Preserve Media
Preservation Access Program Featured Artist: Charles Woodman
A clip from Dance Tracks (1990-1996), an early work by Charles Woodman, mastered on ¾” video at the Experimental Television Center, Preserved by BAVC Media At the end of 2016, we will have celebrated three years of continuous support from the National Endowment of the Arts for our Preservation Access Program (PAP), having provided affordable digitization and preservation services to nearly 100 artists and organizations whose latter-century works are locked into obsolete media formats. In celebration of reaching that milestone, we will be highlighting those participating artists whose dedication to preservation and access is exemplary. Featured this month is Charles [...]
The Unlikely Pioneers of Video Art
This post is written by former BAVC Media Presevationist Kelly Haydon Video cameras arrived on the consumer market at the same time women’s liberation entered mainstream consciousness, a dual-nascency that would beautifully intersect in the form of video art. In the 1960s and early 1970s, women artists were still largely excluded from the film and fine arts factions that offered high-profile openings, exhibits, and funding. Video was different. Free from the trappings of social construct, video provided a safe space for women to experiment and explore a novel medium while achieving levels of notoriety comparable to their male counterparts. A [...]
WHY ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL VIDEO PRESERVATION, WHY NOW.
How I Learned (Almost) Everything I Know About ½” Video from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr by Moriah Ulinskas, Former Director of Preservation Originally published October 5th, 2011 Early this year I received a call from the librarian of Manchester University, a small, faith-based university, regarding a video recording they wanted to have preserved and transferred to an archival digital file. The video was a ½” video reel which had been in the school library for 40 years and had been unplayable for almost as long. I work in the video preservation program at BAVC Media, one of the only not-for-profit video preservation programs [...]
Preservation Access Program Recipients Spring 2016
The Preservation Access Program, or PAP (pronounced p-a-p and not pap like the funny ladies in the Finance department like to say), is our popular, ongoing relief program for artists and small arts organizations seeking to preserve their works recorded to magnetic media. Thanks to a generous subsidy provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, BAVC Media is able to digitize and provide other preservation services at heavily discounted rates. PAP holds two application rounds per year, the latest one ending on January 14th, 2016. We’ve just told some amazing artists and organizations that they will be receiving the [...]
CLIR the Air with BAVC Media Preservation
dance magic, dance. Our 1/2" Open Reel decks have long been identified by their Bowie incarnations. Our January depression, sparked by the death of famous U-matic user, David Bowie*, was relieved only by the announcement that the Hidden Collections unit of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is accepting applications for its 2016 cycle. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CLIR has distributed millions of dollars to organizations with historical collections in the hopes of increasing access to scholars of all stripes. The mission of the grant is marvelous, offsetting the maddening expense of digitizing physical [...]
My BAVC Media Moment
BAVC Media inspires social change by empowering media makers to develop and share diverse stories through art, education and technology. BAVC Media has been an advocate for artists and media makers for almost 40 years, supplying the tools, resources, and support they need to tell their stories.
Preserve Media at BAVC Media
As one of the nation’s longest-standing non-profit video and audio preservation organizations, BAVC Media remains a leader in the field, developing the highest quality preservation standards and practices while working with individuals and cultural, academic, and media organizations to meet a range of needs for preserving historically and artistically important video and audio materials.
Lost Treasures from Bay Area Art Archives
BAVC Media received funding from the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation to support a unique, collaborative effort to digitally preserve and exhibit seminal Bay Area audiovisual works that would otherwise be lost forever. BAVC Media's Preservation department worked with graduate students in California College for the Arts' Curatorial Practice program to assess hundreds of audiovisual assets from the archives of four iconic Bay Area art institutions — Southern Exposure, Headlands Center for the Arts, SF Cinematheque, and Intersection for the Arts — selecting 40 key pieces that have now been digitally preserved. Spanning the genres of experimental film, visual arts, literature, performance, music, and educational programs, the artists and works [...]
Preserving Dance Heritage
In 2007, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) embarked on The Dance Heritage Coalition Dance Preservation and Digitization Project (DHC DPDP), an ambitious project to preserve and make accessible vital dance documentation, rare performances, and other notable works of America’s dance legacy. As the nation's sole non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and making accessible America’s dance legacy materials, the DHC encourages, initiates, and develops collaborative projects among the dance communities, library and archival fields, scholarly institutions, and individuals in four essential areas: access to materials; the continuing documentation of dance employing both [...]
Guillermo Gomez-Pena at The Exploratorium
The Preservation department, at bavc.org, has started cleaning and digitizing the Exploratorium's video collection. http://www.exploratorium.edu/ This is 'La Poocha Nostra' Archival footage, from 1988. Guillermo Gomez-Pena is a bay area artist whose work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography, cultural theory and radical pedagogy explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, "extreme language" and new technologies. For BAVC Media Promo use Only
