting work relating to the obsolescence of Flash and you have recently published on this topic. Could you tell us a bit about that?

[00:10:15] Anna: Adobe flash was this incredibly influential technology in the late nineties, early two thousands. It was incredibly accessible to your regular user. You would have this proprietary program where you have a stage and you can drag and drop or create graphics. And you can attach scripts to that graphics and the scripts, the programming language that you use for these graphics is called Action Script. There's several iterations of it. There's Action Script, one, two, and three. As Flash developed they became increasingly sophisticated. But they all essentially were developed from the same kind of specification as JavaScript was developed. So, over time, this kind of simple animation program, which I mean, I've used it as a child to create primitive kind of animations, a lot of users started using it to develop websites and interactions and like big companies would use it as well to create these very fancy, super high-tech for that time, websites with kind of incredible graphics and reactive sounds. And once you're done with your animation, you would export it and you would save it as an executable, which is essentially a non human readable file. And it had the extension dot SWF, which means Adobe Shockwave. And you would insert that file into your HTML code and that's how you would display it on the webpage. So as I mentioned, I did my coursework on flash for that module taught by Rebecca and I scored pretty well on that coursework. So I thought that maybe I can actually develop this into kind of proper research. This was 2020, COVID just started, it was lockdown so I had a lot of free time and the only way I could access works was through the internet. So it made sense for me to focus on net art because there was no other way that I could do original research in these circumstances. I also saw a call on Twitter for the emerging conservators special issue for the journal of the Institute of Conservation. So I sent my abstract and Jonathan Kemp, the editor was really supportive and he helped me shape this research and advised me on the ways in which my research can develop. So I ended up interviewing the artist whose work I focused on as a case study. And I ended up actually decompiling the Flash Executables, looking at ways it can be migrated from Action Script to JavaScript looking at the ways in which these two languages are incredibly similar and how the whole environment that Adobe Animate provides supports kind of the entire migration process, because you can reuse the original graphics. So eventually that developed into, yeah, an article that I just published in January. This article has three kind of arguments. The first one is really talking about migration and proposing a method in which individual artists or conservators can migrate their Flash work from Action Script to JavaScript and the tools that they can use to decompile the executables, and the actual integrated, like development environment that Adobe Animate provides where you can actually do the recoding, rescripting. The second thread is really looking at the ways in which the role of the source code is evolving. It seems like the field has approached the source code as this marker of authenticity. We have Glenn Wharton and Deena Engle talking about the ways in which the source code has to be respected and that it bears the artistic trace and it shows some of the decisions that the artist has made when they were making the work. But something that I found when I was interviewing the artist was that she felt like her code was so basic that it could have been written by anyone. And she didn't really feel that much of an attachment to it. And if you think about the way software engineering kind of works in today's kind of world, you don't really write your code from start to finish yourself. There's a lot of collaboration happening and a lot of artists sometimes hire programmers to write the code for them. So associating the source code with just the artist, I think is a great concept and it's very interesting to see traditional conservation ethics be applied into the space. But I wanted to think beyond that and think, what does the source code like the site of the source code do? And that's when I started formulating an expanded meaning to the source code and viewed it as a way in which the audience can get involved in the work. When a user comes across a work let's say they go on Rhizomes Artbase and they view the works that they have there. They don't really have institutional access. They can't really look at the source files making up the work, but they can just right click and inspect the work and look at the client side script. At least that's how I always would explore the works. And I think I relate more to the online anonymous public than I do to like an official time-based media conservator. So for me, the source code is a way in which the public can be involved in interacting with the work and the way in which it can document the work. Again, Deena Engle and Glenn Wharton talk about commenting the old code, commenting it out and making sure that there's almost like a system like a version control system internally within the scripts. But for example, when you have Flash works and they have those dot SWF executable files. Once you migrate the work, you don't need those executables anymore and what I propose in my article is that we actually have to keep the executables hosted in the work. Of course we can use JavaScript to just hide them but keep them accessible at the level of the source code so that the public can really sense the past identity of the work and discover it in an archeological manner, like excavated by looking at the source code. So that's how I view the source code. And the third argument forming my article was thinking about my position as someone who is not part of an institution and who is an independent conservator, and thinking about ways in which conservation will develop in the future and what are some of the things that we should be doing now, when we are conserving works, to be able to sanction these future conservation activities by members who are outside of institutions.

[00:17:46] Ben: In your talk at AIC, which I totally loved, you framed your work as a conservator almost as that of a hacker. Is that something you could speak to?

[00:17:57] Anna: It was really inspired by the dissertation that I wrote for my undergraduate degree. I almost got involved with these identities of the hacker and the spammer not by my own will, but because automatic kind of anti spamming programs were banning me when I was trying to document a work by Annie Abrahams. That kind of developed into this long philosophical reflection on the kind of activities that get associated with hacking and spamming and how these activities are actually incredibly productive to conservation and the fact that this association is perhaps a recent phenomenon that emerged out of the increasing commercialization of the internet and the increasing concerns over security. That presentation was also an opportunity to reflect on what sort of identities gain permission to perform conservation related activities. And thinking about the future of conservation and how perhaps it could be possible to delegate the activities of conservation to the public. And conserve the communities that surrounding a work of art and involve, what you would call these like fan communities. I really take inspiration from gaming communities and how they really care about certain games to the point that they restore them, they migrate them, they create emulators to play old console games. So it's definitely possible. And I just think that conservation can take a lot of inspiration from pop culture and fan culture surrounding games. I think a lot of my work and the philosophy behind a lot of my research takes inspiration from my time at the multimedia anthropology lab which is a research collective at UCL. The director of the lab, Rafaela, her PhD focuses on this indigenous community in Brazil, the Guarani and Kaiowá. A lot of our work there was in collaboration with this indigenous community. We had a conference in January, 2020 that was run in parallel to a conference in Brazil where they were talking about their issues and we had our conference online and we were thinking about the ways in which these two kinds of knowledges run in parallel to each other like indigenous knowledge and western ideas of knowledge, and just working with the indigenous community really made me fall in love with this whole idea of distributed forms of knowledge and how you can uncover knowledge in unexpected places. I think in conservation there's been a big push to, for example, involve the indigenous community in the conservation of ritual objects and I think it's has parallels to time-based media conservation and the ways in which we reimagine time-based media conservation and, you know, we can involve the community in time-based media conservation as well, right? So I think from a more conceptual perspective, I take inspiration from my time there.

[00:21:10] Ben: I gather that your work has also extended into curation and there's this, online collective that you're part of?

[00:21:19] Anna: Honestly can I just say, I'm surprised you even found that out... 

[00:21:22] Ben: I do my research.

[00:21:23] Anna: Yeah, wow, pleasantly surprised, but yes, Fetchish. We are a post-internet art collective. We initially emerged as a publication, so we had zines, we would document the work of our friends. And after COVID once London opened up its doors again, we started doing exhibitions and parties as well. The last exhibition that we had was back in December it took place in Pushkin House, which is this very kind of like Palladian architecture, English townhouse building. We focused on the story of Nutcracker and we tried to reimagine it in a contemporary way. So by using audio visual installations and light and sound and interactive installations and like smoke machines and everything, so very kind of ephemeral, out of reach, non-visual ways of telling the story. And we had some experimental musicians as well, that took the original Tchaikovsky score for Nutcracker and experimented with it so there was a lot of sound involved as well. Yeah and we also do like, fundraising events and parties for Ukraine and we have an event on Sunday actually, and these nights we usually call them, Yevraziya which means Eurasia, the continent of Eurasia. And we bring in Ukrainian DJs, Russian DJs, we have some Chinese DJs as well, and we focus on the ways in which we can bring the community together in these difficult times and raise some money for charity. 

[00:22:57] Ben: So, when I have folks on the show that have been in the field for decades, you know, I usually ask them if they have any advice for folks who are just starting their careers. But when I speak to folks such as yourself who are just starting their careers, I like to flip that question and ask if, as an emerging professional, is there any advice that you would like to give to the older generation of professionals, conservators or curators?

[00:23:23] Anna: I would probably say involve the community a little bit more in your work. Think of the ways in which conservation can take place outside of institutions. And like I said before, kind of delegate it to the public and maybe don't assume that certain actors hold certain parts of knowledge Conservation is changing and content is growing. There's so much stuff that needs to get preserved and conserved and brought into the future and one of the things that I find really interesting is that once you join an institution, you don't really get a say on what you're conserving, right? Because you conserve what's in the collection. You conserve what's been acquired and obviously that's part of the job I'm not complaining, but it also makes me think about some of the biases that exist with the types of works that gets brought into the collection and yeah. Maybe make institutions publish their assets on GitHub, or when thinking about what sort of licenses you're attached to copyright licenses, when I'm thinking about the sort of copyright licenses that get attached to works, maybe it's good to turn into the free such open source ideology where individuals can remix and re and reuse the assets. Like the copyleft basically ideology, I think more kind of institutions should adopt that. 

[00:24:49] Ben: Well, so conversely is there any advice that you'd like to give to somebody who's interested in getting into this field.

[00:24:57] Anna: Yes. So I think kind of emerging conservators and professionals like myself should be really honest about the type of positions that they occupy in the field. One thing that I try to really make clear in my research is my identity. And I mentioned this before, I wouldn't call myself a time-based media conservator, at least not yet. I think I relate more to this online internet public that's just really passionate about preserving their heritage. And I think that it's kind of very important to make this identity clear and voice it because you know, a conservator isn't this unbiased kind of detached actor, there's so many things that we are intertwined with that I think is very important to bring out in your research. Yeah approach the work from a transparent way.

[00:25:46] Ben: Love that. So Anna, what is coming next for you?

[00:25:51] Anna: I am starting a PhD in October. One of my supervisors is Pedro Gaspar, who is head of conservation at the V&A, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. So my case studies will be based on their collection of born digital objects. They do have some software based arts, but they also have a lot of kind of design objects as well. And I think that's something that I would love to do in my dissertation is look at not only things that form part of the art historical net art canon, but also for example, they've collected Flappy Bird. So a lot of the pop culture items as well. And obviously my thoughts and concepts will change as I will be doing a PhD, but it really takes inspiration from what I've been doing already. So I'm hoping to revisit Adobe Flash again maybe some other proprietary technology, but essentially it's about the way in which we have to preserve born-digital objects, not only in terms of their materiality, which is what the media archeological approach proposes that you have to preserve the material body, the encasing surrounding an artwork. Or for example, the more traditional approach where you preserve the actual intellectual content or the source code of a work, but also preserving the work in terms of its communities and infrastructures and I'm looking in particular at knowledge infrastructures and technical infrastructures and how the two kind of intertwine. So thinking about the ways in which communities can help sustain the work and how communities form a big part of the work and how at the moment we're in this very crucial time. I think where for example, Adobe Flash as a technology doesn't really exist anymore, arguably, but the communities that remember that technology and remember using it and hold the knowledge about this technology still are alive and exist. So I think it's important that we incorporate them before these works disappear forever. And the people that have interacted with works like these kind of die out. My PhD will be at UCL.

[00:28:05] Ben: That's super exciting. You are already bringing so many fresh ideas to the field, so I will be watching this space. Anna Mladentseva, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate getting to know your story and meeting you at AIC this year, and I'm just so, so excited to see what you do with your PhD.

[00:28:23] Anna: I'm so honored genuinely to be on this podcast. I love it so much. Thank you for having me. 

[00:28:28] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's show. If you want to help support our work and mission of equitably, compensating artists, like I mentioned, at the top, you can head over to patreon.com/artobsolescence, and you get all kinds of cool exclusive perks over there. Or if you are more interested in making a one time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts you can do. So at artandobsolescence.com/donate. Where you can also find show notes and full transcripts as well as highlights on Twitter and Instagram, we are @artobsolescence. Have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.