Independent Media Arts Preservation <http://www.imappreserve.org> (IMAP)
celebrates the launch of its new web resource Archiving the Arts and the recent
publication of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming
Unglued <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/E/bo15981361.html>
(eds., Kathy High, Mona Jimenez, Sherry Miller Hocking) with a symposium and
public program on June 13, 2015 at Burchfield Penney Art Center
<https://www.burchfieldpenney.org> (BPAC), SUNY Buffalo State. Target
participants are professionals and students with some level of expertise in
audiovisual preservation. Conveners and facilitators include Andrew Ingall,
Executive Director of IMAP, Archivist and Time-Based Art Conservator Jeff
Martin, and Carolyn Tennant, Director of Archives and Migrating Media at
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
Artists working with video, audio, and digital materials face unique challenges.
Conventional archival practices for the care of electronic media do not take
into account the need for many artists to maintain earlier works and raw
material for their ongoing practice—in other words, the need for a true “working
archive.” To date, there are few organized projects addressing these specific
issues, and a dearth of resources for archivists and artists to discuss and
debate shared challenges. Hence, Archiving the Arts seeks to bridge the gap
between artists and archivists, by creating a series of convening events, public
programs and a web resource devoted to creating dialogue between these two
communities. The website will contain five in-depth case studies that cover a
range of preservation efforts. The symposium will highlight the Archiving the
Arts audiovisual preservation case studies, and offer a platform to stakeholders
for networking and information exchange. Program includes presentations of case
studies and informal discussions about audiovisual preservation topics, some of
which will be generated by registrants in advance. Speakers include Desiree
Alexander, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art; Madeleine Casad, Rose Goldsen
Archive of New Media Art; Tom Colley, Collection Manager, Video Data Bank;
Dianne Dietrich, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art; Athena Christa Holbrook,
The Museum of Modern Art; Joan Logue, Artist; Bill Seery, Mercer Media; and
Maria Elena Venuto, The Standby Program.
Holiday Inn Buffalo Downtown Hotel
<http://www.ihg.com/holidayinn/hotels/us/en/buffalo/bufmt/hoteldetail>
(716-886-2121), which includes complimentary 24-hour airport shuttle, offers
IMAP a discounted group rate of $119 for King and $124 for two double beds. Due
to the Allentown Arts Festival <http://www.allentownartfestival.com> , the
hotel’s parking lot is closed between 10am and 7pm on June 13-14, 2015.
Symposium Location: Burchfield-Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State
1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York
Fees: General Admission $150
IMAP Members, BPAC Members $100
Artists and Students $50
See following pages for registration, schedule, and presenter information.
Inquiries to imap@imappreserve.org <imap@imappreserve.org> . Registration
here <http://www.imappreserve.org/join/membership.html> .
Please note that registration is limited to 50 participants on a first-come,
first-served basis.
Independent Media Arts Preservation <http://www.imappreserve.org> (IMAP) serves
the caretakers of media collections by providing information resources to help
preserve our cultural heritage. IMAP offers innovative solutions through
information sharing, continuing education and networking opportunities. IMAP
receives generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, individual
donors, and funds from the Media Arts Assistance 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 the New York State Legislature; administered by
Wave Farm.
Archiving the Arts Schedule of Events
10:30 AM—4:30 PM Symposium
10:30 AM Welcome and Introduction
11:00 AM Presentation: Individual artist (Athena Holbrook, Joan Logue
<http://videoportrait.net> )
Pioneering video artist Joan Logue has been collaborating with media archivist
Athena Holbrook to preserve her personal archive, which contains more than three
decades’ worth of work on multiple obsolete videotape formats, and includes
original tapes and edited masters, as well as other working materials. Logue and
Holbrook will discuss their collaboration, and the ways in which they have
approached the challenges of preserving a “living” archive. Under the auspices
of New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, a
pilot project to migrate a portion of the video material received partial
funding from New York Women in Film & Television's Women's Film Preservation
Fund.
11:30 AM Presentation: Artist Collective (Tom Colley and Andrew Ingall on the
Videofreex Archive <http://www.vdb.org/collection/videofreex%20archive> )
Video Data Bank (VDB) is preserving the archive of the Videofreex, a pioneering
group of artists, activists, and storytellers who produced and disseminated
alternative media during the 1970s. Tom Colley, VDB Archivist, and Andrew
Ingall, IMAP Executive Director and curator of the exhibition Videofreex: The
Art of Guerrilla Television
<http://www.newpaltz.edu/museum/exhibitions/videofreex.html> , will discuss the
preservation project, the challenges of dealing with early non-broadcast analog
video, VDB’s role as both archive and distributor, and how working with a
collective has affected decisions about preservation and exhibition.
12:00 PM Q&A
12:45 PM Lunch (Dining options include The Museum Café and off-campus eateries)
2:00 PM Presentation: Institution (Desiree Alexander, Madeleine Casad, and
Dianne Dietrich on the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
<http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu> )
Among its collections, which also include the archives of the Experimental
Television Center, the Goldsen Archive at Cornell University holds an important
collection of artist-created CD-ROM and early born-digital works. The presenters
will discuss the challenges faced in both preserving and making accessible some
of the earliest interactive digital artworks.
2:30 PM Q&A
2:45 PM Discussion: Artist-Technician Partnerships (Bill Seery, Mercer Media
<http://www.mercermedia.com> and Maria Elena Venuto, The Standby Program
<http://www.standby.org/standby/> )
Frequently, artists preserving their work will need to engage a qualified vendor
to carry out digitization. But commercial vendors are not always sensitive to
the special needs of artist-created media. Seery and Venuto will discuss the
ways in which Mercer Media and The Standby Program have worked with artists to
preserve their work, as well as strategies for artists who need to call 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 Arts
Preservation
7:00 PM Public Program: Television Becoming Unglued (No registration required)
The symposium’s public program will celebrate the Western New York book launch
for The Emergence Of Video Processing Tools (Intellect, 2014). An investigation
of the pioneering and collaborative work of media artists and technologists
during the late 1960s and '70s, the two volume text features contributions from
engineers, artists, historians and theorists, and provides a context for both
the culture and the counterculture that drove the invention of production tools
and inspired subsequent generations of contemporary artists. Throughout the book
are links to the Upstate NY community, where activities occurred in spaces such
as the Experimental Television Center (ETC) that housed an elaborate system
designed for artists to produce videos using techniques unavailable to those
outside of television studios. In addition to a conversation with the book's
editors and contributors, the evening will feature screenings of video art from
the compilation Experimental Television Center 1969-2009, produced by Sherry
Miller Hocking, that demonstrate the use of technology discussed in the book.
The compilation features work by over100 ETC resident artists, several of which
were preserved by The StandbyProgram and are now accessible through the Rose
Goldsen Archive of NewMedia Art at Cornell University. The program will also
launch Archiving the Arts, IMAP’s new web resource that documents the unique
preservation challenges of artists and archivists who work with video, audio,
and digital materials.
PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES
Desiree Alexander is a Collections Analysis Assistant at Cornell University
Library and has worked with the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art since
2012, assisting with the Goldsen's experimental video and digital media
preservation projects. She is also co-lead in surveying Cornell's A/V assets to
locate at risk materials campus-wide in an effort to develop preservation and
access strategies. She holds a MS in Information Studies and an MA in Public
History from SUNY Albany, and an undergraduate degree in Art History from Ithaca
College.
Madeleine Casad is Curator for Digital Scholarship at Cornell University
Library. As Associate Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, she
manages an exciting collection of media objects that present a wide range of
preservation and access challenges. She coordinates many of the Library's
Digital Humanities initiatives, and plays a leading role in education and
outreach programs to promote the innovative use of digital collections in
humanities scholarship. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell
University.
Tom Colley manages technical services at the Video Data Bank at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, and is responsible for fulfilling orders and
organizing the collection. His activities involve cataloging, preservation,
digitization, dubbing, and equipment maintenance. In addition, Tom collaborates
in running the Butcher Shop, an artist-run studio space in Chicago. He is also
an active member of AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists. He
received a bachelor's degree in Art and Anthropology from Oberlin College, and a
master's degree in Library and Information Science from the University of
Illinois.
Dianne Dietrich was a Fellow in Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services at
Cornell University Library from 2013-2015. There, she was the Digital Forensic
Analyst and Technical Lead on the library's NEH grant, Preservation and Access
Framework for Digital Art Objects. She holds a library degree from the
University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Wesleyan
University.
Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist, educator currently working with arts
and biology. In the early 1980’s she studied for her masters in film and video
at University of Buffalo with media pioneers Hollis Frampton, Steina Vasulka and
Tony Conrad. She has received awards including Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,
Rockefeller Foundation, and NEA. Her art works have been shown at Guggenheim
Museum, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin),
Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Videotage Art Space
(Hong Kong). High is Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts
at Rensselaer.
Sherry Miller Hocking has worked since 1972 with the Experimental Television
Center (ETC), which provided an international media arts residency program,
educational opportunities and sponsorship for independent media and film artists
and projects. Hocking directed the Electronic Arts Grants Program, providing
funding to individuals and arts organizations. Since 1994 she has directed the
Video History Project, an online research database for media scholars worldwide.
She has helped organize a number of preservation conferences, notably the Video
History Conference at Syracuse University. With Kathy High and Mona Jimenez,
she co-edited of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming
Unglued (Intellect, 2014). The archives of ETC are in the collection of the Rose
Goldsen Archive of New Media at Cornell University.
Athena Christa Holbrook is an audiovisual archivist focused on the
history,presentation, and preservation of media and performance art. A
graduateof NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, she
haspreviously worked as Associate Media Conservator for the KramlichCollection
and New Art Trust. She is currently the Collection Specialist inthe Department
of Media & Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art.
Andrew Ingall, an independent curator and scholar, most recently organized
Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of
Art/SUNY New Paltz. Previous he was Assistant Curator at The Jewish Museum, New
York where he also served as archivist for the Museum’s television and radio
archive. He has served on selection committees for Documentary Fortnight, The
Museum of Modern Art’s annual international showcase of recent nonfiction film
and video, and the Annual New York Jewish Film Festival, a collaboration between
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum. He is a co-founder,
former board member, and current Executive Director of Independent Media Arts
Preservation.
Mona Jimenez is an artist and educator who has been organizing and advocating
for the preservation of media art and community media since the 1980s. She is an
Associate Arts Professor and Associate Director in the Moving Image Archiving
and Preservation Program at New York University, where she teaches collection
management and the preservation of video and digital works, including time-based
media art. Recent projects include developing a model for activist archiving of
video collections and collaborating with colleagues in Ghana for training in
audiovisual archiving and 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 artists with Sony’s
introduction of the video Portapak in the late sixties. Since 1971, Logue has
completed hundreds of video portraits for installations. In 1979, she developed
another form of portraiture called 30 Second Portraits (Spots). Both styles of
her portraiture include artists, families, lovers, fisherman, writers, poets,
philosophers, composers, street people and auto portraits. Her works have been
seen in America and abroad in installations that Logue calls video portrait
galleries. They include portraits of Jasper Johns, Willem DeKooning, 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, and Cesar Chavez to name
only a few. Logue currently resides in New York, but originally lived and worked
in Los Angeles until 1977. There, she became the first photographic portrait
artist at the American Film Institute (1969), and pioneered the first video
program at the American Film Institute.
Jeff Martin is an archivist and conservator with experience in caring for both
archival collections and time-based art. He currently works as Consulting
Conservator for the Kramlich Collection, a San Francisco-based collection of
contemporary and media art. A 2005 graduate of New York University’s Moving
Image Archiving and Preservation MA program, and a 2007 post-graduate research
fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
he served as Executive Director of Independent Media Arts Preservation (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 and operator of Mercer Media.
For the past 15 years he has been active in the conservation and restoration of
time based media including audio and moving image materials, and installation
art. In partnership with The Standby Program, he created the first not for
profit magnetic media preservation center on the east coast working to preserve
collections such as Hallwalls, Electronic Arts Intermix, Experimental Television
Center, Franklin Furnace, Anthology Film Archives, NYU Fales Library, The Martha
Graham Dance Company, The Wooster Group and selected works of James Nares, Beryl
Korot, Carolee Schneeman, Vito Acconci, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Hills and Nam
June Paik.
Carolyn Tennant is a media artist, curator and historian based in Buffalo, NY.
Formerly Media Arts Director for Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (2006-2014)
she currently serves as the organization's archivist. In 2007, she helped
organize the Migrating Media project with other upstate New York organizations
including the Experimental Television Center, Squeaky Wheel, and the Burchfield
Penney Art Center. Carolyn holds a MFA from the Department of Media Study,
University at Buffalo; her video work is distributed by EAI and Video Data Bank
as part of the compilation Experimental Television Center, 1969-2009, and her
research and writings on the history of early electronic 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 in 1993 and became
Executive Director in 1995. Standby’s mission is to foster the creation and
preservation of media art works by democratizing access to media technology.
Standby partners with private post-production facilities to offer artists and
other non-profits access to post-production and preservation services. As
Executive Director, Maria oversees the direction of the organization,
fundraising, development, and relationships with collaborating facilities. In
2003, she facilitated the creation of a comprehensive magnetic media
preservation service for audio and video, designed specifically to meet the
needs of artists and arts and cultural organizations. Prior to relocating to NYC
in 1992, she was the Technical Director at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
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.