Independent Media ArtsPreservation (IMAP) celebrates the launch of its new web resource Archivingthe Arts and the recent publication of TheEmergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued(eds.,Kathy High, Mona Jimenez, Sherry Miller Hocking) with a symposium and publicprogram on June 13, 2015 at BurchfieldPenney Art Center (BPAC), SUNY Buffalo State. Target participants areprofessionals and students with some level of expertise in audiovisualpreservation. Conveners and facilitators include Andrew Ingall, ExecutiveDirector of IMAP, Archivist and Time-Based Art Conservator Jeff Martin, andCarolyn Tennant, Director of Archives and Migrating Media at HallwallsContemporary Arts Center.Artists working with video, audio, and digital materials faceunique challenges. Conventional archival practices for the care of electronicmedia do not take into account the need for many artists to maintain earlierworks and raw material for their ongoing practice—in other words, the need fora true “working archive.” To date, there are few organized projects addressingthese specific issues, and a dearth of resources for archivists and artists todiscuss and debate shared challenges. Hence, Archiving the Artsseeks to bridge the gap between artists and archivists, by creating a series ofconvening events, public programs and a web resource devoted to creatingdialogue between these two communities. The website will contain fivein-depth case studies that cover a range of preservation efforts. The symposiumwill highlight the Archiving the Arts audiovisual preservation casestudies, and offer a platform to stakeholders for networking and informationexchange. Program includes presentations of case studies and informaldiscussions about audiovisual preservation topics, some of which will begenerated by registrants in advance. Speakers include Desiree Alexander, RoseGoldsen Archive of New Media Art; Madeleine Casad, Rose Goldsen Archive of NewMedia Art; Tom Colley, Collection Manager, Video Data Bank; Dianne Dietrich,Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art; Athena Christa Holbrook, The Museum ofModern Art; Joan Logue, Artist; Bill Seery, Mercer Media; and Maria ElenaVenuto, The Standby Program. HolidayInn Buffalo Downtown Hotel (716-886-2121), which includes complimentary24-hour airport shuttle, offers IMAP a discounted group rate of $119 for Kingand $124 for two double beds. Due to the Allentown Arts Festival, thehotel’s parking lot is closed between 10am and 7pm on June 13-14, 2015. Symposium Location: Burchfield-Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York Fees: General Admission $150IMAP Members, BPAC Members $100Artists and Students $50 See following pages for registration, schedule, and presenter information.Inquiries to [email protected] here.Please note that registration is limited to 50participants on a first-come, first-served basis. Independent Media ArtsPreservation (IMAP) serves the caretakers of media collections byproviding information resources to help preserve our cultural heritage. IMAPoffers innovative solutions through information sharing, continuing educationand networking opportunities. IMAP receives generous support from the NationalEndowment for the Arts, individual donors, and funds from the Media ArtsAssistance Fund, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts,Electronic Media and Film, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and theNew York State Legislature; administered by Wave Farm.Archiving the Arts Schedule of Events10:30 AM—4:30 PM Symposium10:30 AM Welcome and Introduction11:00 AM Presentation: Individual artist (Athena Holbrook, Joan Logue)Pioneering video artist Joan Logue has been collaborating with mediaarchivist Athena Holbrook to preserve her personal archive, which contains morethan three decades’ worth of work on multiple obsolete videotape formats, andincludes original tapes and edited masters, as well as other working materials.Logue and Holbrook will discuss their collaboration, and the ways in which theyhave approached the challenges of preserving a “living” archive. Under theauspices of New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and PreservationProgram, a pilot project to migrate a portion of the video material receivedpartial funding from New York Women in Film & Television's Women's FilmPreservation Fund.11:30 AM Presentation: Artist Collective (Tom Colley and AndrewIngall on the VideofreexArchive) Video Data Bank (VDB) is preserving the archive of the Videofreex, a pioneeringgroup of artists, activists, and storytellers who produced and disseminatedalternative media during the 1970s. Tom Colley, VDB Archivist, and AndrewIngall, IMAP Executive Director and curator of the exhibition Videofreex:The Art of Guerrilla Television, will discuss the preservationproject, the challenges of dealing with early non-broadcast analog video, VDB’srole as both archive and distributor, and how working with a collective hasaffected decisions about preservation and exhibition.12:00 PM Q&A12:45 PM Lunch (Dining options include The Museum Café and off-campuseateries)2:00 PM Presentation: Institution (Desiree Alexander, MadeleineCasad, and Dianne Dietrich on the Rose Goldsen Archive of NewMedia Art) Among its collections, which also include the archives of the ExperimentalTelevision Center, the Goldsen Archive at Cornell University holds an importantcollection of artist-created CD-ROM and early born-digital works. Thepresenters will discuss the challenges faced in both preserving and makingaccessible some of the earliest interactive digital artworks.2:30 PM Q&A2:45 PM Discussion: Artist-Technician Partnerships (Bill Seery, Mercer Media andMaria Elena Venuto, TheStandby Program) Frequently, artists preserving their work will need to engage a qualifiedvendor to carry out digitization. But commercial vendors are not alwayssensitive to the special needs of artist-created media. Seery and Venuto willdiscuss the ways in which Mercer Media and The Standby Program have worked withartists to preserve their work, as well as strategies for artists who need tocall on outside expertise for preservation projects.3:15 PM Discussion: Other topic solicited from registrants in advance (TBA)3:45 PM Notes from the Field: Assessing the Needs of Audiovisual ArtsPreservation 7:00 PM Public Program: Television Becoming Unglued(No registration required)The symposium’s public program will celebrate the Western New York booklaunch for The Emergence Of Video Processing Tools (Intellect, 2014).An investigation of the pioneering and collaborative work of media artists andtechnologists during the late 1960s and '70s, the two volume text featurescontributions from engineers, artists, historians and theorists, and provides acontext for both the culture and the counterculture that drove the invention ofproduction tools and inspired subsequent generations of contemporary artists.Throughout the book are links to the Upstate NY community, where activitiesoccurred in spaces such as the Experimental Television Center (ETC) that housedan elaborate system designed for artists to produce videos using techniquesunavailable to those outside of television studios. In addition to aconversation with the book's editors and contributors, the evening will featurescreenings of video art from the compilation Experimental Television Center1969-2009, produced by Sherry Miller Hocking, that demonstrate the use oftechnology discussed in the book. The compilation features work by over100 ETCresident artists, several of which were preserved by The StandbyProgram and arenow accessible through the Rose Goldsen Archive of NewMedia Art at CornellUniversity. The program will also launch Archiving the Arts, IMAP’snew web resource that documents the unique preservation challenges of artistsand archivists who work with video, audio, and digital materials.PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES Desiree Alexander is a Collections Analysis Assistant atCornell University Library and has worked with the Rose Goldsen Archive ofNew Media Art since 2012, assisting with the Goldsen's experimental video anddigital media preservation projects. She is also co-lead in surveyingCornell's A/V assets to locate at risk materials campus-wide in an effort todevelop preservation and access strategies. She holds a MS in InformationStudies and an MA in Public History from SUNY Albany, and an undergraduatedegree in Art History from Ithaca College. Madeleine Casad is Curator for Digital Scholarship at CornellUniversity Library. As Associate Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of NewMedia Art, she manages an exciting collection of media objects that present awide range of preservation and access challenges. She coordinates many of theLibrary's Digital Humanities initiatives, and plays a leading role in educationand outreach programs to promote the innovative use of digital collections inhumanities scholarship. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from CornellUniversity. Tom Colley manages technical services at the Video DataBank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is responsible forfulfilling orders and organizing the collection. His activities involvecataloging, preservation, digitization, dubbing, and equipment maintenance. Inaddition, Tom collaborates in running the Butcher Shop, an artist-run studiospace in Chicago. He is also an active member of AMIA, the Association ofMoving Image Archivists. He received a bachelor's degree in Art andAnthropology from Oberlin College, and a master's degree in Library andInformation Science from the University of Illinois. Dianne Dietrich was a Fellow in Digital Scholarship andPreservation Services at Cornell University Library from 2013-2015. There, shewas the Digital Forensic Analyst and Technical Lead on the library's NEH grant,Preservation and Access Framework for Digital Art Objects. She holds a librarydegree from the University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree inMathematics from Wesleyan University. Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist, educatorcurrently working with arts and biology. In the early 1980’s she studied forher masters in film and video at University of Buffalo with media pioneersHollis Frampton, Steina Vasulka and Tony Conrad. She has received awardsincluding Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and NEA. Herart works have been shown at Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (NYC),Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASSMoCA (North Adams), Videotage Art Space (Hong Kong). High is Professor of Videoand New Media in the Department of Arts at Rensselaer. Sherry Miller Hocking has worked since 1972 with theExperimental Television Center (ETC), which provided an international mediaarts residency program, educational opportunities and sponsorship forindependent media and film artists and projects. Hocking directed theElectronic Arts Grants Program, providing funding to individuals and artsorganizations. Since 1994 she has directed the Video History Project, an onlineresearch database for media scholars worldwide. She has helped organize a numberof preservation conferences, notably the Video History Conference at SyracuseUniversity. With Kathy High and Mona Jimenez, she co-edited of TheEmergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued(Intellect, 2014). The archives of ETC are in the collection of theRose Goldsen Archive of New Media at Cornell University. Athena Christa Holbrook is an audiovisual archivist focusedon the history,presentation, and preservation of media and performance art. Agraduateof NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, shehaspreviously worked as Associate Media Conservator for the KramlichCollectionand New Art Trust. She is currently the Collection Specialist inthe Departmentof Media & Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art. Andrew Ingall, an independent curator and scholar, mostrecently organized Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television at theSamuel Dorsky Museum of Art/SUNY New Paltz. Previous he was AssistantCurator at The Jewish Museum, New York where he also served as archivist forthe Museum’s television and radio archive. He has served on selectioncommittees for Documentary Fortnight, The Museum of Modern Art’sannual international showcase of recent nonfiction film and video, and theAnnual New York Jewish Film Festival, a collaboration between The Film Societyof Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum. He is a co-founder, former boardmember, and current Executive Director of Independent Media Arts Preservation. Mona Jimenez is an artist and educator who has beenorganizing and advocating for the preservation of media art and community mediasince the 1980s. She is an Associate Arts Professor and Associate Director inthe Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University,where she teaches collection management and the preservation of video anddigital works, including time-based media art. Recent projects includedeveloping a model for activist archiving of video collections andcollaborating with colleagues in Ghana for training in audiovisual archivingand in planning a digital repository of audio and video materials. Joan Logue is a pioneer in the field of video portraiture.She first learned to use the medium soon after it became available to artistswith Sony’s introduction of the video Portapak in the late sixties. Since 1971,Logue has completed hundreds of video portraits for installations. In 1979, shedeveloped another form of portraiture called 30 Second Portraits (Spots). Bothstyles of her portraiture include artists, families, lovers, fisherman,writers, poets, philosophers, composers, street people and auto portraits. Herworks have been seen in America and abroad in installations that Logue callsvideo portrait galleries. They include portraits of Jasper Johns, WillemDeKooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, John Cage,Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Anna Halprin,Lucinda Childs, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Boulez, Rosa Parks, andCesar Chavez to name only a few. Logue currently resides in New York, butoriginally lived and worked in Los Angeles until 1977. There, she became thefirst photographic portrait artist at the American Film Institute (1969), andpioneered the first video program at the American Film Institute. Jeff Martin is an archivist and conservator with experiencein caring for both archival collections and time-based art. He currently worksas Consulting Conservator for the Kramlich Collection, a San Francisco-basedcollection of contemporary and media art. A 2005 graduate of New YorkUniversity’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program, and a 2007post-graduate research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museumand Sculpture Garden, he served as Executive Director of Independent Media ArtsPreservation (IMAP) for four years. Bill Seery has over 30 years of experience in sound design,editing and mixing for film, video, radio and multimedia as the owner andoperator of Mercer Media. For the past 15 years he has been active in theconservation and restoration of time based media including audio and movingimage materials, and installation art. In partnership with The Standby Program,he created the first not for profit magnetic media preservation center on theeast coast working to preserve collections such as Hallwalls, Electronic ArtsIntermix, Experimental Television Center, Franklin Furnace, Anthology FilmArchives, NYU Fales Library, The Martha Graham Dance Company, The Wooster Groupand selected works of James Nares, Beryl Korot, Carolee Schneeman, VitoAcconci, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Hills and Nam June Paik. Carolyn Tennant is a media artist, curator and historianbased in Buffalo, NY. Formerly Media Arts Director for Hallwalls ContemporaryArts Center (2006-2014) she currently serves as the organization's archivist.In 2007, she helped organize the Migrating Media project with other upstate NewYork organizations including the Experimental Television Center, Squeaky Wheel,and the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Carolyn holds a MFA from the Departmentof Media Study, University at Buffalo; her video work is distributed by EAI andVideo Data Bank as part of the compilation Experimental Television Center,1969-2009, and her research and writings on the history of earlyelectronic art are included in The Emergence of Video Processing Tools.She has served on the board of Independent Media Arts Preservation since 2008. Maria Elena Venuto began working at The Standby Program in1993 and became Executive Director in 1995. Standby’s mission is to foster thecreation and preservation of media art works by democratizing access to mediatechnology. Standby partners with private post-production facilities to offerartists and other non-profits access to post-production and preservationservices. As Executive Director, Maria oversees the direction of theorganization, fundraising, development, and relationships with collaboratingfacilities. In 2003, she facilitated the creation of a comprehensive magneticmedia preservation service for audio and video, designed specifically to meetthe needs of artists and arts and cultural organizations. Prior to relocatingto NYC in 1992, she was the Technical Director at Hallwalls Contemporary ArtsCenter and a student in the Dept. of Media Studies at UB (BA ‘87, MA ‘90).Maria has worked in the media arts field since 1986 as a filmmaker, educator,and editor.
Posted on behalf of AndrewIngall, Executive Director Independent Media Arts Preservation www.imappreserve.org [email protected]
VIDEOLIB is intended to encourage the broad and lively discussion of issues relating to the selection, evaluation, acquisition,bibliographic control, preservation, and use of current and evolving video formats in libraries and related institutions. It is hoped that the list will serve as an effective working tool for video librarians, as well as a channel of communication between libraries,educational institutions, and video producers and distributors.
