We are excited to announce the Sixth INCCA Student Café: Student & Early Career Research – Time-Based Media, focusing on the long-term preservation challenges posed by complex time-based media artworks.
Presentations will be given by Isobel Finlay, Bird Nord, Chang Lan, Mariana Passos, Mirjam Chair, and Olivia Schoenfeld. The talks cover a diverse range of research and practical conservation projects, including re-digitization strategies for video works, maintenance of CRT-based installations, emulation of obsolete multimedia formats, documentation frameworks for undocumented video installations, preservation approaches for analogue film, and disk imaging as a strategy for computer-based artworks.
The first presentation discusses a conservation treatment of David (2004) by Sam Taylor-Johnson, detailing the re-digitization of the work from the artist's Digital Betacam submaster for long-term preservation. The second talk will explore the care and maintenance of CRT-based video artworks, providing a practical toolkit for conservators to safely perform diagnostics and minor repairs. Additionally, the next talk will investigate the preservation of obsolete multimedia artworks, with a focus on Joy Gregory's web-based Blonde (1998), using emulation and source code analysis to ensure ongoing access. The following talk will discuss the study of Dara Birnbaum's Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), highlighting documentation strategies and collaborative approaches to preserve complex media installations acquired without records. The fifth presentation will examine strategies for exhibiting analogue film, using Tacita Dean's Craneway Event (16mm) to explore preservation, projection, and hybrid workflows in a museum context. The final presentation will present hands-on research on disk imaging for Brody Condon's DeRezFX.Kill(KarmaPhysics<Elvis) (2004–2006), evaluating technical workflows and accessibility across systems to inform digital preservation practices.
The talks will be followed by an open and informal conversation with all speakers and participants. For better language accessibility we provide English live caption and Portuguese AI translation during this event.
All are welcome to join. The INCCA Student Café pt.6 will be hosted online via Zoom on 23rd October 2025, 5pm CEST (Amsterdam 5pm / London 4pm / Seoul 12pm / Mexico City 9am / LA 8am) and will not be recorded.
For more information about the speakers and to register, visit our Eventbrite page.
Presenters' bio (by presentation order)
Isobel Finlay is a second year student currently studying on UCL’s MSc Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media course, graduating in September 2025. This postgraduate course has covered a wide range of topics and materials, from banana peels to software-based art, and also gave students the opportunity to complete work placements in international art institutions, which Isobel completed in the Kunstsammlung Norhrhein-Wastfale, Düsseldorf. Before this course, she worked as an Art Handling Technician for Tate which introduced her to collection care and contemporary art conservation within a large art institution. She is also a practicing artist, working with synthetic textiles, plaster, metal and wax to create sculptures and installations both in and outside the traditional gallery white cube. She currently lives and works in London.
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Bird Nord is an artist from Chicago, IL working predominantly in ceramics. Their work consists of hand-built ceramic sculptures that portray narrative through non-human subjects, bright colors, and simplified forms. They graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2026 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in studio arts and were a McMullan Arts Leadership Intern in Conservation and Science at the Art Institute of Chicago where they focused on researching the conservation of CRT artworks. Bird is a bicycle mechanic and avid bicycle tourist with a love for vintage, handmade-in-USA steel bicycles. Through their nascent experiences with time-based media conservation, they have discovered an overlap between the practices of bicycle repair, conservation, and artmaking, all of which embody respect, memory, and thoughtful care for the object at hand.
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Chang Lan (she/they) is a recent graduate from the MSc Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media programme at UCL East. With an art history background specializing in contemporary video art, Lan’s research interest often falls under the field of time-based media conservation, especially those exploring the potentiality of conserving analogue, digital, and file-based video. She has written about new methods of conducting video image quality assessment, and she is currently working on the documentation for two command-line tools used in during her study of time-based media conservation. Lan is currently based in Hong Kong.
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Mariana Passos is a junior contemporary art conservator with a primary research focus on modern materials, the conservator's role in this field, and the conservation of new media, particularly installation artworks. Her research addresses one of the key challenges in conservation today: how to preserve artworks that, by their nature, change. She is interested in the premise of the conservator as an active manager of change, and as part of this approach, she investigates how documentation plays a central role in these processes, and how change itself can be managed as part of an artwork’s life cycle. She developed her dissertation on the conservation of analogue video installations, specifically "Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry", by Dara Birnbaum (2024), in collaboration with Serralves Foundation. Currently, she is part of the InBloom research, investigating the impact of blooming on polyurethane-coated fabrics to support conservation decisions in fashion and design collections (2023.11375.PEX).
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Miriam Chair
From my art bachelor’s degree at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the work at an experimental cinema in Amsterdam, where I could explore the medium film and help with the media archive which partly consisted of not returned VHS cassettes from Amsterdam’s queer film festivals, I found my love for analogue media. In 2022 I began my masters in the Department of “Conservation and Restoration of new media and digital information” at the Art Academy in Stuttgart. Through my experience in film archives such as the “Arsenal Institute für film und videokunst e.V.” and in the media conservation department of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, I found my master topic with the great work of Tacita Dean who is one of the best examples for working with the medium film in the fine arts context.
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Olivia Schoenfeld is a 2023 graduate of the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage master's program specializing in contemporary art at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She is currently enrolled in the subsequent post-master's Advanced Professional Program at UvA. Olivia has a keen interest in digital preservation and time-based media conservation, with her completed Master’s thesis research exploring the vulnerabilities and future prospects of blockchain-based artworks through a case study risk assessment. She is the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) Contemporary Art Network (CAN!) Secretary & Treasurer for the 2024-2026 term, following her previous position as a CAN! Emerging Conservation Professional Network (ECPN) Co-Liaison from 2022-2024. She received her undergraduate degree from SUNY Geneseo in May of 2021, earning her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry and Bachelor of Arts in Art History.
Image credit: Image of Isobel Finlay Re-Digitising "David" (2004) by Sam Taylor-Johnson in UCL's Media Conservation Lab. Image by Brian Castriota.