Facilities

Bolstering both the practical and theoretical content of this programme are the state-of-the-art facilities in at our new UCL East campus. Much of the work takes place in our dedicated Conservation Laboratory and Media Conservation Studio in the Marshgate Building. The campus is also home to world-class laboratories, media facilities, a cinema, exhibition spaces and object-based learning and maker spaces.

Media Conservation Studio

The Media Conservation Studio at UCL East. 
 

The Media Conservation Studio is one of two dedicated spaces in the Marshgate Building at UCL East supporting teaching and world class research in the conservation of contemporary art and media. Artists and other creative practitioners from around the world have worked with and continue to employ a range of legacy and current audiovisual media in their practices, including video, audio, film, slides, and software. The Media Conservation Studio is dedicated to the conservation and exploration of the artworks and heritage that employ audiovisual media, and the historic and contemporary technologies that contribute to their ecologies.

The Media Conservation Studio houses specialist equipment to support the analysis and preservation of a variety of audiovisual media. This includes an array of legacy video decks for the playback of common magnetic and optical media formats; reference monitors and display equipment; and powerful, state-of-the-art workstations for condition assessing, 

digitising, transcoding, and preparing time-based media artworks for exhibition and display. It also houses archival film and negative scanners to support research and digitisation of film, slides, and transparencies.

The Studio also supports pioneering research in the conservation of software-based artworks, with a dedicated disk imaging workstation, and an array of tools for exploring the potentials of emulation and virtualisation.

The Media Conservation Studio supports both postgraduate students enrolled in the MSc in the Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media, and doctoral researchers working with partner organisations.

Conservation Laboratory

MSc student Kun Fan using the portable FTIR in the Conservation Laboratory at UCL East. Photo: J. Tye.
 

On the seventh floor of the Marshgate Building is a state-of-the-art, dedicated Conservation Laboratory that houses specialist equipment for the conservation of sculpture, installation art, and modern and contemporary materials. This flexible space allows us to work with a range of media and use the space in many different ways, including practical workshops, assessing large or heavy artworks, and independent student work testing materials or undertaking treatment of an object. The Conservation Laboratory also houses a range of analytical equipment including a portable Fourier-Transform Infrared (pFTIR) spectrometer, a portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyser, a spectrophotometer, several digital and optical microscopes, and an accelerated aging chamber. Additional analytical instrumentation is accessible both at UCL East and Bloomsbury, including Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Raman Spectroscopy, as well as a range of tensile testing equipment. 

This space is dedicated for students enrolled in the MSc. Under the supervision of our teaching and support staff, students have access to these facilities to conduct practical work as part of the programme’s core modules, core skills sessions, as well as in support of their dissertation research.

In both the Media Conservation Studio and the Conservation Laboratory students work on objects from a range of sources, including private and public collections and foundations, artists, and artist’s estates. From the start of the programme, teaching and support staff ensure that students feel confident working in the lab and that students develop their practical skills throughout. 

MSc student exploring the methods used in the conservation of Robert Gober’s ‘A Bag of Donuts’ 1989. Photo: J. Tye.
 

In addition to these two dedicated spaces, UCL East offers a range of additional teaching spaces including an Innovation Lab, the Wet Lab and the Computer Cluster Rooms. All staff and students can also join the Institute of Making which at UCL East is spread over two floors with facilities for student led projects that involve textiles, wood, metals, electronics, 3D printing, mould making, ceramics and more. The Institute of Making even has an experimental kitchen. 

Students also have access to the Bloomsbury Campus and all of its events and activities including those organised by the History of Art Department and the Institute of Advanced Studies.