Nadja Wallaszkovits has been Professor of Conservation and Restoration of New Media and Digital Information at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design since 2020. A portrait
Nadja Wallaszkovits is an enthusiastic career changer and Professor of Conservation and Restoration of New Media and Digital Information at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. She is actually a sound engineer, has supervised music productions for records, films and videos at the Konzerthaus Vienna, then worked at the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences with “audio digitization, re-recording, restoration and processing, workflow, conception and implementation for a digital archive” – first as an assistant sound engineer, later as chief engineer. This list from her CV outlines the interests of this extremely enthusiastic career changer in the field of restoration.
Rescuing audio files and more
However, she has been involved in the preservation of new media and digital information her entire professional life. Nadja Wallaszkovits has a captivating way of describing how dramatic the situation is when it comes to rescuing audio files. She talks just as captivatingly about troubleshooting when restoring sounds: “I wanted to read out the absolute last magnetic particle. With the utmost precision. But I realized that this wasn’t possible because the sound carrier or the film was damaged. So I asked myself how I could improve the quality of the carrier – chemically or physically – to get a great signal.” This was the beginning of her involvement with chemistry and restoration. Because her main question is: “Why does it sound the way it does? Why does it look the way it looks? How much can I change? Where is the end of a technology? And do we see something completely different today – with a modern HD monitor, for example – than we did in the 1980s?” These are some of the questions she wants to discuss with her future students.
What do museums and archives need to preserve their audio carriers and digital works?
However, there are not yet too many of them in Stuttgart. There are currently three female students. The coronavirus restrictions have dampened interest in the new course. But Nadja Wallaszkovits is confident that she will be able to get more future conservators interested in her subject. After all, it is one of the most important topics of the coming years: “Many museums and archives don’t even know what they need to preserve their audio carriers and digital works. They don’t even know that time is running out for them every day and they don’t know that many devices are no longer available.” Most people are only aware that there is rarely funding for the digitization of an entire collection.
The conservator as consultant
Anyone studying with Nadja Wallaszkovits will be a consultant for all these problems, will know how to digitize the valuable individual pieces, why one provider is better than the other, what improvements are possible, what is ethically correct and where the compromise lies. “My aim is for the conservators we train to be able to understand and manage the ethical, aesthetic, commercial and technological context,” says Nadja Wallaszkovits.
Vita Nadja Wallaszkovits
1987-1989: School of Audio Engineering (SAE), Vienna, Diploma in Audio Engineering
1998: Degree in musicology (comparative musicology / ethnomusicology) and theater studies (focus on music theater)
1995-2000: Jazz Club Porgy & Bess, Vienna, sound engineer for live sound reinforcement, lighting design and lighting technology for international live jazz concerts
1988-2002: Konzerthaus Wien and Hey-U Media Group Vienna: sound engineer for recording / mixing / mastering / sound reinforcement of various music recordings, record and CD productions of all music genres including film music and video sound
1999-2005: Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna: assistant sound engineer, 2005-2020 chief engineer, head of the technical development working group
2017: Doctorate (Dr. phil.) at the University of Vienna, Institute of Musicology, topic: Restoration of historical audio materials with a focus on recordings from the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
since 2020: Professor of Conservation and Restoration of New Media and Digital Information at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design
A keynote lecture by Nadja Wallaszkovits (“From Wax Cylinder to Digital: A Time-Travel through the History of Field Recording Technology”, Institute of Musicology SASA October 27th, 2021) can be found here in the video: