Life and Property (2021), Cameron Rowland

SUMMARY
When installed, conceptual artist Cameron Rowland's Life and Property (2021) consists of five Ultra High Frequency (UHF) radio scanners on view in the gallery space, each recording the live content of police radio channels for the five boroughs of New York City. By Rowland's stipulation: "When Life and Property is exhibited, recordings are produced continuously. Each day the prior 24 hours of recordings are made publicly accessible on the exhibitor’s website. The recordings for each day of the exhibition are hosted as documentation." Thus, for each day the work is on view, five media files are produced which become components of the artwork and the responsibility of the conservation department.

TREATMENT
As of 2025 this artwork included over 1,100 media components and thousands more will be created with each installation. This inspired an interdepartmental working group at the Whitney Museum of American Art (WMAA) to think through how to catalogue and preserve artworks with thousands of components, as they will likely proliferate in the WMAA collection going forward. The group included myself, Savannah Campbell (Time-Based Media Conservator), Christopher Bernu (Cataloguer), David Neary (Digital Asset Manager), Tara Hart (Head Archivist), made smith (Manager, Permanent Collection Information and Time Based Media Acquisitions), and Farris Wabeh (Director of Research Resources). Together we determined that such artworks should be cataloged responsively, following the logic of the work.

While the WMAA media component ingest procedures had been formulated with the expectation of single bagged files, testing confirmed that Life and Property could be ingested and catalogued using multi-file bags, with each bag including the five simultaneous recordings for each 24-hour period. While the complete ingest of the components into TMS, archivematica, and the WMAA Works of Art server still required two months of dedicated labor, this reduced the workload by a factor of five, allowing the many media components to be managed with less significant impact on the processing of other artworks, and reducing barriers to displaying the work again in the future.