Items tagged with "preservation"

The time is now. If we don't fully own the absolute necessity to change how we've all been working, we won't be working -- and we won't have the illuminating, inspiring, transforming films that we now enjoy. It's your choice, but action is required.

There is the capacity for many more of us to create and prosper from creative media work. This capacity can also close up and vanish along with our audiences. The canaries are now the size of Big Birds and we somehow are able to ignore them (but that is a subject for a different posts).

How do art house cinemas survive in the 21st century with a business model that appears to be quixotic at best and suicidal at worst?

On January 5 and 6, 2000, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted "TechArcheology: A Symposium on Installation Art Preservation." This gathering was billed as an "opportunity to significantly advance the development of conservation practices for technology-based installation art." The approximately 25 invited participants included conservators and curators from the Getty Conservation Institute, New York s Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Gallery, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pacific Film Archive, and SFMOMA, as well as four important installation artists: Dara Birnbaum, James Coleman, Gary

Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) is a consortium of over 40 groups and individuals founded in February 1999 to ensure the preservation of independent electronic media. Members include representatives from Electronic Arts Intermix, Paper Tiger, The Kitchen, the Jewish Museum, Bay Area Video Coalition, Experimental Television Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the National Museum of the American Indian and the New York Public Library (Donnell Center and the Dance Collection) among others.

On March 30-31, 2001, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York hosted a conference entitled "Preserving the Immaterial: A Conference on Variable Media." The conference made public for the first time the Guggenheim's Variable Media Initiative: a pioneering effort to explore the issues surrounding, and to find solutions to problems arising from, art made in inherently ephemeral media. This effort is spearheaded by John Hanhardt, the Guggenheim's Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, and Assistant Curator Jon Ippolito.

National Center for Experiments in Television Preservation Project Progress Report

"Long long ago, in an archive far far away..."

Like most video histories, the story of the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET) is fragmented, buried and unknown to all but a handful of people. Fascinated by what little we knew about the Center, the two of us embarked on a preservation project to locate, preserve and exhibit tapes from the Center out of a desire to see the work and learn more.

After many strong decades of independent media, various artists resource centers are finding themselves the custodians of growing collections of distinct and important films and videotapes. As artist film- and video-practice grows into adulthood, these dispersed collections are beginning to show the physical signs of age - old films are fading and shrinking, and video works shot in rare analogue formats are outlasting some of the equipment necessary to play them.

Why would two intelligent people focus their attention - not to mention stake their savings, reputation, and livelihood - on an "obsolete" film gauge?

1. Relax - you have started. You are thinking about ways of saving the cultural record. You are reading, talking, and head-scratching. This counts. Figuring out what you and your organization want to do and can do is sometimes the hardest part.

2. However long those think-tank meetings on your preservation plans take, start anywhere. Got a box under your desk that annoys you every time you want to put your feet there?

There was once a myth about the permanence of magnetic media that has been proven to be just that: myth. Individuals and organizations that have produced work as recently as the 1990s are dealing with the need to preserve that work for the future. There is an even greater need to preserve works from earlier decades, as much of it was recorded on formats that are now extinct. Functional equipment to reproduce these tapes is difficult to locate and maintain. No true archival format exists. Migration to current magnetic formats is the best we can offer at present. New formats come and go, and media continues to degrade.