Tina Weidner, Conservator, I’m Tina Weidner, I’m the Assistant Time-based Media Conservator at the Tate, and I was involved in the process of acquiring Letter to the Censors and therefore I dealt with the video archiving and issues concerning electronic and electrical problems. Tate acquired this work from the Miami Art Fair in 2003, and the most pressing problem discovered at the time was that the electronic and electrical equipment inside was overheating. The electrical equipment is kept inside the cavity, above the foyer underneath the pitched wooden roof construction, and while, the projector is being operated, the heat outlet of the projector caused the balsa wood roof to warp, and the construction joints to open. And we tried to find especially quiet fans, which are designed for computers, so that the visitors wouldn’t be aware of the cooling system inside the model, and also so that the soundtrack wouldn’t be disrupted. We started our test series with the mocked up roof and the quiet fans, which were directly attached to the underside of the mocked up roof. And we looked closer into the possibilities of the positioning angle of the fans pointing inside the cavity. This was carried out to see if it would be better to inlet or outlet air, or if the disturbance of air inside the cavity would already reduce the heat build up inside the cavity. We then worked closely together with Karl Bush – our conservation technician, and we came up with the idea of a freestanding metal frame inside the cavity, which would also hold the fans while they’re spinning inside. This final solution made us really happy, as the freestanding metal frame proved to be really effective; the temperature decreased below the crucial point, and could also be held at a stable condition, and therefore we didn’t need to introduce further alteration to the physical construction of the model itself. |