Essay
Agency for Cultural Affairs FY2015 Overseas Study Program for Emerging Artists: Research Report
Media Arts: Moving Image / Digital Archives
Miki Koishi
1. Purpose of the Research
Museums and art education institutions in Japan and abroad are each developing their own methods for publishing and preserving moving-image archives in the arts. In Japan, academic discussion has grown, but there are still few opportunities or places where digital archivists who handle media and equipment in practice can share knowledge, methods, and problems with one another.
This research visited practitioners at museums and related institutions in New York, where many organizations have taken early and active approaches to digital archives. Through interviews, it examined the current state of digital archives in the arts, the problems they face, future issues and plans, past examples, and possible futures for digital archives, with the aim of applying those findings to digital archiving in Japan.
Because some institutions have multiple departments that handle digital archives, and because media conservation departments often work on the preservation and restoration of digital works, the interviews were not limited to digital archivists. I also actively spoke with people in related roles.
2. Research Schedule
Friday, October 16, 2015
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
25 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019
Ben Fino-Radin, Associate Media Conservator, Media Conservation
Shannon Darrough, Director, Digital Media
Michelle Harvey, Archivist, Museum Archives
Jennifer Sellar, Senior Digital Image Archivist, Imaging and Visual Resources
Monday, October 19, 2015
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Moving Image Archive
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-7498
Tanisha Jones, Director
Monday, October 19, 2015
Rhizome
The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
Dragan Espenschied, Digital Conservator
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Department of Cinema Studies
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP)
721 Broadway, Room 626, New York, NY 10003
Dan Streible, Director
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014
Dina Helal, Manager, Education Resources
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Eyebeam
34 35th Street, Unit 26 / 5th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Erica Kermani, Community Engagement Director
David Borgonjon, Program Coordinator
Billy Dang, Creative Technology Manager
Hellyn Teng, Computational Fashion Program Coordinator
Roddy Schrock, Director
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
610 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001
Tara Hart, Manager, Archives
Friday, October 23, 2015
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011
Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Manager
Monday, October 26, 2015
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
Neal Stimler, Digital Media
Jennifer Phoenix, Time-Based Media Digital Asset Specialist
Robin Schwalb, Media Production
Members of the Time-Based Media Working Group
Hwai-ling Yeh-Lewis, Collections Management Coordinator, Department of Asian Art
Alison Clark, Collections Management Specialist, Department of Asian Art
Midori Oka, Research Associate, Japanese Art, Department of Asian Art
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives
Avery Fisher Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-6970
Barbara Haws, Archivist / Historian
Mitchell Brodsky, Digital Archives Manager
Gabryel Smith, Digital Archivist
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)
2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
Carson Parish, AV Coordinator
Ellen Holdorf, Chief Registrar
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003
John Klacsmann, Archivist
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Residency Unlimited (RU)
360 Court Street #4, Brooklyn, NY 11231
Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria, Operations Director
Julie Rich, Director’s Assistant
Honorifics omitted.
3. Content and Results of the Research
A) Research Topics
While filming video records, I interviewed practitioners at each institution with a focus on the following three topics. I asked about important historical examples from a media-archaeological perspective, as well as possible and predicted futures for digital archives.
1. The current state of digital archives and media conservation
2. Problems and points they would like to improve
3. Future issues and plans
B) Research Results
By interviewing practitioners directly, I was able to obtain detailed information on the three areas above and exchange views. The details are as follows.
1. Current State of Digital Archives and Media Conservation
Collaboration with External Companies and Developers
Many institutions conduct their work in collaboration with outside companies and developers. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Moving Image Archive (hereafter Jerome Robbins Dance Division) entrusts part of the publication and management of its moving-image digital archive to Brightcove, working in coordination with digital archivists inside the institution.
MoMA’s Media Conservation department worked with Artefactual Systems to co-develop Binder, open-source software for preserving and managing digital artworks.11http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/05/13/open-sourcing-momas-digital-vault Because the current version was created for MoMA under budget constraints, institutions that wish to introduce it elsewhere would need system development. Ben Fino-Radin, a MoMA media conservator and member of the development team, is now leading improvements through GitHub and working to lower barriers to adoption, including by holding regular user forums.
Archivematica, an open-source digital preservation system developed by the same company, is also used by MoMA and many other institutions.
Media Conservation for the Future
Digital archivists and conservation staff at several institutions commented that, for the future, it is important to obtain as much information as possible about works while the artists are still alive.
One work currently being researched by MoMA’s Media Conservation department for future restoration and preservation is Teiji Furuhashi’s LOVERS: The Lovers (1994). It was shown in Video Spaces: Eight Installations, a 1995 exhibition curated by Barbara London at MoMA,22http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1995/videospaces/videospaces.html and entered MoMA’s collection in 1998, after Furuhashi’s death in 1995. At the time, MoMA did not have a media conservator. Today, information about the work is limited, and it has not been activated in an appropriate form for a long period. Students in a class taught by MoMA’s Ben Fino-Radin are now researching the work and documenting it toward future exhibition and preservation. The computer used in the work dates from 1993, and MoMA did not possess the source code for the program that runs it. Through reverse engineering, however, they have succeeded in writing the program’s contents into a general form of documentation. In order to keep the work operable and exhibitable in the future, the project is ongoing while gathering feedback from other members of Dumb Type, the group Furuhashi co-founded.
Michelle Harvey, archivist at MoMA, and Jennifer Sellar, Senior Digital Image Archivist, said that because it is impossible to know what information will become important to whom several years or decades later, they archive all materials, including exchanges with artists and curators’ notes.
At the same time, when considering the future preservation of works, one must not allow only the institution’s opinions and methods to take priority. The artist’s own view and proposals must also be considered.
The interactive artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has offered opinions and proposals from the artist’s side regarding the conservation of media-based artworks.33https://github.com/antimodular/Best-practices-for-conservation-of-media-art/ During this research, I visited bitforms gallery, where an exhibition by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was being held. Bitforms was often mentioned as a gallery that presents experimental work. In its July-August 2015 exhibition Memory Burn, exonemo was included. I also had an opportunity to meet Rafaël Rozendaal, who makes internet art. He had apparently participated in a September talk at MoMA on media conservation with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and others. Communication and exchange of views between makers and conservators appeared to be steadily developing.
Networks among Practitioners
Speaking with practitioners at each institution, I noticed that digital archivists and media conservators across the city are connected through organic networks and exchange information with one another.
For example, Tara Hart, manager of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Archives department, had previously worked at the New Museum with MoMA’s Ben Fino-Radin. Fino-Radin had also worked at Rhizome, where he was once a colleague of Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s digital conservator, and they are still working on cross-institutional projects.
Overall, many people seemed to move between institutions on a project basis in search of new settings, and that movement has become a source for projects that cross institutional boundaries. Opportunities for informal information sharing and discussion are far more numerous than in Tokyo, and this seems to support exchange and network formation among practitioners.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art (hereafter the Met), in addition to interviews, I joined a staff lunch of the Time-Based Media Working Group and exchanged information. This group is composed of several dozen members across departments and conducts ongoing research and information sharing on the preservation and management of digital works. There was considerable interest in HIVE, the moving-image digital archive I had worked on at NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC], and I introduced it to them. HIVE was conceptualized in 2003 by Dominick Chen and uses Creative Commons licenses, which allow copyright holders themselves to control the level of copyright. Neal Stimler in the Met’s Digital Media department said he was interested in the use of Creative Commons.
Places for Experience and Employment
Within several institutions, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Cinema Studies, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP) came up frequently.
MIAP is a two-year master’s program founded in 2003. Through practical work on a wide range of projects involving collections at external museums and related institutions, students acquire digital technology and management skills for digital archiving and preservation. The program produces around ten graduates each year and is a representative career path for digital archivists and conservators.
One program developed in recent years by the Library of Congress is the National Digital Stewardship Residency. It is a residency-style program that allows students to gain practical experience in digital archiving at museums, libraries, and other institutions. Each year several MIAP graduates are selected and gain experience at places such as the Smithsonian Institution and Carnegie Hall. According to MIAP director Dan Streible, after the one-year program ends, many institutions hire the students as regular staff.
Most MIAP graduates work in public institutions, museums, nonprofits, and related settings, but some also gain employment as conservators or archivists in the private sector. There were examples of a student knowledgeable about games directly approaching a game company about the importance of digital archives and being hired, and another student who worked on archiving David Byrne’s audiovisual collection as a graduation project, then proposed a large-scale digital archiving project to Byrne and was hired full-time.
The program encourages students to discover needs and develop markets themselves, cultivating entrepreneurial forms of activity and research that result in employment and further projects.
Use of Grant Systems
Many institutions obtain grants from government bodies and philanthropic organizations and work with a sense of urgency to digitize deteriorating collections of magnetic tape and film.
For media such as Betacam, DVCAM, and VHS, many institutions can create digital files and preservation copies in-house. For U-matic tape and film, however, where in-house handling is difficult, they outsource digitization to specialist companies and laboratories. Digitizing large volumes of stored media requires enormous cost, so institutions obtain grants and proceed by setting priorities.
I will discuss details in the section on deteriorating and disappearing media.
Many institutions also use grants to obtain older editing equipment and other tools needed for digitization and preservation.
2. Problems and Points for Improvement
Shortage of Personnel
A common problem at every institution is a shortage of staff responsible for practical work.
The institution with the largest staff was the New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives (hereafter NY Phil Digital Archives),44http://archives.nyphil.org where three full-time staff members, including archivist and historian Barbara Haws, who promoted the establishment of the digital archive, worked on related duties, along with several part-time staff and interns.
MoMA’s Media Conservation department and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division each had three-person teams, but given the enormous amount of work required by their collections, both needed more staff.
Other institutions fell into one of the following categories: one person in charge; a person had previously been in charge but there is currently no one; a person is scheduled to be assigned soon; or there is no official person in charge, but a staff member handles related duties alongside another role.
Residency Unlimited, which publishes digital archives with a small staff, has no official digital archivist, but operations director Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria handles the work alongside his main duties and presents some video records of public events held at the institution on Vimeo.55https://vimeo.com/resunlimited
Deteriorating and Disappearing Media
Sticky-Shed Syndrome, the deterioration of magnetic tape through hydrolysis, is now a major problem for many institutions. Severely damaged U-matic tapes, films, and other media can be lost completely through a single playback.
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division still holds many deteriorated tapes. Because it is also a problem for a public library to hold a large amount of media that visitors cannot view, it applied for and received a two-year grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) to digitize them. The division plans to set priorities and proceed with digitization as quickly as possible.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is digitizing a collection of more than 3,000 works with support from the New York State Council on the Arts. More than 2,000 works have already been digitized, and EAI plans to continue digitizing the entire collection.
Anthology Film Archives preserves all copies of Essential Cinema,66http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/essential-cinema a collection of 330 film titles gathered between 1970 and 1975. Including Essential Cinema, it now holds around 900 titles and is working on digitization alongside preservation and submaster copies. According to archivist John Klacsmann, however, only four film laboratories are under contract, and because digitization is expensive, the work cannot be done all at once. They are therefore proceeding while considering priorities.
The NY Phil Digital Archives is also digitizing materials, but Barbara Haws said that DAT players in good condition are now extremely rare, and that handling fragile DAT tapes is especially difficult.
Limits of Physical Storage
When I asked about the amount of data they currently hold, many institutions responded by speaking not in terabytes or petabytes, but in terms of the number of hard drives. This suggested that, in practice, many institutions still store and manage video data and born-digital data on hard drives. At the same time, the amount of data will only continue to increase. A major future issue is how to choose cost-effective and safe storage methods, including cloud storage and remote storage, while designing suitable workflows.
Systems for Managing Digital Data
Many institutions use collection management systems such as The Museum System (TMS). Yet those systems are not always suited to simultaneously managing born-digital works, moving images, and related documentation. In some cases, institutions supplement TMS with separate Excel spreadsheets managed by individual staff members. Dina Helal at the Whitney said she would like to find a more comprehensive management system for the future.
Robin Schwalb, who works in media production at the Met, shared a distinctive story related to this issue. Schwalb was hired in 1981 as manager of the Met’s theater team and had originally been a projectionist. Soon after joining, he checked the inventory of film collections and found that titles and storage locations did not match. Organization was necessary because films were screened almost every day, and the job required knowing exactly what title was on which shelf. As he continued organizing the films day after day, he became more knowledgeable about their management than anyone else and gradually became a film archivist. Today he works as a media archivist who also handles born-digital materials.
Preserving Internet Art
Since 1996, Rhizome has focused on preserving art on the internet. I spoke with Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s digital conservator, about the preservation of internet art and its problems, along with the software and tools Rhizome has created.
Because operating systems and browser versions are constantly updated, more and more internet artworks become inaccessible over time. At the same time, newer works often exist on semi-closed social networks that cannot be crawled by programs, or on video-sharing sites, making technical archiving difficult.
For example, Alli Coates’s performance video AMERICAN REFLEXXX, published on YouTube,77https://youtu.be/bXn1xavynj8 is not only the video itself; the phenomenon that occurs online, including comments by viewers, is also part of the work and therefore a preservation target. Works that use platforms such as social media and video-sharing services may be lost if videos are suddenly removed or if the service itself is discontinued. The key issue is how to archive them as close to real time as possible.
In response to such issues, Rhizome developed Webrecorder,88https://webrecorder.io which makes it possible to record and replay websites that have been viewed. There are still points to improve, such as how to handle a video work with thousands of comments, but because it is open source, there is room for future development. It had been under internal testing, but was publicly released just a few days before the interview. An open-source emulation software package, also released in mid-October, is another tool conceived for preserving works that run on old operating systems, browsers, CD-ROMs, and related environments.
3. Future Issues and Plans
Improving Systems and Processing Speed
MoMA’s Media Conservation department has developed its own system and workflow.99http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/04/14/momas-digital-art-vault In summary, it evaluates and analyzes how digital works were made and programmed, creates documentation in a proprietary format so that they can be preserved in the most suitable way in the future, packages that documentation together with the work’s materials, and sends the package data to a storage facility on Long Island. At present, sending package data takes a very long time. When the completed system first sent the accumulated data, 30 terabytes in total, it took two and a half months. Because the number of packages to send will certainly increase, including long-duration video works, improving processing speed for transfer is a future necessity.
Developing New Systems and Tools
Tanisha Jones, director of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, was researching ways to enable more dynamic video playback on the moving-image archive the division publishes.1010http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/dancevideo She would like to develop playback functions and tools that allow users to extract and search for specific scenes across multiple videos under certain conditions, such as showing only scenes in which dancers wearing costumes of a particular color appear, without having to watch entire videos.
Regarding the singularity said to arrive around 2045, many practitioners were skeptical, citing the fact that Google’s automatic image recognition in its photo app and Amazon’s recommendation technology are still not sufficient even today.
MIAP director Dan Streible said that as technology develops, cybercrime may become even more active, but he also pointed to innovative automated devices such as Jim Lindner’s SAMMA System and suggested that machines may in the future generate video metadata automatically, producing new archival methods.
Barbara Haws of the NY Phil Digital Archives commented that as digital data becomes increasingly central, archivists, digital archivists, librarians, historians, and related professions may be integrated into a single role.
The Wall between Art and Engineering, and Education
Rhizome’s Dragan Espenschied seemed to believe it is important for many institutions to transform from art facilities alone into something closer to research institutions that also conduct various forms of research and development. At present, introducing archival systems and media storage systems such as TMS is common, but many aspects no longer fit the times. Rather than simply using such tools, people at many institutions need to take part in developing and improving them. He said there is a community wall between art and engineering, but that people who understand both will be needed in the future.
MIAP also expects to handle born-digital materials increasingly in the future. It is gradually changing its curriculum in response to the times, incorporating information studies, web applications, and open-source software. For the newest developments, it frequently invites outside specialists as lecturers and holds workshops.
New Educational Video Distribution Models
Rebecca Cleman, distribution manager at EAI, was considering a new streaming-service model for education that would make all moving-image works distributed by EAI viewable from devices such as iPhones. For EAI, distribution on video-sharing services such as YouTube, where copyright infringement can easily occur, or lending through easily copied media such as DVD, is not an ideal model. Because piracy and illegal copying can arise when there is no legitimate route to access the desired work, EAI is considering a subscription-based streaming service similar to Netflix as a way to deter piracy. International deployment would require adjustment because copyright law and censorship differ by country.
Layered Digital Archives and How to Publish Them
The Museum of Arts and Design has digitized and published video and audio records of exhibition-related talks and educational programs.1111http://www.madmuseum.org/media/video
At present, it has no digital archivist, but AV coordinator Carson Parish is preparing to create a new digital archive for MAD’s permanent collection of more than 3,000 works.
At the Whitney, the Education Resources department handles and publishes Watch and Listen,1212http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen a digital archive of video and audio. Physical moving-image media and paper materials are managed by the Archives department. The Archives department does not currently conduct digital projects, but Tara Hart, the manager who had just come to the Whitney from the New Museum in May, said that the museum holds many valuable materials that should be digitized, such as documentation films of the Whitney Studio Club, the Whitney’s predecessor, and exhibition materials from 1930 onward. She would like to develop projects in the near future and eventually make everything viewable online. In the future, multiple and diverse archives may increasingly develop simultaneously within a single institution.
MoMA also has MoMA Multimedia,1313http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia handled by the Digital Media department, where users can view video and audio records of exhibitions and public events. According to director Shannon Darrough, because it is currently published primarily for public relations purposes, the department is reconsidering how videos should be presented. On the current website, MoMA Multimedia can be reached from the Explore menu on the homepage, but she said it may be more natural, and may better attract viewers’ interest, to feature related videos within exhibition pages.
The NY Phil Digital Archives currently allows users to search concert programs, scores, photographs, and business documents, and plans to publish audio and video online in the future. It is now considering the best publication methods. Because it places the greatest emphasis on sound quality, it will proceed in the order of sound first, then video.
Collaboration with Other Institutions and Sharing Archives
Tanisha Jones of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division said that many institutions currently face similar technical problems, and she would like to seek effective improvements through collaboration with other institutions, including the possibility of sharing archives not only within the United States but also with institutions abroad.
MIAP is already involved in archival projects with overseas educational institutions and public facilities. It is active in exchange with other institutions, including an Audiovisual Preservation Exchange project with the University of Ghana and dispatching students in response to a request from Teatro Colón in Argentina concerning the preservation of magnetic tapes and other media.
Proposals to the Private Sector
Based on successful examples of archiving in museums and libraries, MIAP plans to actively advocate the need for digital archiving to the private sector, broadly promote the importance of archivists and conservators, and discover latent needs for archivists and conservators as a business field.
The family of Robert Sklar, a film scholar and former professor at New York University, also established a scholarship for Cinema Studies. Sklar is known among people connected to baseball as one of the creators of Fantasy League Baseball in the 1980s. Major League Baseball (MLB) holds a vast archive of audio and film, and MIAP director Dan Streible said he would very much like to realize an MLB archive project bearing Sklar’s name.
C) Plan for Applying the Research Results
I would like to apply the results of this research, together with my practical experience to date, to digital archiving in Japan and abroad. Specifically, I would like to help create places where practitioners can share information and discuss issues, collaborate with institutions and organizations advancing digital archiving in Japan, and share knowledge with libraries and related organizations. Through these activities, I hope eventually to share knowledge not only in the current field of the arts, but also with new artistic domains and private-sector fields where digital archiving will become necessary.
4. Information on the Current State, Characteristics, and Cultural Administration of the Host Country’s Art World
New York Archive Week 2015
Beginning on October 14, New York Archive Week 20151414http://www.nycarchivists.org introduced the activities of archive communities throughout New York. Organized by the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. (A.R.T.), a nonprofit founded in 1979, and held in collaboration with New York organizations and companies, the event opened archive-related programs across the city to specialists and the general public alike. During the research period, I attended the following three events.
1. On October 19, a panel discussion on video-tape archives, LA MAMA: Preserving The Videotaped Record of 1970s-Era, was held at LA MAMA Experimental Theatre Club.1515http://lamama.org The institution holds many films and videos of experimental theater and performance it has presented. The discussion focused on how a small institution can build an archive effectively and educate new generations about the importance of archives. Panelists included LA MAMA’s director, MIAP students and faculty working with the archive, and a MoMA media conservator, confirming the strong connections among archive practitioners in New York.
2. On October 20, I attended a workshop titled Archival Research Introduction at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The workshop introduced efficient ways to search archives and materials in New York, including ArchiveGrid,1616https://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/ a tool that allows users to search archives managed by libraries and museums by region.
Participants also practiced searching for materials in online catalogs and databases of the New-York Historical Society using keywords assigned by the lecturer. A participant who appeared to be a member of the general public commented that using multiple online catalogs and databases across a short period of time was a high hurdle. Technically, there seemed to be room for improvement.
3. On October 21, I attended Archives and Architecture, a symposium on archival projects in architecture held at the Center for Jewish History. In a presentation by Shu-Wen Lin, then enrolled in MIAP, and Sheung Tang Luk of the Reversible Destiny Foundation,1717www.reversibledestiny.org the architecture of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, who had been active in New York since the 1970s, was introduced. The presentation proposed experimental attempts using archives and interactive virtual-reality technology, and suggested the possibility that new technologies could protect and express artists’ ideas and production intentions more precisely.
The Barbarian Group
I had an opportunity to meet Benjamin Palmer, founder and chairman of The Barbarian Group,1818http://barbariangroup.com and visited the company’s office. The company, known for dynamic interactive advertising, not only purchases artworks but also actively supports artists’ activities. Some employees work as creative technologists while also making their own artworks. The company was recognized as a mentor-like supporter for artists and felt like a new type of arts supporter. Palmer also serves on the board of The Kitchen,1919http://thekitchen.org which presents experimental performances on an almost daily basis.
Conditions in New York City
The High Line2020http://www.thehighline.org had been completed, and because of subsequent development and the real-estate market bubble, rents rose sharply. Several galleries that had been in Chelsea had moved to the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.
The Lowline project,2121http://www.thelowline.org which aims to create an underground park on the Lower East Side using a solar system, was underway toward 2020.
This report is a revised version based on a research report submitted to the Agency for Cultural Affairs in December 2015.
The footnote URLs are all as of December 2015. Some websites or webpages may no longer be accessible, but they have been left unchanged.