TRANSFER Data Trust is halfway through our first round of funding, and we have a big project update to share: 6 months ago we started building out our vision with funding from Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund, Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web and Filecoin Foundation.

In that time, we’ve hit some exciting milestones:

🎯 Exhibiting restored artworks at art fairs and pop-up exhibitions

🎯 Achieving a record-breaking acquisition

🎯 Assembling a Care Team of leading Time-based Media Conservators

🎯 Designing and Developing a proof-of-concept prototype for our decentralized artist-owned infrastructure for valuation and long-term care of Experimental Media Art

Many of the artworks in TRANSFER Data Trust’s archives present new challenges to conservation. Our inventory of experimental virtual artworks – including Real-time 3D, Video Games, Algorithmic Art, VR, AR, and Animated GIFs – are embedded in an ever-changing context of networked culture, 3rd party softwares, and hardware dependencies.

 How can we ensure these artworks will be accessible in 100 years? To address the complexities of the advanced variable media formats our artists are working with, we’ve assembled a team of experts in Time-based Media Art to lead conservation treatment, and co-design best-practice workflows for iterative care of our dynamic archives.

 Regina Harsanyi, Time-based Media Art Specialist and Associate Curator of Media Art at Museum of the Moving Image, leads the team as a founding member of the TRANSFER Data Trust.

 Eddy Colloton is media conservator and consultant working with art museums to preserve time-based media artworks since 2011. Colloton received his MA degree from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University in May 2016. Colloton has previously worked as Project Conservator of Time-Based Media for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Assistant Conservator at the Denver Art Museum and Time-Based Media Technician at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

 Claudia Röck works as a conservator of time-based media art for LI-MA (Amsterdam), Kunstmuseum Basel and the House of Electronic Arts (Basel). Previously, she researched conservation strategies for software-based art and received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2024. This research was part of the EU-funded project New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA). From 2019 to 2021 she worked on a software preservation project at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Previously, she worked as an assistant conservator for time-based media art at Tate, London, focusing on video-based art.

 sasha arden is the Conservation Fellow, Time Based Media at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. They graduated in 2022 from the dual-degree Master’s program in art history and conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts NYU, with a focus in time-based media. sasha embraces the long-term thinking and development of appropriate stewardship practices while negotiating ecosystems of stakeholders and values unique to each artwork. Their ongoing research examines the intersection of technical capabilities and the philosophical and ethical questions arising through the conservation process, often questioning conventional approaches in pursuit of a holistic outlook on the integrity of cultural assets.

 Taylor Healy joined the Art Institute of Chicago in March 2023 as the Assistant Conservator of Media. She was previously a post-graduate fellow at the Smithsonian researching neon artworks and historical objects and developing documentation and preservation strategies for the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is excited by the preservation and display challenges presented by complex artworks and their technologies. Healy received dual masters degrees at New York University’s Conservation Center in 2021, finding her way to the field of conservation through the studio arts after receiving a BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. She maintains a personal studio practice working with materials such as metals, glass, textiles, and plastics.

 Nicholas Kaplan is a time-based media conservator with over a decade of experience working with contemporary artists and cultural institutions. Based in New York, Nick has his own private conservation practice that focuses on providing clients with services ranging from risk assessment, condition reporting, documentation and conservation treatment, and long-term preservation planning to design, fabrication, and exhibition support. He began his career at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and holds a graduate degree from Winterthur University of Delaware in Modern and Contemporary Art Conservation. Nick has wide-ranging experience working with artists, estates, galleries, and world-class museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and Glenstone.

How We Work: Each conservator is partnered with a founding artist, and is focused on one aspect of the conservation process to create best-practices for our toolkit – artist interviews, metadata, disk imaging/checksums, iteration reports, condition assessments, and more. As the first round of conservation works wraps up in Spring 2025, we’ll publish case studies on this work to share our findings. We hope this open toolkit will inspire other artists, stewards and collectors to dig deeper into long-term conservation and care of emerging media artworks at risk of loss.

 Demos of our proof-of-concept open culture protocol are coming online! We shared an introduction and demo at Recursive Visions hosted at NYU Tandon at the Yard during Armory Art Week (watch the recording 📹), and have presented our infrastructure to students, researchers and conservation teams at leading universities, collections and institutions.

At the core of our infrastructure is a peer-to-peer network of NAS Drives (network attached storage) powered by QNAP with cutting-edge SSD storage provided by Kingston. In the first phase of our infrastructure deployment, each studio will have 16TB of capacity to host their archive, and redundantly store encrypted copies of each other’s archive. This allows for a form of collective resilience – if one node goes down it can be restored from the network.

All the data in an artist’s archive is fully managed autonomously, secured locally on their NAS drive. Artist Information Packages contain the artworks and robust documentation for conservation. In addition, lightweight web-based interfaces powered by HTML/CSS and Javascript are hosted locally on the devices to facilitate collaborative conservation workflows between the artists and our Care Team. 

These self-hosted interfaces access the data on the drives directly through well-structured metadata schemas, meaning there is no centralized platform or server – the infrastructure is co-owned and hosted by each artist on their NAS drive. This local-first system ensures autonomy from 3rd party platforms, and provides long-term access to the Data Trust archive beyond the interests of any centralized authority.

Networked interfaces display data from across the trust by leveraging a private IPFS network for exchange. Collaborative activity is shown to all trusted members, while protected artworks and files remain private to individual artists. Archiving is a lonely activity – by creating a cooperative network of data exchange the studios find encouragement, efficiency and context for this ongoing care and conservation work. We are experimenting with valuation and exchange protocols, to give artists agency over the financial and cultural value their studio represents.

Our development team partnered with Filecoin Foundation to design a progressive access protocol for the trust. Inspired by the work of SHIFT collective, we are leveraging a private IPFS network, in addition to encryption at rest protocols developed by Fission to share access with trusted nodes. Artists have the agency to choose to publish portions of their data to the public IPFS network leveraging Pinata, in just one click. By stitching together these leading efforts in the IPFS and Filecoin ecosystem, the project has created a small data demonstration of the power of decentralized storage for preservation and collaborative care.

 If you would like to schedule a 1:1 demo of our proof-of-concept prototype, please reach out to [email protected] 💌

As we close out the year, conservation efforts continue and our design and development teams are working through product sprints. In 2025 we’re bringing governance online and forming a not-for-profit distributed cooperative business entity. In addition, we’ll be presenting our work at events and conferences (look for our work at the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting), and publishing conservation case studies and open repos for our code in the spring. 

Contributing just $25 helps boost us into the new year 🚀 Purchase an artifact on Artizen to help us earn match funding, or give directly via Open Collective to back our cooperative and become part of the trust.

 TRANSFER Data Trust is made possible by fiscal sponsorship from Gray Area. Thank you to all our sponsors for their generous support of our vision of a more equitable model for artist-owned decentralized open culture infrastructure.