Chris King is a conservator of time-based media art at Tate. He has contributed to Tate’s Software-based Art Preservation project and forthcoming research on Tate’s early net art commissions for Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum. He also helped deliver workshops at The American Institute of Conservation annual conference, on the preservation of web-based art and at Sussex Humanities Lab on conserving software-based artworks and the maintenance of obsolete electronics.
Outside of his role at Tate Chris also works as an artist and curator with particular research interests in early electronic video & computer-based practice in Britain and beyond. This work is supported by a discussion list he runs and an extensive personal collection of early catalogues and archive material. Starting in 2018 Chris also helps convene Vector Hack, an international artist led festival devoted to the history & contemporary practice of experimental and analogue vector graphics. Based in Croatia now in its third edition, Vector Hack has helped surface research into often neglected areas of early new media with a special attention to media archaeological, practical and materialist approaches.
