Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• Series: A field of practice
• Status: public scholarship
• Institutional author: 6529 Network Museum
• Version: 1.0.0
• Publication date: 2026-08-04
• Research cutoff: 2026-08-04
• Research apparatus: primary-source register

LACMA’s “Welcome to the Art + Tech Lab” states that the Lab supports experiments in design, creative entrepreneurship, art and industry, collaboration, and interdisciplinary dialogue. The page links current projects to the original 1967–71 program catalogue and keeps a dated Lab Archive of artists and projects.

The page’s dated record for Casey Reas’s METAVASARELY and An Empty Room, alongside the artist interview “Introducing METAVASARELY and An Empty Room, A Two-Part Digital Work by Casey Reas”, provides a named example of this continuity.

METAVASARELY and the program archive

LACMA’s interview states that the project is a simulation and homage to Victor Vasarely’s unrealized proposal for the original Art & Technology Program. The proposal described a machine with lights arranged in a grid that would generate millions of visual patterns related to Vasarely’s paintings. Reas explains that he chose a software simulation in place of a physical electronic build. For LACMA, he describes creating one work in each of two forms: METAVASARELY and An Empty Room. The page says both have online and in-gallery components, beginning with METAVASARELY on lacma.org.

This record is precise enough to separate the historical proposal, Reas’s software simulation, the two-part project, and the current presentation. A 6529 program page should preserve the call, selection decision, artist brief, source documents, project components, minting or accession event, exhibition history, and later preservation status as linked records.

Colloquium as a care record

Joey Heinen’s “Examining the Life and Times of Media Art at LACMA’s First-Ever Time-Based Media Colloquium” identifies the event as TBM IRL: Examining Lifecycles of Time-Based Media Art, a daylong colloquium held on October 27, 2023, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The account names artists, gallerists, collectors, archivists, estate representatives, and museum professionals as participants.

The article records questions about what defines authenticity across time, who is authorized to make preservation decisions, whether artist intent is the controlling rule, how an ideal state relates to technological change, and how to steward works that depend on obsolescent technologies. It also identifies artist archives, authorship and authority, AI, blockchain, and big data as topics. The author’s stated takeaway is advocacy for the resources and labor required to care for time-based media.

For each time-based or network-dependent work, the Museum should turn those questions into required record fields: work definition; authorized decision makers; acceptable change; period-specific and current environments; accessibility and embodiment needs; dependencies; recurring labor and budget; test evidence; and unresolved questions.

Blockchain acquisition: ambition and evidence

LACMA’s “LACMA Acquires Largest Collection of Blockchain Artworks”, dated February 13, 2023, states that a gift from Cozomo de’ Medici placed 22 digital artworks by 13 artists in or promised to the permanent collection. The release quotes LACMA’s director describing the acquisition as an impetus to develop new standards and techniques for preserving works created on the blockchain.

That preservation language is a stated institutional ambition. The release documents an acquisition; it supplies no public schema or condition model. The 6529 Network Museum should publish the next layer as linked, testable documentation: chain and token identifiers; custody and provenance events; artist, collector, and museum rights; source and dependency inventory; display and access requirements; condition tests; preservation decisions; and named responsible roles.

What the Museum should adopt

• Keep program history, artist/work records, acquisitions, exhibitions, and preservation builds as distinct linked events.
• Use a work-level authority and authenticity record for media works, with explicit rules for reinstallation, migration, and acceptable change.
• Budget recurring technical labor and record who is responsible for each dependency, service, and preservation test.
• Convene artists, conservators, curators, registrars, archivists, technicians, and rights staff around a named work and publish the resulting decisions.
• Treat blockchain preservation standards as versioned public specifications tested against named collection works.

Where the analogy ends

LACMA’s Art + Tech pages combine program description, archive links, project pages, interviews, and acquisition announcements. Those forms serve different editorial purposes and should not be treated as one collection-data model. The blockchain release documents the acquisition and the intention to develop preservation standards; it does not, by itself, demonstrate a completed technical or provenance method.

Sources

1. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Welcome to the Art + Tech Lab”.
2. Joel Ferree, “Introducing METAVASARELY and An Empty Room, A Two-Part Digital Work by Casey Reas”, LACMA, 13 February 2023.
3. Joey Heinen, “Examining the Life and Times of Media Art at LACMA’s First-Ever Time-Based Media Colloquium”, LACMA, 23 January 2024.
4. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “LACMA Acquires Largest Collection of Blockchain Artworks”, 13 February 2023.

Revision history

• 1.0.0 — 2026-08-04: initial profile.