XFR STN Offers a Digital Update at the New Museum Artists, editors and the occasional MTV producer are making pilgrimages to its fifth-floor gallery, where the museum's XFR STN project helps them preserve, and in some cases, excavate, artworks stored on floppy disks, videocassettes and other obsolete media. "It's like Noah's ark," said Ben Fino-Radin, a digital conservator for the project. Some of this stuff hasn't been seen in 30 years. It can be something of a random archaeological dig, dependent on what is brought in by the artists seeking free one-on-one time with technicians to digitize their work. Most of it is then uploaded to archive.org, the Internet's Wayback Machine, where it is available for anybody to experience. The project, pronounced "transfer station," runs through Sept. 8 and allows anyone to bring in their work after signing up on the museum's Web site. It's also open to museumgoers, who can see an exhibition of retro videos, posters and machinery, and witness the artists and technicians midrestoration. Along the way there's a healthy dose of nostalgia, as well as the smack of recognition that time, or at least technology, travels rather fast. In the space of a few hours "you go from U-matic," an analog tape deck from the 1970s, "to watching it on your phone," Mr. Fino-Radin said. A recent tour revealed how art buried in the audiovisual graveyard lives again. At a tower of outdated machines - a U-matic, an oscilloscope - Walter Forsberg, an audiovisual conservator for the project, worked with the artist Matthew Geller to digitize a tape of the artists Kiki Smith, Rebecca Allen and Ellen Cooper fronting the Cardboard Air Band in a performance at the Kitchen. Mr. Geller guessed that it was from 1981, when the artists were at the beginning of their careers. Even so, the footage, of men and women in skinny pants and floppy bangs singing and playing cardboard instruments, looked remarkably contemporary. "It's certainly interesting seeing a lot of this stuff, with the knowledge now of what comes after it," said Mr. Geller, a site-specific installation artist. We were all in our 20s, and no one ever imagined being famous until our 30s or 40s. Museum visitors watched footage from the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club, an art collective begun in the 1980s, led by the artists and writers Alan W. Moore and Michael Carter. The club was spun out of Colab, Collaborative Projects Inc., a downtown group that also helped start ABC No Rio, a cultural space still kicking on the Lower East Side. Andrea Callard, a Colab artist, has helped digitize hours of tapes from the MWF club that span a 10-year period. In 2004 New York University acquired her papers, including the first videos she made in the 1970s and "80s. "I was at a point in my life when I really wanted to see what that stuff looked like," she said, taking a break from her headphones and monitor. If you want to experience the continuity of your work, that's important. It's really fun to see it. Now they have a new audience. It's like a second life. The New Museum is digitizing some of its own archives, too. On an unlabeled Betamax tape, Tara Hart, the institution's archivist, uncovered the museum's founder, Marcia Tucker, discussing art in an early TV appearance. "It's very much high-"80s," said Johanna Burton, the director and curator of education and public engagement at the New Museum, sounding enthralled about this window into the past. As artists stream in to XFR STN, "histories are being told," she said. There are instant connections between the technicians and the people who are in the space. It feels very intimate in a space that we were afraid would be cold and technical. Because of the "precarity of the medium," she added, "there's something in the room that makes people aware of how easily histories get lost." Gabriel Tolliver, an associate producer on "Yo! MTV Raps" in the early 1990s, brought in a tape of performances by Public Enemy, Run DMC with the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest and the Wu-Tang Clan - the foundations of contemporary hip-hop. In an era overstimulated by images, "there will be a need," Mr. Tolliver said, "to look back, at certain points, at our cultural timeline to try to find moments to connect with, to revisit or be inspired by." Mr. Tolliver also digitized rap ephemera, like a 1992 Harlem boxing match. "Willie D of the Geto Boys knocked out Melle Mel of the Sugar Hill Gang," he recalled. That was one of the first times I ever picked up a camera. It was wild looking back at that. The nostalgia doesn't extend to the older devices, which are nearly useless and often hard to come by. The majority of the project's budget went to hiring people adept at wrestling with the temperamental machinery. Floppy disks and hard drives are jury-rigged with new software used in forensics and video games. The museum borrowed old cassette decks from other institutions or scavenged for them on eBay, where even an outdated cord might go for $200. "If you think Apple's cables are expensive now," Mr. Fino-Radin said, "wait until they're vintage, and you have to get grandpa's old photos off his iPhone that you find in a shoe box." The obsolescence of tools that were once cutting edge highlights the limits of the digital anthology the New Museum is creating; its collection is just a small fraction of what's out there, Ms. Burton said, "and it's rather arbitrary." "It's going to be a great collection, and a weird collection," she said, "but it will be just the beginning of something that we wish could keep going."