FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

TBA

Hide and Seek: Locating the Agency and Power of Archivists in the Neoliberalist Structures of Audio-Visual Archives in India

This study examines the complex interplay of social, cultural, political, and personal factors within India's national audio-visual archives, focusing on the evolving role of archivists as cultural laborers in an increasingly neoliberal organizational structure. The research aims to elucidate the manifestation of archivists' collective agency within the intricate mechanisms of India's bureaucracy and governmentality, particularly in relation to media archives. The investigation is predicated on the conceptualization of national audio-visual archives as multifaceted cultural institutions tasked with preserving the nation's audio-visual heritage. The study's genesis lies in the observed augmentation of organizational hybridity, primarily driven by the government's digitally optimistic and economically instrumentalist objectives.

Employing a theoretical framework informed by Bourdieu's concept of ‘capital and power relations’, the research critically analyses the autonomy of archivists in the process of 'archivisation' of India's national audio-visual heritage. It explores the dichotomy between 'politicians and bureaucrats' wielding fiscal and social capital, and 'professionals and intellectuals' possessing cultural capital, as manifested in the formal information discourse of archives. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach, utilizing in-depth interviews with media archivists and historians closely associated with both public and private Indian archives. Thematic analysis of these interviews, will elucidate the conceptual underpinnings of changing dynamics in archiving and heritage management.

By situating film archives at the intersection of archival, cultural, heritage, and media studies, this research aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the significance and authority held by those who operate these institutions. The findings are expected to shed light on the personal perspectives of archivists regarding their current capacities and anticipated future responsibilities within the elaborate mechanism of India's audio-visual archival institutions. This study's relevance lies in its potential to inform policy and practice in the management of national audio-visual heritage, particularly in the context of evolving digital landscapes and neoliberal governance structures.

Entangled narratives of restitution between Europe & Africa in audiovisual archives

The restitution of African cultural heritage, stolen during the colonial period and currently kept in European institutions, is an on-going societal challenge at the heart of many discussions in political, cultural and academic circles. It is a tangled topic which is gaining traction in Europe after decades of pressure from African scholars and activists. One notable development has been its increasing presence in the media over the last few years, with numerous news reports, debates, talk-shows, documentaries, and coverage of key events. Thanks to media monitoring and a brief consultation of online collections, it appears that certain narratives on the restitution of African cultural heritage are taking shape across several European countries. 
Among other aspects, these narratives give a prominent role to the French president, bring States as key actors, and shed a spotlight on well-known objects such as the Benin Bronzes, whose photographs are now commonly associated with the topic. By doing so, these narratives tend to simplify the issue in ways that affect both public discourses and public opinions regarding the restitution of African cultural heritage. Therefore, through this project, I will explore European and African audiovisual archives to analyse narratives on the restitution of African cultural heritage, and identify various and potentially competing narratives, discover transnational exchanges, analyse the evolution of discourses across languages and the role played by images, and shed light on processes of inclusion and exclusion of specific actors and institutions. 
In terms of methods, I will use an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from media history and narrative studies, in order to identify how public discourses have evolved across European countries and languages, with a welcome perspective from Ghana which will offer a counterpoint to unearth new media narratives. 

In 1980, B.B. King gave his second concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The recording was made by Swiss sound engineer Philippe Zumbrunn on CJ 87 Pyral tape in NAGRA Master analogue audio. Unfortunately, the polymer base sticks to the adjacent magnetic coating, making it unplayable. When read, the tape sheds and clogs the player.  UNESCO’s Magnetic Tape Alert Project found that degradation problems are common to millions of historic tapes. The Australian National Film and Sound Archive even stated ‘Tape that is not digitised by 2025 will in most cases be lost forever’. But is it so?

The “Play it Again” project at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland) uses chemical and physical characterisation to better understand magnetic tape degradation in a collaboration with the Montreux Jazz Digital Project. For Pyral tape, infrared spectra are consistent with other tapes suffering from ‘sticky-shed’. As it is not the magnetic binder that is at fault, but rather the polymer base, this suggests a need for a more careful classification of tape degradation pathways to aid conservation. Physical characterisation using electron microscopy shows micrometre-scale cracks across the tape. Heat treatment does not heal the cracks, meaning that this degradation is irreversible and the magnetic signal will become intrinsically noisier with time. Similarly, in collaboration with the British Film Institute, we are investigating degradation in video tapes. Some of our research questions include: Are physical treatments helping the tapes, or just mitigating the decay symptoms long enough to allow for digitisation? Is attempting to treat tapes doing more harm than good?

So, is 2025 a final deadline? Probably not, however degradation is generally irreversible, eventually rendering magnetic tapes totally unplayable using conventional technologies. We are presently developing a contactless solution using synchrotron X-rays for recovering the recorded information from such degraded tapes.

Daily archives or Archives of the day is a very popular format for accessing specific archive content. What happens when we start to use the “old” daily news as a trigger for intergenerational dialogue? Can we understand each other better through archival footage?

Three generations in particular, Baby Boomers, Generations X and Millennials, are currently meeting each other on Facebook. Each has a different (or none) experience of life under socialism in Czechoslovakia. Across the generations, there are also different views on whether things were better before and where the current society is heading. News events from the 1970s and 1980s evoke a wide range of emotions. Comments on the Czech Television Archive's Facebook page commonly include statements such as "the world was still fine then", but also those that condemn everything from the old days. But does it have to be so black and white?

We think primarily about the relationship between the archival material, the archivist who selects the content, and the audience. Where, how and under what conditions can everyone safely meet and develop these relationships? Can we use a selection of events from the archive, well-aimed questions and sensitively guided discussion to create a space for cultivated dialogue among our viewers? And what can the audience teach us? Why do they watch archival footage? What does it evoke in them? Where, apart from social networks, can we meet and what form to choose? If we open ourselves up to dialogue and resist nothing, we may discover what else archives have to offer society.

The presentation is two part of 30min each.

Data Scientist, Data engineer, Community manager, AI Project Owner, Web editor, Digital Storyteller, Podcaster… Job offers with new job titles seem to pop up every day in the Archives world, and sometimes leave us perplexed.

The ultra-fast development of AI, yesterday analytical, today generative, the need to always create new contents to be visible and reach all audiences, the environmental challenges, the permanent renewal of uses and the technological transformations, create ever-new skills needs.

There is a growing convergence between archive, IT, journalism… It is an ongoing challenge for archive professionals, who must stay up to date, hire the right profiles, develop new professional cultures to dialogue with their colleagues and take - or keep - their place in this changing landscape.

What are these new jobs? How do they relate to the jobs we know? Will they replace them? How do they co-exist and collaborate? How do these new kinds of teams and work organisations work?

Part 1: Will they replace archivists and documentalists? Feedback of 2 professionals (AI product owner, Data Analyst…)

Part 2: Have they a place in archives? Feedback of 2 professionals (Officer for sustainability, Web editor or Community manager...)

Part 3: Exchanges Come and exchange with these new jobs professionals, share your experience, your challenges and your vision of the future during this interactive workshop.

VRT has 120.000 files (60.000 hours in total), which possibly contain colour flickering. The defect was introduced during bulk digitisation starting in 2015, of Betacam SP and SX to MXF-DV25 from 1980 and 2005. During the project insufficient digitisation quality control was in place.

In order to avoid having to re-digitise 120.000 tapes, VRT was looking for a partner to investigate if a digital detection and correction could be possible. Joanneum Research and HS-Art partnered up to take on this challenge. A solution for the digital detection and restoration of colour flickering has been implemented. For the detection the properties of the colour flickering have been carefully researched and a solution has been developed which covers a wide range of relevant properties, as there are varying degrees of flicker magnitude and varying size of the colour flickering areas. Based on the flicker magnitude and area it is decided which media items and media sections get restored digitally. During restoration the colour information of each affected frame is seamlessly reconstructed from the colour of the neighbouring frames. The presentation will introduce the preservation use case, the solutions workflow, operational experiences and various samples for the detection and restoration of colour flicker.

For this tape digitisation artefact the digital detection and restoration is an ideal solution, as the defect can be detected reliably and restored in high quality, and this in a much more cost efficient way as re-digitisation would have been. In order to avoid the need for re-digitisation or digital restoration its recommended to include appropriate quality control procedures in each current video and film digitisation project right from the beginning.

At the end of 2023, adapted from the Mao Dun Literature Award work "Blossoms", directed by Kar Wai Wong (HK), the Shanghai local television drama "Blossoms Shanghai" had been launched, with a great reputation. Shanghainese seem to have opened a memory gate, collectively returning to the vibrant 1990s. Many real-life scenes from the past appear in the drama, most of these historical images were provided by Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives.

In 2020, the production team of "Blossoms Shanghai" had contact with Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives. With the aid of the archives of the city of Shanghai in the 1980s to 1990s, they hope to dig deeper into the special historical period of Shanghai and the living conditions of its people. Also, they hope to realistically recreate the scene of the drama at that time.

In the following three years, the Archives provided senior professional editors and researchers with specialized consulting services for the production team, with dedicated personnel conducting targeted queries and organizing information. They provided over 60 historical video archives for the production team of "Blossoms Shanghai", totalling over 1800 minutes. The production team of "Blossoms Shanghai" utilized these rich visual memories to create a 1:1 replica of the street scenes of the old Shanghai at the film and television base. The narrow alleyways, crowded staircases, and aisles filled with things all present the rich fireworks and contemporary atmosphere of Shanghai in the early 1990s in the drama.

From the initial historical scene reference needs of the cooperation to the copyright purchase of precious historical images for drama applications, the Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives and the production team have worked together to meticulously craft a sword for three years, showcasing the touching urban Shanghai of the 1990s. This form of market-oriented application has been continuously carried out by Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives for several years, providing services for multiple dramas, such as the scientist series film "Ye Shuhua" and "Yan Dongsheng", the drama "Great Pudong", " Like a Flowing River", "Faith Makes Great", and so on.

Real historical images not only serve as an important reference for the production team, but also make the content presented in movies and TV dramas more convincing by examining details. In addition, the direct use of real historical images in the drama reflects the historical background while making the content of the film and television drama more creative. In the face of more diversified media communication methods, relying on the collection of historical images, Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives has also planned and produced a variety of short videos on themes, showing the audience the real historical images at that time on new media platforms such as the official WeChat channel and the official account, which has made many people relive the past life, popularize historical knowledge, and gradually build a social public library.

The state television series, ‘Yuruparí: Popular Traditional Art’, documented cultural expressions of peasant, Afro and indigenous populations in Colombia, leaving a memory of the sociopolitical configurations in the midst of the armed conflict of the 1980s. Being the most complete ethnographic record of its time, with rituals, festivals and songs declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, the preservation of this collection after its censorship, invites us to reflect on access and restitution policies, in order to unveil untold stories and embedded narratives.

Following the beginning of its restoration in 2013 led by the colombian institutions of Proimágenes Colombia, RTVC-Señal Memoria and Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, as well as the lead researcher Juan Suárez PhD and international organizations such as the National Museum of African American Culture-Smithsonian/Blake McDowell, FIAT/IFTA, amongst others, 24 of the 86 episodes in 16mm have been completed.

The central figure of Gloria Triana, its main director, has led the conventional narrative around this archive. However, based on the documentation management and contextualization with a gender perspective of the private, state and community archives around this collection, more than 25 participating women who constitute part of Colombian audiovisual history have been made visible; Ann Marie Lóök, Beatriz Barros and María Ema Frade are just some of them.

In this way, in an exercise to recover the oral memory of the production team, the participation of the populations represented in the collective cataloging of their episodes, and the making of a film with the found materials, this project proposes different approaches to reread the sociopolitical narrative(s) imposed in the series and delve into the challenges of access, reuse and promotion of public archives in Colombia.

The cultural and historical value of videogames can no longer be ignored. Yet, as an interactive medium, video games still continue to provide a challenge in archives and as a historical basis. At the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision we've incorporated a strategy to preserve games in interactive form by leveraging emulation, working together with the rights holders of these games and presenting them to the public in interactive methods to broaden the understanding and highlight this aspect of our archive.

In this session we put all our cards (and controllers) on the table and explain our methodology, how working with the game's creators themselves allows us to bring a new perspective on video game preservation and how to present games as cultural heritage to the general public. Preserving interactive media and software through emulation, may even be applied in fields other than video games, making them valuable tools even if your institution has yet to take the plunge on games-preservation.