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summer workshops

Un-archiving LA

Jun 5, 2023 – Jun 15, 2023

Los Angeles, California

Felicity Scott

and

Mark Wasiuta

Research Question

This workshop will study and speculate on film and television archives in Los Angeles, and the cultural and institutional landscape to which they collectively give form. The first film archive was founded in Sweden in 1933. The quest to store and conserve cinema history through film archivization and preservation spread widely in the 1940s and the postwar. Television archives appeared much later, the first established only in the 1960s. Despite the profound importance and the lasting consequence of the moving image for the 20th century, both early film, because of celluloid film stock, and postwar television, because recorded on electromagnetic tape, are notoriously unstable media.

Looking at the spaces, processes, technical infrastructures, and priorities of different film and television archives in Los Angeles, the workshop will inquire into the instability at the heart of these moving image archives. It will research the role these archiving institutions and their buildings play in arresting, holding, or marking this instability. The workshop will also interrogate the expansion of film and television archives in relation to other sites for producing, storing, and disseminating media in the 60s and 70s, especially those for memory tape storage linked to the computer companies and military contractors that proliferated in Southern California. Hence, the workshop will ask how the problem of preserving cultural history and the more general problem of storing information have intersected technically, historically, spatially, and architecturally, opening onto a series of critical, curatorial, and conceptual frameworks.

Methodology and Process

Students will research the content and structure of film and television archives at UCLA, the Academy of Motion Pictures, the American Film Institute, and the Center for Visual Music. They will meet with archivists, film historians, and media conservators, such as Mark Toscano at CalArts, traversing a range of sites and agents from academic institutions and the film industry to alternative practices. And they will view and record other archival traces of film and television histories, including sound stages, sets, and the many other instruments and environments of LA’s vast film and television territories.

Students will be asked to find key documents and technologies from the collections that speak to the themes of archival instability and arrest or that address the problem of information production, storage, and circulation more generally. These documents may be film or television tape. They may also be storage protocols, cataloging systems, architectural details, or climate controls. Students will then develop proposals for translating, communicating, or viewing their selected archival materials in various formats, asking how to treat these documents to perform a new reading or interpretation and hence to invent a technique of un-archiving media.

Output and Findings

The selected archival documents and the students’ un-archiving proposals will be compiled into a small pop-up show in Los Angeles. The exhibition will consist of drawings, diagrams, and descriptions of different creative formats, ranging from exhibitions, critical exposés, films, podcasts, interviews, atlases, pamphlets, performances, alternative archives, new cataloging systems, new narratives, counter-archives, and more.

Repeater Projector Film Magazine with 8mm copy of Joe Colombo’s film for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA, 1972. Photo M. Wasiuta.

Other 2023 workshops

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Honolulu, HI Frequency: Urban mobility patterns across time, space, and scale	Kaz Sakamoto	Honolulu, Hawaii	Aug 10, 2023 – Aug 18, 2023
Peri-urban Water Management in Gujarat	Sandro Marpillero, Sonal Beri	Ahmedabad, India	Jul 17, 2023 – Aug 5, 2023
On Circulations And The African Imagination Of A Borderless World	Mabel O. Wilson, Mario Gooden, Emanuel Admassu	Dar es Salaam, Tanzania	Jun 20, 2023 – Jul 3, 2023
Modern Architecture in Havana	Belmont Freeman	Havana, Cuba	Jun 7, 2023 – Jun 17, 2023
Real Estate Finance: Incentivising Capital to Create Better Outcomes in the Built Environment	Chris Munsell	Across New York City	Jun 5, 2023 – Jun 16, 2023
An Atlas of Dust	Jorge Otero-Pailos	Across New York City	May 22, 2023 – Jun 9, 2023