Archives

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power and resources. Calling for the necessity to reimagine the potentials of archives in practice, the three contributions ask: Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle? Contents: Introduction: Contesting "The Archive," Archives, and Thanatarchy (Andrew Lison); Archives of Inconvenience (Rick Prelinger); System of a Takedown: Control and De-commodification in the Circuits of Academic Publishing (Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak)

Looking Back at an Electronic exchange with a Media Archeologist. An Interview with Rick Prelinger by Caroline Martel 12 ½ years later

It took place over a dial-up connection on a 386 computer, in the last century, a century that Rick Prelinger decrypted through his collection of films artifacts revealing “the dark side of the American Dream.” As I was writing a review of his twelve CD-rom collection Our Secret Century, focusing on how multimedia could contribute to a new historiography of cinema, I dared to ask for an interview. This led to a back-and-forth email exchange over some long winter months, from November 1998 to ..

Fantasies of the Library

"Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas--as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others." -- Publisher's website

L'avenir de la mémoire

La question de la conservation, de la restauration et de la diffusion du patrimoine cinématographique et audiovisuel devient de plus en plus cruciale. Des pans entiers de l'histoire du cinéma demeurent toujours difficiles d'accès et sont souvent menacés de disparition. Que faire de ces gisements de films et de documents audiovisuels que les archives ont de moins en moins les ressources et la possibilité de faire connaître ? Où commence et où s'arrête la notion de patrimoine filmique ? Quels sont les critères de pertinence qui mènent une cinémathèque ou une archive à favoriser la restauration de telle œuvre plutôt que telle autre ? Comment la redécouverte de certains corpus de films contribue à modifier notre connaissance de l'histoire du cinéma ? Quelle influence la conservation et la patrimonialisation du cinéma a eu sur les créateurs de cinéma ? Comment ces œuvres participent d'une forme de valorisation singulière du patrimoine filmique ? Quels sont les nouveaux défis des cinémathèques et des archives dans la conservation et la restauration du patrimoine filmique ? Quels rôles jouent les « nouveaux supports » dans la conservation de certaines zones oubliées du patrimoine cinématographique ? Sans avoir la prétention d’épuiser les multiples ramifications de ces questions pressantes, vastes et complexes, cet ouvrage voudrait poser quelques jalons d’une réflexion plus que jamais nécessaire sur l’avenir de la mémoire des archives cinématographiques et audiovisuelles

Lux : A Decade of Artists' Film and Video

“Lux” gathers together a variety of essays, commentaries, interviews, scripts and artists’ projects representative of a decade of artists’ film and video. As the editors note, the book is intended to be a print analogue to the screening activities of Toronto’s Pleasure Dome, and to blur the distinction between the artist’s and the critic’s practice. Includes a chronology of Pleasure Dome’s film and video events from their inception in 1989 to 1999. Notes on contributors. Circa 95 bibl. ref