Article

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.

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

Kara Van Malssen Instructing International Archivists

If any of you are passing through Lithuania next week make sure to stop and say hi to our own Kara Van Malssen while you’re there. Kara will be in Vilnius as an instructor with the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property’s (ICCROM) SOIMA 2011: Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections. ICCROM is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) dedicated to the conservation of cultural heritage. SOIMA is part of their recent initiative to focus on and provide training in the preservation of audiovisual materials to collection caretakers worldwide. Over the next three weeks, 19 professionals from 15 countries will receive training from a team of audiovisual preservation experts. AVPS is proud of Kara and proud to have a member of our team out there fighting the good fight and sharing knowledge.

Chris Lacinak Published In IASA Journal

AVPS President Chris Lacinak’s article “Embedded metadata in WAVE files: a look inside issues and tools” hit the street (and the information superhighway) today in the newest International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives Journal (No 37, July 2011). A PDF version of the article and journal are available to IASA members for free on the website at http://www.iasa-web.org/book/iasa-journal-no-37-july-2011

The article draws on our work with the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group (FADGI) in developing the BWF MetaEdit tool for embedding, editing, and exporting metadata in WAVE files, as well as on a study of embedded metadata support within and across audio recording software applications AVPS spearheaded on behalf of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Technical Committee (ARSC TC). Using these experiences, Chris illuminates the real world importance of embedded metadata for the use and preservation of digital materials and, perhaps more so, the great need for practical tools and guidelines that will help people review and manage that metadata with the same integrity as the associated object. Our thanks to all of the contributing FADGI and ARSC members, without whom the projects could not have been realized.

A big shout out as well for Carl Fleischhauer’s article “Developing an MXF audiovisual preservation file wrapper specification in the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative” appearing in the same IASA Journal, another FADGI project that AVPS is proud to be a part of. The Federal Agencies are doing amazing work to drive the field of digital preservation forward and are becoming an invaluable resource, so check ’em out.

Perceiving Preservation

It’s not surprising that there is only a slight modulation in the difference in meaning between perception as a physical process (our eyes reading signals) and perception as mental process (our reading/interpretation of the world around us). The brain is so linked to the senses as our means of interacting with the world that we often lose the distinction between the two in our vocabulary usage. (And don’t worry, I’m not going to get all Blake-as-told-by-Huxley-as-told-by-Morrison here on you.)

There is a debate about which element has primacy in this relationship — whether the mental (our ideologies) colors what / how we see the world, or whether our limited field of vision (both literal and figurative [see, it’s difficult to separate out these terms!]) colors what our mental reading is (a la Sturges-as-told-by-Welles). I was looking back at a TED talk by Beau Lotto, founder of LottoLab and a science/art researcher, and was intrigued by the way he picked up this questions, sniffed it to check for ripeness, and viewed it from a different angle. In his talk he considers the evolutionary causality of visual perception on the brain, the idea that the brain is trained in how to see and interpret by the physics of light and vision.

In other words (just in case 16 minutes of his words were not enough…or too much), there are many ways in which variations in light, filters, shadows, distance, luminance, etc. can make very different objects appear indistinguishable or distort how we perceive them. This is what can commonly cause illusions or visual puzzles (or are the base of special effects in filmmaking). What Lotto suggests is that, when making a discernment in visual clues is beneficial to our survival, our brain learns to see through the filters somehow. When that discernment is of little or no benefit, the brain does not bother to learn and allows the default perception to remain.

In Lotto’s rubric, visual clues are information, and, to paraphrase him, there is no inherent meaning in information; it’s what we do with the information that creates meaning. This is the exact same point of view that needs to be applied to one’s understanding the importance of metadata, that meaningless yet all powerful pile of text. Metadata does nothing on its own, and seems like a bother to capture and maintain if it’s just going to sit there. But, with the right processes and applications defined and in place, there are innumerable possibilites for the social, educational, and business use of even the modest Y/N flag.

This would seem like the logical direction to take this weblogged rambling, but what struck me about Lotto’s talk is the feedback connection between the physical world and mental processes. This idea got me thinking about the assessment and preservation of magnetic media, things that, as objects, are very physical but that, because we require an intermediary (a playback deck) in order to see what is on the tape (or more correctly see the results of the signal that is stored on the tape, a signal that can have no discernable visual correlation to the image it produces) can seem very abstract and mystical.

Film is visual in its physical manifestation, as is its inspection. Every scratch, tear, splice, and oil stain on a film can be documented as well fading and shrinkage and what not — and the visual effect of these problems can be assumed or experienced even without playback — and this reassures us in the exact work that needs to be done to preserve the item. Video, partly because archives often lack playbacks decks in good (or any) condition and partly because those decks hide the tape/ cassette from our view and use unseen mechanisms/ processes (causing fear that something catastrophic and unpreventable will occur during playback), often has to rely on physical inspection of the cassette, tape, and annotations to make a preservation assessment of an item without actually viewing the content or the condition of the image produced. These physical clues can point to possible condition issues (some more reliable than others), though signs of condition issues don’t necessarily correlate to errors produced during playback.

Of course the simple answer here is, play everything back, which, yes, is the only true reliable way of 1) determining content of a tape and 2) determining the condition of the signal and resultant image/ sound. The simple question in answer to that answer is, Who has the 1) time, 2) money, 3) equipment to do that with every single item in a collection? Practically thinking, there has to be a more efficient way to process and assess collections. Messrs. Greene and Meissner have addressed this issue to a degree, but their discussion revolves entirely around paper collections and does not take into consideration the accessibility issues regarding audiovisual materials that make researcher-centric browsing much more difficult than leafing through a folder or box of letters.

What we need to do is change our view of a perceived lack of information attainable from certain analog media formats to a view of the value in what information is present or can be inferred, and that can be exploited for establishing strategies for planning, discovery, access, and the other necessary activities of archives. With the application of outside knowledge such the history and technical characteristics of video formats or typical production workflows, a box of mixed formats can shift from a jumble of plastics and worry to a clearer picture of potential production dates, priorities for reformatting, delineations of camera original versus production elements, ceiling targets for storage capacities and throughput, and more.

This still requires an item-level approach, but a quicker, more efficient one that also provides for improved collection management. The mediation between box-level and item-level processing for audiovisual material is still unresolved, but reformatting has to happen sooner than later, and even a basic item-level inventory supports planning for those efforts more practically and in a way that can better allay future costs — and looking down the road like that is yet another way we need to think about perceiving preservation efforts to help clarify the things we need to do today.

— Joshua Ranger

Dispatch From Far Afield: APEX In Ghana 2011

I’ve just returned from my fourth visit to Ghana with New York University’s Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program, where we completed a successful week-long training in audiovisual archiving for 25 local professionals. Lead by NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP) Professor Mona Jimenez, the APEX training team this year included Jennifer Blaylock (Fulbright scholar and MIAP grad – check out her great blog), Ishumael Zinyengere (audiovisual archivist for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), and myself. This is our third consecutive year conducting training together in Ghana, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have once again had the opportunity to work with such a talented group of trainers and participants. APEX in Ghana began in 2008 with an invitation from the pan-African Real Life Documentary Film Festival to do a short workshop on audiovisual archiving for the filmmakers in attendance at the festival, and the local professionals from broadcasting, government and universities with audiovisual collections. That invitation co-incided with a request from then Fulbrighter Seth Paris to help establish a audio digitization lab at NYU-Accra. That inaugural year, the APEX team consisted of Mona Jimenez, AVPS President Chris Lacinak, and myself. In addition to the training during the festival and the work with Seth, we spent a couple weeks meeting with local caretakers of moving image and sound collections, learning about their challenges and needs. Mona and I returned the following year, along with Mick Newnham (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia), Jennifer and Ishumael, and we conducted our first week-long workshop, which provided an overview of: management of audiovisual collections, care and handling, occupational health and safety, climate control and storage of collections, cataloging, digitization best practices, and ethics. In 2010 we returned to do more training on digitization and an introduction to fundraising. [Read more]

True Blood

I was watching the pilot of AMC Original Series The Walking Dead the other night (I believe [Cable Network] Original Series has become an official titling appendage and prestige signifier, much like Contemporary Classic, A Spike Lee Joint, or From the Creators of Troll 2) and found myself disturbed by the use of blood. Not the amount of blood or the gore — it’s still a television program and was not incredibly gory — but the use of CGI’ed blood, especially for gunshots. The use of this visual effect was something I first noticed around the time of Takeshi Kitano’s take on Zatoichi where the spritzes (or sometimes geysers) of blood that mark the genre were done with CGI, as was the sword blade, it seemed, at times. What disturbs me about this shift from practical special effect to visual effect is that, though it is meant to be more shocking and “realistic”, the result tends to make me feel less shocked and less viscerally disturbed by the violence. This is not because of the artifice of it all. I’ve written other posts here about my love of various filmic tricks and effects, and even poor imitation can be effective in creating an emotional reaction.

I recall a summer job I had in college painting dorm rooms. In one building I was given a special can of paint and tasked with putting a fresh coat on all of the fire extinguisher wall units. The paint was a bright, bright red and immediately reminded me of the color of fake blood used in low budget films from the 70s, especially of the exploitation ilk. This is the red of red hots (both kinds), Red #5 (the dangerous kind, from the 50s), and Glacé fruit (the kind of fruit that is actually bad for you).

It’s a conundrum — how does one delineate the point at which something fake looks more fake than other fake things — but something about the Somebody worked a few days to research and painstakingly recreate the correct shade and splatter pattern of real blood-ness of it all just…looks…fake.

I don’t want to make this a rant about the coldness of digital versus the warmth of analog — though I do tend to admire the ingenuity and physicality of practical effects — because computer-aided effects are not across the board bad. The issue is, more so, one of shifting perceptions of what constitutes realism and what one, experientially, accepts as the norm in visual representation.

I think here of a Cosby Show episode where the adults discuss how things like rubber bats and other haunted house-y type things in movies were enough to scare the bejeezus out of them, but kidsthesedays just roll their eyes at it all. Damn you, Rudy!

To reiterate, the problem we face is what people are currently accustomed to viewing versus what people were previously accustomed to viewing. Unfortunately, in terms of moving images, these shifts are gradual and not always noticeable in degrees, like how when you see a child every day you don’t exactly note their growth over a year, but if you see them once a year they will look very different. As a simple example, placed side by side, the differences in visual quality between VHS and DVD are noticeable but can be difficult to articulate, unlike, say, comparing classical portraiture to non-representational art. Additionally, the less we view VHS the more distant our memory of the particulars of the format become. We feel things should look like DVD or Blu-Ray or H.264 now because those are what we experience.

Trying to define why “This fakery is more fake looking than this fakery” is similar to trying to define why “This format looks better than this format”. The issues compound when one takes prosumer and professional formats into consideration. The limited scope of direct exposure makes it more difficult for a wider audience to differentiate. When dealing with preservation reformatting, the challenge becomes maintaining the look of the VHS or whatever source format, but also helping people who do not recall or never experienced the qualities of the source understand that this DVD ought not to look like what they may expect. Binder formulations, monitors, playback machines, codecs, and such are the bristle, paint, and canvas types of video that produce their own quality and have their own aesthetic, which qualities need to be maintained to the best degree possible.

In short, as a human of a certain age with a certain exposure to methodologies of creating bloody messes, I maintain a certain sense of what appears the “correct” presentation format, leaning more towards Karo syrup and less towards AfterEffects. This isn’t to say that one’s taste or eye cannot change — it does shift, as in the case of video — but there is a loss in the shift. A fading of memory, an alteration in perception, a dispersal of molecules. Inscrutable, intangible things that we cannot fully grasp onto in order to keep in place. Things that go away, we know not how and we know not where.

But then again, it was AMC Original Series The Walking Dead I was watching. I guess there are certain things we don’t want sticking around forever.

— Joshua Ranger

Planning Beyond Digitization: Digital Preservation For Audiovisual Collections

In 2011 The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, in collaboration with the audiovisual heritage network AVA_net published a collection of essays on the topic of digital preservation entitled Making Invisible Assets: The Preservation of Digital AV Collections. The book is available for only the cost of shipping from Sound and Vision. AVP Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen was one of the international professionals commissioned to write an essay for the collection. Her article, “Planning Beyond Digitization”, is available here in PDF:

• PLANNING BEYOND DIGITIZATION (PDF)

Thinking Local

I believe I’ve written before about how lucky I feel to have grown up in a pre-cable, VHF/UHF era where “local affiliate” seemed like something more relevant than just the people complaining what time Jay Leno is on and deciding whether Days of Our Lives airs at 1:00 or 3:00. In my hazy memory it denotes those local or regional personalities who seemed so Big Time; the too-bright lighting and low quality video that exposed how chintzy television sets actually are and how much makeup and hair styling is required to (try and) make people look good; the idiosyncratic collection of airtime filler collected from various licensing deals over the decades (and which gave me my early and defining film history education). I would guess that this was how viewers in the southeast would have experienced Turner Broadcasting (WTBS) in its early days, but, and I don’t know if this true or just the aging curmudgeon in me, but the channel’s shift to a major national presence through cable seems like a profound shift to a certain flattening of localness. I enjoyed CHiPS and Beastmaster as much as anyone, but, irony, kitsch, and nostalgia are the amour fou of cultural consumption and the sub-prime mortgages of cultural capital — intense, ostentatious, and absolutely unsustainable.

———–

Admittedly, I have to cop to a degree of disingenuousness here. It’s difficult to make an argument for “localness” when, in fact, the areas where I grew up were far from urban centers and depended much more on extended regional networks. This meant that my early television exposure was as much from Portland as it was from Northern California, which means my points of reference are as equally Ramblin’ Rod

as they are Cal Worthington (and his dog, Spot)

One exception to this was the radio. The town where I spent most of my childhood was at the bottom of one of a series of deep vallies in the region, enclosed by major mountain ranges to the east and west and a smaller groups of mountains, hills, and bluffs to the north and south. At that time most transmitters were not powerful enough to reach our little divot, so we had two local radio stations — the Top 40 AM station and the FM news and radio station. Eventually we caught up to the times and the two swapped frequencies, but it took the influence of New Country and Rush Limbaugh to set things right.

———–

Okay, okay. More disingenuity and exceptions. (Question: Is the unreliable narrator a reliable narrative device if the narrator keeps admitting to unreliability?) There were other regional radio and more local television stations that reached the communities where I lived. Those, of course, would be public broadcasting stations: KSYS Medford (now rebranded as SOPTV Southern Oregon Public Television), KSOR and KSRS radio (now rebranded as part of Jefferson Public Radio), and any other number of public radio stations from distant translators I could tune in on clear, starry nights (as long as I wasn’t listening to the Trail Blazers game).

At that time I don’t think I really understood the organizational and distribution structure of PBS, NPR, and PRI, so it’s difficult to recall the exact division between what was locally produced and what was national. My memories are much more impressionistic along those lines. I remember the wooden Big Bird cutout they used during pledge week on which they taped feathers with donor names and which, even to a six-year-old, looked pretty moth-eaten. I recall getting huffy when All Things Considered or Prairie Home Companion came on because it interrupted the classical music. I remember the satisfaction of seeing the names of businesses I knew or my doctor among the list of funders in the donor bumpers.

This was something different than Ramblin’ Rod or good ol’ Cal. Even though in TV psychology terms I felt like I “knew” them, it was a distant knowledge. They were far-flung entities I could imagine meeting but couldn’t imagine ever getting the chance to do so. Even if I had gotten the chance, I know now that it would have been a depressing let down, all polyester, faded paint, and desperation. But public media was something different. It was just there, dependable. The people involved were the people I saw at the mall, the parents of schoolmates, the people who did things because, well, that was part of living in a community.

———–

I’ll give you a minute to wipe the treacle from your computer screen. It was not my intention to get all Mayberry here — I did after all gather all my truck and humped it to New York City when I got the chance — but one of the great lessons of living in New York is just how scalable “local” is. Yes, WNET is a major producer of national PBS programming, but that doesn’t subsume their local commitment. For a number of years in the 1970s and 80s, they produced TV Lab, a program which gave space to video artists like Nam June Paik and Bill Viola and to experimental documentaries and dramatic features.

The lower east side of my hometown was an RV park at the County Fairgrounds, but if it had been a thriving arts community maybe we would have had similar programming. But even beyond NET are things like NYC TV and Radio that air programs about and for local neighborhoods, music, and cultural groups, or the long tradition of public access television now supported by the Manhattan Neighborhood Network

———–

As a jaded New Yorker I am contracted to at least act like I disdain my small time roots (though, really, people get locked into neighborhood mentalities here that are just as isolated as growing up in rural areas). However, local is not small. Local is an area one defines through geography and accessibility and the individual urge to expand those definitions. Local television and radio, especially as expressed through public media and public broadcasting, bring us a look at the world while bringing us a connection to our neighbors. And this is why we work to preserve such content, to recall and reenforce those memories and those connections.

— Joshua Ranger

« Previous Page — Next Page »