San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

• Series: A field of practice
• Status: public scholarship
• Institutional author: 6529 Network Museum
• Version: 1.0.1
• Publication date: 2026-08-04
• Research cutoff: 2026-08-04
• Research apparatus: primary-source register

SFMOMA’s Media Arts page states that its Media Arts department was established in 1987. The page lists video, film, slide, sound, computer-based, online, and live-performance works, and connects collection highlights to online artworks, publications, and media-preservation research. Its collection record for Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July; Yuri Ono and web designer, Learning to Love You More, 2002–2009 identifies the work as digital media, a web project and archive, acquired in 2010, and not on view at the time of the record.

Questions asked at acquisition

Jill Sterrett’s “Matters in Media Art” describes media artworks as dormant in storage and activated by viewers in the gallery. The essay records SFMOMA’s need to ask artists about elaborate installation setups, specialized technology, viewing conditions, and care appropriate to the work’s intentions.

The same essay identifies the 1996 Team Media group as initially “a registrar, a media tech, and me,” in Sterrett’s account. SFMOMA’s “Team Media: In Action, in Contemplation” describes its monthly meeting as bringing together curators, conservators, technicians, intellectual-property managers, registrars, and web and digital staff. It says the group began with three members and regularly attracts more than fifteen interested people.

SFMOMA presents “Matters in Media Art” as an international collaboration among the New Art Trust, The Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and Tate. The essay says the collaboration produced procedures and downloadable forms for lending video, film, audio, and computer-based installations, and that practices are adopted and revised as technology changes.

For the 6529 Network Museum, the accession gate for an executable work should require a completed technical questionnaire with: artist installation instructions; hardware, software, and service dependencies; significant properties; active and dormant test results; named change authority; artist or estate contacts; rights to preserve source and dependencies; and an approved fallback manifestation. A cross-functional review should sign the record before accession, and each later revision should cite the case that prompted it.

Writing from practice

SFMOMA publishes two complementary editorial forms. The Learning to Love You More collection record combines a concise object description with classification, medium, dates, acquisition, credit, copyright, permanent URL, and display status. Sterrett’s longer “Matters in Media Art” names the staff group, the acquisition questions, the partner institutions, and the downloadable forms. Together, the pages connect a stable object record to the institutional reasoning around its care.

The Museum should use the same editorial division: keep facts and status in the object record, and publish the technical decisions, participants, uncertainties, and revision history in linked practitioner essays.

What the Museum should adopt

• Add the technical questionnaire and cross-functional approval to the accession checklist for every executable or service-dependent work.
• Store separate dormant and activated condition observations, each with date, environment, test result, and evidence link.
• Assign a named authority for hardware substitution, software migration, dependency replacement, and fallback display.
• Publish reusable forms with version numbers, adoption dates, and amendment notes tied to specific casework.
• Create a standing media review that includes curation, conservation, registration, technical operations, rights, and web or digital staff.

Where the analogy ends

SFMOMA’s Team Media account presupposes a staffed museum with registrars, conservators, technicians, rights staff, and digital staff who can meet regularly. The Museum must name equivalent roles, fund outside partners where needed, and record responsibility in each object file. The downloadable form does not settle artist-specific rights or significant properties; those remain work-level decisions.

Sources

1. SFMOMA, “Media Arts”.
2. SFMOMA, “Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July; Yuri Ono and web designer Learning to Love You More, 2002-2009”.
3. Jill Sterrett, “Matters in Media Art”, SFMOMA, October 2015.
4. Lindsey Westbrook, “Team Media: In Action, in Contemplation”, SFMOMA, February 2016.

Revision history

• 1.0.1 — 2026-08-04: removed an unsupported institutional analogy and narrowed the lesson to role definition, media conservation, and work-level authority for this Museum.
• 1.0.0 — 2026-08-04: initial profile.