5 Minutes With… Mei Wilkinson

In Oct of 2023 Mei Wilkinson, ICS Technology and Collections Coordinator, was the lucky recipient of the George Alexander Foundation Fellowship from the ISS Institute (International Specialised Skills Institute).
The Fellowship Program supports early-career professionals to travel abroad and acquire higher-level skills to drive leading practice and innovation in their fields when they return to Australia.

Mei used this time to specialise in software-based media conservation in a placement at M+ Museum in Hong Kong. The M+ Museum opened in November 2021 and holds some of the foremost collections of twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture making it one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world.

During her placement at M+ Museum Mei worked under the care of David Smith, the Digital and Media Art conservator at M+ and immersed herself in the conservation of digital and time-based media.

She acquired skills in disk imaging, emulation, and data recovery, especially from obsolete digital carriers. Mei also applied her learning in practical electronics, contributing to the maintenance and upgrade of a current installation. She also spent time doing quality control and preparation of digital video files for the museum's facade and learning about analogue film formats.

An important part of her time there was a special project working to document, test and stage an interactive software-based artwork where she utilised her new skills troubleshooting hardware and software issues.

Mei is now back at ICS, looking forward to using her skills to support the preservation of Australian digital and time-based media collections, along with sharing her new knowledge with the ICS team