CHAIR: Cléo Sallis-Parchet

Sam Meech

Feedback Forms - Technological Analogical Experimentation in Video Art Within and the Beyond the Vidéographe Collection

This is a paper about technological analogical experimentation in video art, within (and beyond) the Vidéographe collection. Specifically it will look at the practice of video feedback; an ephemeral image making practice more aligned with live video installation and improvisatory performance than the traditional locked down editing timeline. I will identify historical and contemporary examples of video feedback phenomena within the collection, and address the issues around documenting, distributing and archiving ‘live’ video art in an evolving technological landscape.
Vidéographe is an artist-run center based in Tio'tia:ke / Montreal, founded in 1971, whichsupports experimental moving image artists through distribution, equipment and training. Each year, new works are acquired for distribution as part of a large collection (2500+) of artist film and video, while the artists themselves become part of a community with a long tradition of experimental moving image practices. Significantly, a number of contemporary artists (Charlotte Clermont, Guillaume Vallée, Rob Feulner) are revisiting ‘live’ video mixing techniques and technologies explored 50 years previously, such as video feedback and video synthesis.
This paper will examine the work of Feulner, Clermont and Vallée alongside early Québec video artists such as Giles Chartier, Charles Binamé, Micheline ""Mousse"" Guernon, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. In doing so it will look at the role of active collections in maintaining historical video art works. It will also examine the potential of ‘obsolete’ technologies such as VHS in developing, distributing and archiving contemporary works .

Sean Loughrey

Redundant Technologies: Found Voices and Lost Histories
I would like to begin by discussing three specific archives probed during some PhD research. All three archives share a physical (analogue) presence within the world and most of the material discussed exist as recordings on tape, a now redundant technology.
The first archive I will discuss is research conducted by Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who developed an archive and wrote a book on the science of recording voices of the dead in 1971. As an archive, these recordings became source material, or vocal “ready-mades” for numerous writers, artists, and musicians, including William Burroughs, Mike Kelley, Susan Hiller and multimedia artist and writer Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky. The second archive discussed highlight segments of the CPA (Communist Party of Australia) archive. Focus here is more personal, in which much material relates to my parent’s involvement in the CPA during the 1950s. This material was both visual and audio based, including tape recorded interviews and basic printing techniques used to create posters, booklets, and pamphlets. The third archive discussed would be the tape recordings used by Samuel Beckett, in the theatrical production of “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1958), in which an old man ponders upon his own archived voice.
Further reflection upon these archives acknowledges numerous complexities, highlighting unique qualities only found through the medium of magnetic tape. The ‘medium’ becomes an integral part of the archive, and I would suggest that the medium might reveal alternate interpretations of an archive, specifically through an open capacity to engage with gaps, slippages and the “in-between spaces,” with less concern for a linear narrative."

Peter Gagné and Jorge Ayala-Isala

Priests and Pixels: Humanizing Archives in the Digital Age

This presentation aims to present the evolution and challenges of an ongoing project by media artist Jorge Ayala-Isaza that uses the archives of the Séminaire de Québec as the basis of a research-creation project. It will be co-presented by the artist in conjunction with reference archivist Peter Gagné of the Musée de la Civilisation, which manages the Seminary’s archives. The presentation hopes to raise various questions and challenges encountered by both the artist and archivist regarding archive-based research and emerging digital storytelling technologies to create an immersive audiovisual installation inspired by texts, images, and objects found at the archives of the Seminary of Québec. Among other things, the presentation seeks to identify the various challenges faced by both artist and archivist throughout the processes of exploration, ideation and creation, and to present the ideas and efforts employed to overcome them. From an archival point of view, the challenges include Communication: understanding the evolving scope and content of the project in order to suggest appropriate avenues of research; Archival limitations: finding specific documents using “vague” ideas, Technological limitations: combining multiple digital and paper-based finding aids to locate source material, and Ethical dilemmas: using historical archives to suggest possible or plausible events or actions. From the artistic point of view, the challenges include Selecting the most appropriate source materials from the vast holdings of the archives, Finding the balance between historical and artistic representation to produce a creative interpretation of the documentary evidence rather than reproducing canonic history, and Exploring the idea of the Seminary of Québec beyond a physical repository of documentary heritage and architectural site as a site with entangled memories and charged with a complicated symbolic value. This presentation highlights the collaboration between artists and archivists in finding solutions to these challenges, hoping to suggest ways to integrate traditional archives and emerging digital storytelling technologies to develop virtual heritage projects."

Tatiana Astafeva and Rasmus Greiner

Audiovisual Pathways through Archive: Video Essay as Research Method

The word “archive” entails such connotations as “scholarly”, “structured”, “objective”. Even if academic methods of working with archives strive to objectivity, archival materials, especially audiovisual ones, are not deprived of emotions.
Of a special interest in this regard are the so-called transitional comedies produced in 1944–1945 and finished after WWII. These snapshots of the transitional period captured ruptures and continuities between the Third Reich and divided post-war Germany. Produced as a part of an “indirect”, “subtle” propaganda these comedies aimed at affecting audience first and foremost through emotions, which they unrestrictedly did after 1945. With the development of archives’ digitalization these repositories of traumatic pasts become accessible for a broader audience to be reproduced, reapproached, reused.
In regard to the transitional comedies, archives accomplish ambiguous tasks. On the one hand, they allow clarifying the role of such ‘entertainment’ films in the Third Reich and after WWII. On the other hand, archives make this highly problematic heritage visible. Reappropriation, reusage, rearrangement of such emotionally-loaded audiovisual archival materials raise a wide range of ethical issues, especially in the current times of digital archives that make such an ambiguous legacy accessible for a broad audience. Video essays are a suitable tool to convey these issues in dealing with film heritage in a genuine cinematic way.
The presentation first explores why it can be productive to approach films as emotional repositories. It then aims to examine how these kinds of archives can be studied in order to treat carefully the ethical issues such archives entail. It is argued further that certain forms of an academic video essay provide essential tools both for researching problematic audiovisual archives and for preserving and presenting emotional aspects of such archives without eliminating a necessary contextual distance towards the problematic past.