Introduction

CONSERVATION IS A COMPLEX FIELD that draws on many different disciplines. Broadly speaking, conservators are concerned with the future of the past. While we are primarily focused on preserving material aspects of objects (that is, artworks, artifacts, specimens, and other historic documents), we are also concerned with the meanings present in objects, and how those objects are used to tell histories. Conservators work in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from archaeological sites to libraries, national parks, museums, and private practice studios (these conservators in turn work for galleries, private collectors, artists, historic homes, auction houses and so on). Acting as translators between different fields, we must manage different professional languages and collaborate with a variety of partners. Despite our field's deep roots in archaeology and art history, conservators’ vocabulary has been augmented with new approaches to contemporary and media art—and this new lexicon also helps to understand emerging approaches to the conservation of historic works better. In discussing the evolving language of conservation, this lexicon can be understood in both a narrow sense (that is, recent terms coined in the conservation of time-based media and contemporary art) and in a broader sense. In this more expansive definition, fluency in multiple languages functions as a metaphor for how conservators codeswitch between different skill sets and vernaculars to manage interactions with diverse professional collaborators.

While we are adept at mediating between different professional languages, this is not the only codeswitch that informs the practices of modern conservation. Foundational coursework in American conservation training programs includes learning the history of conservation practices across specialties. My own training was focused on archaeological and anthropological collections, a subfield of object conservation (sculpture, decorative arts, artifacts, and so on) with its own particular history, practices, and ethics. Now working at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, I work with an interdisciplinary team confronted with many challenging new digital acquisitions. While there have been perceptive articles on the links between the conservation of contemporary art and cultural materials collections, contemporary design requires a new hybrid approach that draws on many other subcultures of conservation.

The field of conservation has been revolutionized once again by technological changes, but only recently have we started to register the changes in our practice and theory engendered by the inventions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.