Digital conservation

Professor Mike Phillips has worked with Tate to conserve several works of the artist Donald Rodney (1961-1998). His collaborations with Rodney dates back to the design and construction of Visceral Canker (1990), Psalms, and Donald Rodney Autoicon. The Tate has now acquired Visceral Canker and Psalms and Autoicon sits in its archive.

Visceral Canker was a kinetic assemblage of peristaltic pumps and heraldic shields of Queen Elisabeth I and slave trader John Hawkins. Phillips has worked with the Tate conservators to rebuild some of the perished electronics and contributed to the discussion around the most appropriate ways to conserve these hybrid electronic works to the gold standard.

These discussions are further complicated by the acquisition of Psalms, the Autonomous Wheelchair constructed by Guido Bugmann, in the School of Computing, for Donald Rodney’s “Nine Night in Eldorado” at the South London Gallery, 1997.

Psalms is a modified electric wheelchair augmented with a sensory system and a neural network running of a laptop. This bricolage of technologies tracks a figure of 8 within a gallery, stopping and avoiding visitors that may cross its path. At the core of the work is this autonomous behaviour driven by the neural network and its navigation of its environment. The pathos and power of the work cannot be broken down to the sum of its electronic parts. Its conservation is as much in the code as it is in its material construct.

And conserving the physicality and code of Donald Rodney Autoicon (2000) is even more ethereal. Phillips collaborated with Rodney leading up to his death and then developed the digital work with a group of friends and artists (his partner Diane Symons, Eddie Chambers, Richard Hylton, Virginia Nimarkoh, and Keith Piper). Using software written by Adrian Ward and produced by Geoff Cox and Mike Phillips, Autoicon is a dynamic internet work and CD-ROM that simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney who died from sickle-cell anaemia.

Kadish Morris (2020). ‘Union jack swastikas and space-age braids: Thirteen Ways of Looking – review’, The Guardian, 28 October 2020 (Accessed: 16 January 2021).