Using remnants bequeathed by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MetaCloud explores the fragility of institutional memory when faced with the transition from analog to digital imagery. As of only one or two generations ago, the art world predominately used 35mm slides to document artwork and exhibitions, filling countless carousels, projectors and cabinets in a desire to archive and disseminate the history of art. Today’s ubiquitous and low cost digital imaging, however, has motivated major cultural institutions to digitize their slide libraries, consequently rendering vast collections obsolete. Jean Shin has strung together thousands of individual slides into a large-scale installation intended to reconstruct the systems of categories, hierarchies and chronologies that once contextualized these archives.

MetaCloud is a satellite exhibition of Materials for the Arts’ Institutional Memory: 35mm Slides from the Met’s Collection exhibition organized by Hallie Bahn and Omar Olivera of MFTA and Marco Castro Cosio formerly of the Met Media Lab.