For my final internship in the MIAP program, I worked at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). EAI was founded in 1971 by Howard Wise, and has accumulated over 4,000 works of art to be both preserved and distributed over the course of its 50-year history. It continues to be one of the foremost nonprofits in the world devoted to video and media art in all its forms, and its collection represents an enormous percentage of the history of video art from the 1960s to the present day. EAI is also currently looking to rebuild their in-house digitization and expand long-term digitization prospects after COVID left them with non-functional equipment and a general need to regroup their capabilities. They have successfully cleared out most of their nonfunctional equipment and are continuing with a variety of projects, which resulted in me having a more varied slate of tasks than in my previous two internships.
EAI
EAI continues to receive new born-digital titles and archival materials from the artists in their collection, with Cory Arcangel and Zoe Beloff having a collection of their works arrive during my time at EAI. This meant some time was spent adding their titles to EAI’s administrative database for organizational purposes, along with compiling Excel spreadsheets for cross-reference. EAI also has a collection of hard drives from artists with material on them that was utilized for events or screenings, and the material on these drives was copied to other forms of storage and added to EAI’s database. Some of my work at EAI required me and Caroline to take trips to the UOVO storage facility in Brooklyn. I noted down all the works in EAI’s collection of tapes related to the early video artist Jud Yalkut. The work related to Yalkut that I performed was the result of EAI’s initial plans for a grant they are in the process of pursuing and that I played a major part in writing, the CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) grant.
