Insuring The Past

Archives And Privacy In The Age Of Accessibility

A little over a year ago it was announced that one of my alma maters (hey, it takes a village to educate a fickle mind…) was acquiring the archive of artist Larry Rivers. Though his artistic works are not as widely renowned as some of his contemporaries, the Fales Library & Special Collections at NYU has been developing their Downtown Collection since 1993 as a repository of materials documenting the ‘Downtown’ New York art scene from the 1970s-1990s, and the Rivers papers are rich in documentation of his relationships and extensive correspondence with other artists and writers from the 1940s-1980s, making it a significant historical collection.

Amongst the materials in the collection are film and video works created by Rivers, including footage of his then adolescent daughters he documented over several years for a series he entitled “Growing”. In this footage, Rivers shot his daughters topless or naked bodies and interrogated them about their bodies and physical development. Around the time of the announcement, it came out that Rivers’ daughter Emma Tamburlini had been trying to have those materials removed from the official papers as held by the Larry Rivers Foundation and have them given to her and her sister. She has stated that the process of the filming led to several emotional problems during her life and (understandably) does not want non-consensual, revealing images of her open to public access. When the Tamburlini story broke the NYU response was non-committal and the Rivers Foundation maintained their line of not giving the items to the daughters, but only a few days later NYU declared that they did not want the “Growing” materials as part of their acquisition.

The speed and tenor of NYU’s decision underscores the more clearcut nature of the privacy issues involved here. Accusations of exploiting children in such ways can cause even the most stagnant bureaucracy to react at a closer to reasonable pace. However, though this one issue is somewhat resolved, it points to the emergent concern of privacy in this age of accessibility. In the past, the combined issues of distance, a closed/secretive tradition, and format obsolescence helped keep archival materials little accessed and difficult to locate. Digital archives, online catalogs, and electronic finding aids have changed that, but, equally influential, is the shifting cultural paradigm towards greater sharing of information.

The current get-offa-my-lawn-kids! blame for this shift are the Zuckerbergs and the Anonymouses, those harbingers of “Wait — maybe our parents had some things right”ness…A concept that appears to have a fairly strong toehold if Salon and the New York Times both have articles within a few days of one another discussing the sad breakdown of the differentiation between “secrecy” and “privacy”. (Though, one has to admit, there is a reasonable argument for laying the start of things on the Boomers who put their colonoscopies on national television, discussed the presidential penis, gave the German prime minister a shoulder massage, and burdened decades of poor English literature students with confessional poetry.)

I needle here a bit because, admittedly, I have to agree with the current urge towards reassessment, but I am loathe to sound like I’m the cranky-old-man I really am. I blog in a public (to the five people that read this…Hi, mom!!!!) arena and reference personal topics, but I chose what to present and how to present it.

However, I would be utterly mortified if I saw that some home movie/video of me from youth were floating around out in the digital ether for anyone to see, to set to ironic music, or to gently mock in a series of Facebook comments. I was a goofy adolescent who enjoyed making people laugh (as opposed to my current instantiation of a grim middle-ager who enjoys curing insomnia), and much of the “archival” footage of me that may exist out there reflects that. Similarly, I always felt that the classroom was a place to test ideas, writing styles, and pushing concepts to logical conclusions in the name of learning (not the name of being correct). The idea that a grade school friend’s family could have sold some VHS tapes on ebay or that one of my alma maters (again, NYU) did in fact want to put all student papers online makes me understand the (perhaps exaggerated) fear of photography stealing one’s soul.

I should also note that this isn’t just a shift in the level of accessibility to materials, but also a shift in estimation of what is considered of historical (or monetary) value. The influence of bottom-up historical research, the appreciation of home movies and amateur documentation, and the nostalgia/re-purposing market have all contributed to private or semi-private materials becoming a more respected part of the cultural (or marketing) fabric of contemporary life. Once the provenance of your spinster aunt or insufferably boring neighbor, the previously mocked 8mm films and interminable slide show have become National Film Preservation Foundation targets and footage licensing fodder, distorting their real or imagined Antiques Road Show value.

In the initial Times article about the Rivers acquisition there was an interesting pull quote from David Joel, director of the Larry Rivers Foundation. He stated that he would not destroy the “Growing” films and videos because “‘I can’t be the person who says this stays and this goes. My job is to protect the material.'” I recall my first reaction to this quote, that it was insensitive and overly worshipful of the capital-A Artist and his capital-W Works. Though my own strong feelings about the exploitation of Rivers’ children persist, after a year of pondering I wonder now if Joel’s adamancy was the right tact, having a reverse psychological effect of preventing the materials from being publicly accessed or destroyed and, at least in some way, protecting the materials for some future date. Being thus protected, I’m not sure if they should ever be released, but, just as preserving everything is neither possible nor desirable, where and how do we sketch the line separating (or defining the convergence of) accessibility, discretion, and ethics?

— Joshua Ranger

Is There A Right Time To Let Go Of Original Materials

Film is dead. Again. Or still. Or will be soon. It’s difficult to tell where exactly film is in the continuum from bloody-phlegm-coughed-up-in-a-handkerchief to too-far-gone-to-be-a-threatening-zombie. The tendency in the technological age is to declare the end of X and move on to Y before one (or one’s coolness) is usurped by some early adopter somewhere. However, for media obsolescence, there is no hard end date, even when one takes manufacturing end dates into consideration. Production slows until it stops and stock is hoarded or recycled until no longer viable and administrators are finally forced to admit that they must lay out the money for new formats and new equipment.

The death of film has been predicted and/or declared repeatedly over the years because of the extended slow down of stock and equipment production and the decreasing number of places to have it processed. A recent news article about the end of film print distribution in Hong Kong and Macau has many people thinking that this is the big third act coughing fit that can no longer be dismissed or fully recovered from. The topic has led to an extensive thread* on the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) listserv, producing a collective mind version of the 7 stages of mourning as people are alternatively depressed, angry, unbelieving, and hungry (hey, an archivist’s gotta eat).

A definite undercurrent to the posts is, essentially, “Film is the awesomest! Digital is a stupidhead!” (I simplify, perhaps in too many ways, to cover the large volume of responses.) A good point was made by Leo Enticknap** that the tightly clasped fist holding film to our hearts does not seem to exist in the same way with video, the response to this elicited on the listserv then being, “Well, duh.” It was expressed there (and in many places before) that film is special because one can see the image without a projector and there is magic in the creation of the image, while the invisible electrical pulses and signals of video and audio are empty and unloveable. (Sniff! As am I. As. Am. I.)

This is not true. I have a number of colleagues and friends in the field who love video and audio precisely because it is so mysterious and who find electricity magical. Also, an audio signal is at least as simplepure as the filmic image, representing exactly what occurred in actuality to create and transport sound through the air.

Of course there is no real arguing a point among formats here. –philia is –philia, and there is no logical point/counterpoint discussion and resolution to passion and faith. I think of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s writing on sacred objects***. As he states it, in either the spiritual or ethical structure within a culture, “the forms, vehicles, and objects of worship are suffused with an aura of deep moral seriousness” and “that which is set apart as more than mundane is inevitably considered to have far-reaching implications for the direction of human conduct” (126).

I would stress that the reference is not limited to objects of religious worship, but all special objects or symbols (mascots, flags, lucky underwear) that store meaning and importance in the Everyday. As Geertz goes on: “Sacred symbols thus relate an ontology and a cosmology to an aesthetics and a morality: their peculiar power comes from their presumed ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental level, to give to what is otherwise merely actual, a comprehensive normative import” (127).

For the cinephile or audiophile or philatelophile, their particular sacred object holds a similar rightness and beauty, establishing not an utterly guiding but at least a partial value system dependent on, in Geertz’s terminology, a metaphysical referent or a system that derives from an ontologically based ethic (127). In the field of film preservation, cinephilia has often been a driving force. However, there has been a gnawing concern in the back of mind that the worm will turn…or has turned. It seems that fetishization of the object – the reification of film, video, or whatever carrier – can equally be a detriment to preservation.

Reformatting is a fact of audiovisual preservation. The carrier will not persist and the content needs to be migrated to an accessible format. Scratch that. The carrier will not persist and the business model that produces that carrier will not persist. However, we cannot, we will not let go of that original object. First of all, out of fear, fear of going down in history as that person who decided that nitrate films should be thrown in the Pacific or early television materials should be thrown in the Hudson River. Second of all, the reason is… fear, fear of losing the object. Reformatting is trending towards the digital realm and, to many, digital files are even less real or graspable than video signals. Geertz states that, while theoretically possible, no culture has established an “autonomous value system” independent of symbols and objects (127). However, conceptually, this is what digital preservation can seem to be requiring us to do.

The reconceptualization necessary here will happen over time, gradually, the birth of digital neither as hard nor fast as the death of film. What will be a bigger problem to face is what do we do with all of the physical materials once they have reached a state of advanced/absolute obsolescence and/or decay. One of the promises of digital media is cheap (and increasingly cheaper) storage (though initial cost outlay does not make it seem so). Physical storage is not getting cheaper, and costs will keep rising as organizations reformat and store their originals away. In the very near future (if not already), organizations will start asking hard questions: If we have a preservation master (with backups, stored in separate locations), and a mezzanine copy, and an access copy, why are we paying to store 15,000 tapes we cannot play internally, would cost us X number of dollars to have played by someone else, and may have decayed beyond the quality of our preservation master? At what point do we say, “Enough. We’re moving ahead with what we determined was our best option”?

Tough decision. Not mine nor anyone else’s to make for someone other, but, still, a decision we all can discuss and, hopefully, establish a reasonable set of outcomes and considerations that can inform the choices one must make. Preservation is not a single act, but a series of decisions and implications that follow the embodiment of content from object to object.

Maybe, then, as with the burial of Torahs and other sacred objects in Judaism, there needs to be some sort of ritual disposal, something that acknowledges the limitations of physicality and something that lets us say we shepherded these materials as best we could through their lifecycle so that their essence shall persist.

— Joshua Ranger

*Started by David Croswaith, [AMIA-L] Re: It’s the Beginning of the End for 35mm as Worldwide D-Cinema Roll-out Accelerates, Mon, 8 Aug 2011 14:20:01 -0700
**[AMIA-L] Reply: It’s the Beginning of the End for 35mm as Worldwide D-Cinema Roll-out Accelerates, Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:33:39 +0100
***Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books. New York, 1973.

A Primer On The Use Of TimeReference: A Field In The Bext Chunk Of BWF Files

This presentation addresses the typical questions that arise from embedded metadata implementers regarding the role, technicalities and value of the TimeReference field in the bext chunk of BWF files. This mostly visual presentation is a practical primer for everyone from engineers to archivists and librarians.

• A PRIMER ON THE USE OF TIMEREFERENCE (PDF)

As It Was

Despite the presumed character of one in my profession, probably the only physical thing I collect (besides, at this point in my life, grey hairs) is stationary from hotels at which I’ve stayed. To whatever degree, I believe this is sufficient representational memory of a trip that is then, ideally, used for practical purposes and does not long impinge on the valuable New-York-Apartment space required for other things, say, oh, like, food and ironic t-shirts.

Of course, my true collector nature outs in the fact that I no longer pick up pens and pads from chain hotels — there is only so much Best Western scrap paper I need (and the pens are sub-par!). Regional or independent hotels are much preferred, and if they still have matchbooks, well, then, I have to be surreptitious in grabbing handfuls of them from the frontdesk.

I make a differentiation on collection of physical items here because the other thing I unashamedly admit to collecting is running across bridges. There is no memento, no photo, no selection of a commemorative key chain/bottle opener/thermometer. It is just the experience. I’ve always enjoyed bridges; something about the liminality of being on one, but also an appreciation of the ingenuity and know-how required to build such structures.

My home state of Oregon offered many rivers, creeks, and assorted ravines that utilized everything from one-lane, covered bridges to massive 8-lane, mile-long spans across gorges where I had to fight against the wind to make sure my fuel-efficient compact wasn’t pushed into swerving across the parallel lanes. New York offers a similar high frequency of bridges, what with the islands and the inlets and the spaces where the things with this thing we have happen that you would rather not (or really shouldn’t) know about.

For a time most of my running routes were park-bound, and I didn’t really get my first taste of NYC bridges until running the New York Marathon. A number of major (and minor) bridges are closed off to traffic to provide runners the transition points between boroughs, starting with the massive Verrazano arcing from Staten Island to the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, and ending with the more utilitarian seeming Madison Avenue Bridge planking across from The Bronx to Manhattan. Of course that less stellar impression of the last bridge may be a result of not really paying attention to one’s surroundings at that point in the race while focusing on trying to find the physical energy to keep lifting one’s legs and the mental energy to stop wondering how it is going to be possible to make it through another 6 miles. One of the more unique experiences is crossing the 59th Street Bridge, a mile through the lower deck — essentially an enclosed space — with no spectators around. This is about 15 miles into the race, the point when people are starting to realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, and the early chattering and peppy energy is gone. It’s just the echo of heavy breathing and the heavy patting of feet.

For whatever reason, I always had the sense that the marathon would be my only opportunity to be able to cross bridges like these (and that I would have no chance to cross most of the bridges in New York). In my mind, they had been repurposed for cars only (the same way one wouldn’t really go for a walk on a highway), or, because of heightened security, major structures like these would be off-limits to normal access, especially to some oddball like me.

Of late, however, I have been doing much more road running which, in order to accumulate miles, has taken me through little foot-travelled streets and, to my enjoyment, across multiple bridges that I had previously thought had no pedestrian pathway. Among my current favorites is the Manhattan Bridge. Though not particularly beautiful or inaccessible, what I love about it is the way I can see what was. Despite the desertedness, the retro-fitted cement pathway, the cyclone fencing, and the thick graffiti, being on the bridge still has the power to take you back. The viewpoint alcoves, the beaux arts steel work, the long slope up past the brick warehouses of DUMBO and down past the former temples and temple-like banks of Chinatown. This was a bridge, built when such average spans were a marvel, when not so many people drove, and when the idea of an evening promenade in one’s only fancy dress was a decent way to spend a night. The Brooklyn Bridge has preserved and marketed this kind of past. The Manhattan Bridge has hidden it under grime, subway tracks, and safety precautions (perhaps the only example where Brooklyn is considered classier than Manhattan). I’m sure there are old photos and films of the Manhattan Bridge when it was more vibrant, but to me, the the bridge itself is archive enough, a place where I can contemplate and imagine a past I never knew.

In these moments I feel lucky — lucky to live in this place where I can experience an entity like New York and the history it offers, but also lucky to have benefited from historical and archival materials. The reason I can imagine the past and view under the layers of grime is because I have been able to read novels, diaries, and letters and see drawings, photographs, or films from the past. The value of archival materials is not all in the reuse/remix/repurposing of content into MyCreation. There is also value in the internalization of the content, the ingestion and synthesization of information as a means of understanding and envisioning what was, and how what was informs or has resulted in what is. This process creates no flashyviralwebsensation, but it builds layers slowly and assuredly — layers in the individual and, therefore, layers in a society that maintains and engages with history and culture — that appreciates history and culture — and actively utilizes the bridges that lead back to what was and ahead to what will be.

— Joshua Ranger