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Casus Multimedia -- VU 2003

 ICN (Instituut Collectie Nederland) is actively involved in the preservation of modern art, being project leader for INCCA (International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art), in the person of Tatja Scholte.

1. INCCA general

2. Case study (Miroslav Balka)

3. Additional material (Artists' Interviews)

Please note, explanatory texts should be added to all parts Description of the resources used for the casus

INCCA General

Presentation of the INCCA project, its aims and results. During its first project (running from January 2000 to October 2002) INCCA established a network of circa 30 professionals, representing 11 modern art museums and institutions, located in 10 European countries.

Organiser of the project is ICN (Amsterdam). Co-organiser is TATE (London).

The INCCA Meetings are crucial for the process of the project development and for the inter-personal exchange of knowledge and information (which is one of the main aims of the project).

In a second project (running from October 2002 to October 2003) the INCCA network will be expanded with 9 other partners (sometimes representing various museums in one country, e.g. in Spain)

The aim is to establish INCCA as a permanent network from October 2003 and open it to the whole conservation community (more than 100 museums, over 300 members).

material

  • Pictures of the project team (4 in total)
  • Pictures of the group of partners, made at two different meetings.
  • Schematic representation of the process of an increasing number of members in the future (not available)
  • Text, explaining the aims of the INCCA project or Mission Statement

Aims of INCCA are:
  1. .To make knowledge and information accessible about the care and conservation of modern and contemporary art
  2. To generate primary information by interviewing artists or their representatives

INCCA's guiding mission is:

To collect, share and preserve knowledge needed for the conservation of modern and contemporary art. To achieve this goal we will:

  • create and maintain a website with general access for the public
  • create and maintain a database for INCCA participating members to access and share their knowledge through the network
  • target contemporary artists as a primary source of information
  • devise common methods and vocabularies for organising the information and knowledge to allow its retrieval and use
  • establish the artists' intent as a key factor in the care, display and conservation of all types of artwork
  • disseminate our goals to the international conservation and contemporary art community
  • promote and expand research and scholarship supporting all those professionals concerned with the conservation of modern and contemporary art

INCCA website

The INCCA website addresses professionals and students. It includes announcements of relevant events, brief project descriptions, and a number of professional tools.

The INCCA website offers a well-organised index of information, user friendly search facilities, full documents that may be downloaded in PDF format, links to useful URL's and a Literature Database.

Currently there are few websites providing information on the conservation of modern and contemporary art. A lot of information provided by INCCA is primary information. When information resources are accessible at other URL’s INCCA provides links and a short introduction to the content of the specific resource.

One of INCCA's aims is to support the profession by providing methodologies and tools for conservation, such as the Decision-making model and the INCCA Literature

Database.

  • Representation of the Homepage of the INCCA website
  • Example of a pop-screen providing information on current projects, e.g. CIAO – Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online (text)
  • Example of a professional tool: The Decision-Making Model (text, diagrams)
  • Exemplary forms of the INCCA Literature Database
  • Example of link, e.g. to Piet Mondrian – The Transatlantic Paintings

INCCA Database for Artists' Archives

The INCCA database for Artists’ Archives is a reference database, providing metadata about documentation stored in the partners’ archives, contact data and, where possible, links to relevant web pages. ‘Documentation’ refers to a wide variety of resources, such as treatment reports of works of art, artists’ interviews (registered on tape, transcription), reports on scientific research of works of art, databases (e.g. storage of material-technical data), instructions for the installation of works of art, art historical information, correspondence (e.g. with the artist), etcetera.

The architecture of the INCCA Database for Artists’ Archives started from the following requirements:

  1. The information structure should meet with the group’s requirements for flexibility and (future) interoperability with other systems, and guarantee the quality of the content.
  2. The database should be composed of records that catalogue a wide variety of resources.
  3. The cataloguing structure should be simple.
  4. The system should have excellent tools for import/export procedures as the partners are providing records from their own network environment.
  5. The INCCA Database should be embedded in the INCCA infrastructure (access via the INCCA website)
  6. The database should be a password protected area, with potential access for the whole conservation community through membership.
  7. Users should know where to find the information sources and be provided with a contact option.
  8. The system should facilitate resource discovery through the Internet (in the future - the realisation of a web interface was no objective for the current INCCA project).
Material:
  • Explanatory text: should be short
  • Representation of the Search Screen
  • One or two exemplary forms to give an impression of the structure of the database

Case study (Miroslav Balka)

During the project the INCCA partners have created one virtual Artist's Archive, i.e. on the Polish artist Miroslav Balka. Partners used group-mail to distribute their documents. This virtual archive gives an impression of the content of an archive and illustrates the usefulness of INCCA in daily museum practice.

The Balka-archive contains:

  • Explanatory text: should be short
  • Text: describing some of the conservation problems, questions to the artist, art historical comments
  • Images: pictures of the works of art (commented in the written documents) and installation drawings provided by the artist (originally faxed, then scanned)
  • Brief transcription of interview with the artist who comments on a problematic installation of his work, with an additional image of the art work and of the artist

Additional material (Artists' Interviews)

One of the main objectives of INCCA is to collect primary source information from artists or their representatives. This information, mainly focused on working processes used by the artist, material-technical issues and the artist’s view on meaning, ageing and conservation is essential for the conservation of modern and contemporary art.

  • Explanatory text: should be short
  • MPEG: Two fragments of videotaped interviews
  • Digital images of the art works discussed
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