Abstract / topic summary
Media art preservation increasingly depends on collaboration across institutions, disciplines and national borders. This lightning talk introduces two complementary European initiatives: EMBARK, a COST Action building a pan-European network for research, knowledge exchange and capacity building, and CUSP, a Creative Europe project developing shared standards, sustainable preservation workflows and collaborative infrastructures. Together, they address common challenges in preserving media and born-digital art while strengthening connections between researchers, conservators, artists, technologists and collecting institutions. The presentation offers an overview of both initiatives and invites the No Time to Wait community to engage with a growing European ecosystem dedicated to open collaboration, knowledge sharing and the long-term preservation of media art.
Speaker summary
Jina Chang
Jina Chang is a time-based media art conservator at the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. Originally trained as a media artist (BFA, Pratt Institute; MFA, University of New Mexico), she later specialized in conservation at the University of Oslo. Her work spans the technical, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of preserving time-based and digital artworks. As both a practitioner and researcher, she examines the ontological and temporal complexity of conservation, with recent writings exploring artistic intention, affect, and the recursive processes of re-creation. Her current research investigates how conservation produces and negotiates time through documentation, technological change, and moments of decision, urgency, and deferral. At the Nasjonalmuseet, she has led long-term projects documenting and developing preservation strategies for installation and digital art. Through CUSP, she investigates sustainable approaches to the preservation of time-based media art, while her work within EMBARK examines human-centred AI in conservation and documentation, with particular attention to ethics, transparency, and institutional responsibility.
