Overview

An ongoing research on how artists can document and sustain their works through their own practices and technical systems in personal and institutional contexts.

It sits at the core of my practice.
It explores artists’ preservation efforts and infrastructure,
especially in contexts where institutional support is limited, temporary, or absent.

Rather than treating preservation as always retrospective,
I approach the former as something already embedded within artistic practice itself.

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Context

I became interested in preservation not through institutions,
but through noticing how fragile media artworks actually are.

Works disappear, break, or become inaccessible,
not necessarily because they are neglected,
but because the systems that are supposed to support them are incomplete.

At the same time, I realised that many artists were already doing preservation work themselves –
maintaining files, fixing systems, documenting processes –
but these efforts were rarely recognised as part of “preservation” in a formal sense.

This research began as an attempt to understand:
what artists refuse to do and are already doing,
and what it means to take those practices seriously.

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What I Do

– Conduct empirical research with artists and preservation professionals
– Analyse how preservation responsibilities and authority are distributed
– Examine how artists engage with technical systems, institutions, and resources
– Develop conceptual frameworks to describe artist-led preservation practices
– Translate research findings into models that can inform both theory and practice

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Current Output

– A PhD thesis (nine chapters) examining artist–museum–conservator relationships in media art preservation (under final review)
– A presentation at ICOM-CC (2026):
Artists’ Authority, Access, and Participation in Media Art Conservation
– A short paper to EVA London (2026):
Temporary Preservation as Practice (under reivew)
– A body of interview-based and survey-based research across 10 countries
– Two short papers (blog posts) examining gaps between institutional frameworks and artists’ own preservation practices

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Ongoing

This research continues to inform how I think about artistic practice beyond preservation as a discipline.

I am interested in how these ideas can move:
– from theory into tools and systems that artists can actually use
– from institutional frameworks into more distributed and flexible models
– from preservation as a specialised field into something embedded in everyday artistic workflows

More broadly, I see this work as part of a larger question:
how artistic practices can be supported and sustained —
not only by institutions, but through systems that artists themselves can access, shape, and build.