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Anna Mladentseva

PhD supervisor: Dr Hélia Marçal, Dr Pip Laurenson, Dr Oliver Duke-Williams (Information Studies), Dr Pedro Gaspar (V&A)
Working title for PhD: 'Tracing, Situating and Remembering Infrastructures in the Conservation of Software-based Art & Design'

My research sits at the intersection of conservation and digital preservation, contributing to an emergent field of study—the conservation of software-based art and design. Fundamentally, my collaborative and conservation practice-led PhD contributes to the care of three software-based objects from the Victoria and Albert museum’s collection, including examples of art and design that span from the late 1980s to the present day. Some of the objects I look at originate from artists, whilst others—from corporations, yet as collection objects acquired into a national collection, they are united through their mechanisms of becoming. 

In my project I address—by revisiting, prototyping and performing known conservation methods—the urgent needs of these objects not only in terms of their material body and encoded environment, components which are most often subject to intervention, but also their technological and knowledge infrastructures. By “doing” conservation, I investigate how museums can maintain the infrastructures supporting these objects and, in turn, conserve them considering the external—and often proprietary—dependencies of not only these objects, but of the conservation methods themselves. My thesis is informed by a critical framework that interrogates the mechanisms through which collecting and conservation activities operationalise, to establish more equitable economies of care within the museum and beyond.

Publications

Conference papers and presentations

  • Forthcoming: ‘Care, Communities, and their Discontents: Collecting and Conservation Challenges for Mobile Apps’, BDCAM25: Born-Digital Collections, Archives and Memory, London, 3rd April 2025 (co-authored with Natalie Kane).
  • ‘Conserving a Mobile App Using Emulation: Considerations on the Method and its Institutional Challenges’, No Time To Wait 8, Karlsruhe, 13th September 2024 (co-authored with Natalie Kane).
  • ‘On the Conservation of Flash-based Net Art’, VARIANT: Documenting New Media Art, digitalSSM Archive & Research Space at the Sakip Sabanci Museum & University, online, 1st February 2023.
  • ‘Responding to obsolescence in Flash-based net art’, Lightning Talk, iPres 18th International Conference on Digital Preservation, Glasgow, 13th September 2022.
  • ‘Peer-to-Peer: Towards the Collective Conservation of Net Art’, Electronic Media Session, American Institute for Conservation 50th Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, 15th May 2022.
  • ‘Recursive Alterity: Experiments in Virtual Reality and Machine Learning’, Panel 5: Algorithmic Thinking, Multimedia Encounters: Experimental Approaches to Ethnographic Research, online, 15th January 2021.

Media appearances

Teaching

  • Module Lead, HART0018: Art and Technology (Modern & Contemporary Art in London), History of Art Department (UCL), Autumn 2024
  • PGTA, INST0019: Introduction to Programming and Scripting, Information Studies Department (UCL), Autumn 2024
  • PGTA, INST0002: Programming 1, Department of Information Studies (UCL), Spring 2024
  • PGTA, HART0054: Methodologies of Making, History of Art Department (UCL), Autumn 2023
  • PGTA, ARCL0112: Conservation in Cross-Disciplinary Contexts, Institute of Archaeology (UCL), Autumn 2023

Awards

  • 2022. London Arts & Humanities Partnership Open Studentship (Arts & Humanities Research Council).
  • 2022. Overseas Research Scholarship (University College London).
  • 2022. Commendation for Best First Time Contribution at the iPres conference (Digital Preservation Coalition).
  • 2022. Foundation for Advancement in Conservation/Samuel H. Kress Foundation International Speaker Scholarship.
  • 2021. Zilkha Prize for achieving the highest set of grades, Department of History of Art (University College London).
  • 2021. Dean’s List and nomination for Faculty Medal, Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences (University College London).
  • 2021. Shortlisted runner-up for the Undergraduate Dissertation Award (Association for Art History).
  • 2020. Frances Stracey Prize for outstanding academic achievement in second year of studies, Department of History of Art (University College London).