More notes from an aging Vidiot
The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) : Notes on Video preservation from my conversation with Ben Turkus BAVC Preservation Manager
BVAC was founded in San Francisco, CA in the early 1970s by a group of video makers interested in sharing equipment, mutual production assistance and production training. By the 1990s they realized that magnetic media was not designed for long term storage, putting vast amounts of important video recording in danger of being lost forever. As a response to that threat, in 1994 BAVC became the first non-profit video archiving and preservation facility in the nation. BVAC hosted the Playback Conference in 1996 a national meeting of video archivists and preservationists. The conference initiated the development of systems to standardize the preservation and archival process of magnetic media.
Continuing its leadership role for the independent producer and small arts organization, BVAC has several free software programs which are a great help in the preservation and archival process. I will describe them in my next blog post, but you can access them from our links page on our web site http://mnmediaarts.org/.
BVAC is currently in its third year of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to provide a 70% subsidy to individual media artists and small arts organization towards their preservation projects. Here is a link to apply for that program:
Ben Turkus Preservation Manager
Ben came to BAVC with a fellowship from Columbia University while pursuing a master's degree in Film Studies. While working on preservation projects at BVAC, he got hooked on the process.
He is intrigued with the archaeological excitement of being the first to see content, locked away for decades and which may be lost forever without his involvement . He is now pursuing an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU while working at BAVC.
Ben's first archiving project was for the Shirley Clark project. Ms. Clark was a pioneer experimental film and video maker and colleague of Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, De De Hallack, and Skip Blumburg. Her ½ inch video series The Tee-pee Troupe recorded happenings from her Chelsea Hotel penthouse with the likes of John Lennon, Arthur C. Clark, Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik. Here are links to some of Ms. Clark's work :
Ben feels the most challenging aspects of video preservation are:
- the obsolescence of the playback equipment
- the deterioration of the video tapes.
Video recording technology has advanced astronomically in the past 50 years. The older tape decks are very difficult to find and the parts needed to keep them operational are even rarer. On top of that, the repair manuals are few and far between as are the people with the expertise to keep the decks running. There needs to be a coordinated effort to keep training technicians, so the knowledge base is not lost, and to develop an inventory of equipment and replacement parts.
Ben sees the need for decentralized preservation centers to spread the knowledge and the equipment and to facilitate the preservation of our culture as recorded on magnetic media.
We need to work together to stop the Magnetic Media Crisis.
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