Disappearing Media, Disappearing Culture

Mona Jimenez, Associate Arts Professor, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

In a grainy black-and-white video made in 1973, advocates from the National Association for Media Access are in deep dialogue with policy-makers from the Nixon Administration and leaders of the cable industry, including Alfred Stern, the president of Warner Cable and Clay T. Whitehead of the Office of Telecommunications Policy.

The video, called Cable Report, documents the organizing that eventually carved out a public space for public, educational and governmental (PEG) access from the burgeoning cable monopolies. The video offers a rare look at the role of media advocacy in telecommunications policy, placing the current battles for fair telecommunications policies in an appropriate and essential historical continuum. Cable Report was produced by Portable Channel, a center founded in Rochester in 1971 on the philosophy that new portable video systems were tools not only for personal expression but also for participatory community development.

Portable Channel’s series Homemade TV was broadcast for several years on WXXI, Rochester’s public television station, in a prime-time slot. The example above is just one of many gems from the series. Other programs in the series included community organizing efforts by Rochester’s African-American community, the ordination of the first female Episcopal minister, the trial of the anti-Vietnam activists the Harrisburg Seven, a 100th anniversary birthday celebration in a senior center, activism in response to rape crisis, documentation of Haitian-American arts and strudel-making by an elder.

Sometimes rough but often fascinating and poignant, the tapes provide a window into the first years of community media, where media making came out of the studio and onto the streets. Across the country series like this – crucial video documents of culture and history – are at risk of loss due to inadequate support for media preservation.

Until last fall, Cable Report was buried among the roughly 800 other titles in the basement of the arts center Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), also in Rochester. When Portable Channel closed its doors in the 1980s, VSW took on custodianship of the collection, adding to its own substantial archive of media art. At the time, the concept of media preservation was almost non-existent, and VSW provided a home for a collection that would likely have been abandoned.

Suffering physical changes over the decades, Cable Report did not play back easily or well. The edges of the image wobble and white lines, representing the loss of particles that hold the video signal, periodically flash across the screen. These are symptoms of a common problem, “sticky shed syndrome,” that causes an older tape’s surface to become gummy and to shed through playback. Debris from the tape can stop a playback machine dead in its tracks. More importantly, video is machine-readable, and without a working player is totally inaccessible. Most older players, like those needed for the 1⁄2” open reel format, are extremely rare even on Ebay. To make a new digital preservation master, most tapes require careful treatment. Many must be cleaned, de-hydrated and coaxed through playback by a skilled technician.

Working with the New York nonprofit The Standby Program, graduate students from New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP) managed the preservation of Cable Report and four other titles in the fall of 2009. The Standby Program is one of a small network of nonprofits dedicated to saving the history of independent video and media art, one tape at a time. While seemingly insignificant, the preservation of a few titles can spark broader community interest in a collection, leading to critical support for long-term storage and public accessibility through collaborations with resourced institutions, such as local universities.

Across the country, the situation at VSW is repeated. Arts organizations, community organizations and in some cases local TV stations hold the work of pioneering media artists and citizen journalists. Of course many works are held in private collections by the producers themselves.

These collections – primary sources for the study of American social and cultural history and in many cases tracing the history of media access and activism – exist in every corner of the country. They contain everything from social documentaries and video art to public testimonies on community needs, evidence such as human rights documentation, and recordings of performances of music, dance, theater or spoken word.

The vast majority of independent media productions were financed directly or indirectly by foundations and public agencies, yet the support for preservation has been an almost indiscernible fraction of overall media funding.

Preservation – periodically moving content to a new carrier – is simply a strategy for maintaining a work over the long term and must be done from the highest quality version. Recent support for digital distribution stresses low-band transfers for short-term access over the more complex process of digitization for the long term. While in theory greater access to productions can lead to a deeper awareness of the need for preservation, digitization-for-access projects leave the works just as vulnerable to loss as they were before digitization.

In the 1990s, the media arts community began to collectively sound alarms about the loss of independent media collections with the Symposium on Video Preservation (NYC, 1991) and the publication of Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past (Media Alliance, 1993). Early on, media preservationists realized that a dependence on for-profit vendors was dangerous; nonprofit centers were also needed. (Their fears were not unfounded. Recently one of the largest video preservation companies, Vidipax, went out of business. Not only did the services disappear, but also important web resources on the history of video technology and on preservation techniques.)

Expanding an existing media center to perform preservation makes sense. Equipment and processes are transferable, and media centers are invested in local and regional networks that support public culture. For example, in 1994, the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) established the first nonprofit video preservation program, intended to be a national model, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Media preservationists were encouraged when credibility for the nonprofit model was strengthened through the publication of Television and Video Preservation 1997: A Report on the Current State of American Television and Video Preservation (Library of Congress). The study called for the establishment of a national center for video preservation, the creation of a national television and video registry for exemplary tapes, the establishment of a national foundation to fund television and video preservation, and for the establishment of nonprofit preservation centers on the model of BAVC. Thirteen years later, all of these mandates are unfortunately still unfunded and unfulfilled.

Despite the lack of national leadership on television and video preservation, organizations such as Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) have continued to promote preservation. IMAP has provided a template for cataloging audiovisual collections and the information needed to prepare for preservation. BAVC has continued to provide solid preservation services; among its recent projects has been digitization of a substantial collection of videos for the Dance Heritage Coalition’s archive of American dance. In New York, the Standby Program is a trusted provider of preservation services, working with organizations such as the ACTUP Oral History Project, Appalshop and the Experimental Television Center, and with a range of artists including Nancy Holt, Tony Oursler and Mierle Ukeles.

Several new centers have recently emerged, providing optimism for the concept of regionally-based centers. Migrating Media, based in Buffalo’s media arts center Squeaky Wheel, rose to the challenge of creating a program after a major equipment donation by Jim Lindner of Front Porch Digital. Migrating Media’s model is to build capacity regionally not only by digitizing collections, but also by training cultural organizations on all aspects of the preservation workflow, from identifying and cataloging collections to safely storing and making accessible the resulting files.

Mediamaker Blaine Dunlap, based in New Orleans, conceptualized the newly formed Southeast Video Preservation Center (SVPC) after losing much of his own work through Hurricane Katrina. He travels throughout the Southeast matching at-risk collections with established archives, recently arranging for the IMAGE Film and Video Center collection to be deposited with the University of Georgia. SVPC has recently focused on the digitization of documentary works of music and folklife.

These new initiatives – labors of love born in a period of severe cuts in arts funding – are based on the reality that we are at critical juncture if we are to save video productions of the 1970s and ‘80s. A network of preservation centers, each rooted its own region, can have the greatest impact on media arts heritage.

The truth is that our analog tape collections are just the tip of the iceberg. The looming crisis is that of collections of fragile, small format digital tape and even more, the longevity of productions created through new tapeless video systems. The bottom line is that long term media access is not only a question of policies but of practicalities.

I was recently struck by the energy – very impressive and productive – that went into the development of the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use developed by the Center for Social Media. But I couldn’t help asking the question: without preservation of media collections, where will the documentarians of the 21st century go to exercise their fair use rights?

For more information on the organizations mentioned above see:

Bay Area Video Coalition – Preservation Services

Independent Media Arts Preservation

Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network

Southeast Video Preservation Center on Vimeo

The Standby Program

Mona Jimenez teaches video preservation and the preservation of multimedia and time-based media art in the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University.
www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation