Vacancy: PhD position in collaboration with Tate

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University and Tate invite applications for a collaborative PhD position on the topic of ‘Precarity in the Social-Material Networks of Technology-Based Artworks’.

Since the 1960s artists have been using a range of media technologies to create art. Time-based media works of art are artworks where the primary medium is film, video, audio, 35mm slides, digital data, software-based art or performance. These artworks are dependent on these technologies and their associated networks of people, materials and skills, not only for their production but also for their on-going display and access. In this way the traditional museum model, based on collection knowledge and conservation capacities that is held within the museum, is challenged. Instead, we see the contemporary art museum as increasingly dependent on socio-material networks outside the museum which are beyond the museum’s direct control and which circulate in alternative economies, often dominated by different commercial concerns. Greater understanding of these networks is needed to inform and build upon methodologies such as risk assessment and other tools for imagining the future viability of particular works in contemporary art collections. This study will investigate these conceptual, theoretical and practical challenges of precarity.

The doctoral candidate will identify in several cases from the Tate collection an artist’s work or body of works, which exhibit dependencies on one of three technologies (16mm film, Delphi programming language, Cathode Ray Tubes). Through the use of ethnographic methods and methods drawn from experimental archaeology, the candidate will explore the socio-material networks that constitute these works and their production and maintenance.

The doctoral candidate will reside at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) at Maastricht University in the Science, Technology and Society Studies research programme, and will be able to benefit from the research activity conducted as part of the project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum, including participation in selected workshops, contact with visiting scholars and the case study research. In addition, the doctoral candidate will spend three periods of three months hosted by Tate over the course of the four years.

This PhD position is made possible through funding from Maastricht University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

>> The advertisement can be consulted here. 

Closing date for applications: 8 July 2018.