Spearheaded by the Department of Education and Public Engagement, New Museum’s inaugural  R&D (Research and Development) Season connected various projects in the galleries, Theater, and Resource Center around the theme of ARCHIVES.

“XFR STN” (Transfer Station), the first project of the Season, turned the Fifth Floor Education Gallery into a full-fledged digitization lab where visitors learned about legacies of video art, and became familiar with evolving techniques for moving image and digital preservation.

Concurrently, the Education Department unveiled a newly reconfigured Resource Center with the exhibition “Pushing the Limits.” This presentation of materials from the New Museum’s rich archival collection exposed a variety of strategies by which artists, critics, scholars, and curators have tested the conditions and parameters of the institution.

For the second part of the Fall 2013 Season, “Performance Archiving Performance” took up archiving and its relationship to live art as its focus. This special presentation included an exhibition of performance projects that engaged archive as medium, an accompanying series of residencies, and a lineup of performances and talks with artists, curators, and scholars.