Un-archiving LA

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.