2019 MIAP Thesis Week

Laurie Duke (MIAP '16) presents her thesis portfolio,"Personal Portmanteaus and Preservation Persuasion," Apr 1, 2016.

Students in the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program will present their M.A. thesis projects, covering a wide range of topics such as digital film restoration, Icelandic home movies, and streaming media. All sessions will be held in the NYU Department of Cinema Studies at 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, in the Michelson Theater (Room 648) and will be open to the public. See below for a complete schedule and presentation descriptions.

Wednesday, April 3

6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Annie Schweikert - Audiovisual Algorithms: New Techniques for Digital Processing

Born-digital audiovisual accessions have increasingly begun to outstrip analog accessions in archives, representing not only a change in format but a change in scale. In order to understand—not just preserve—the tsunami of born-digital content, archivists must take advantage of the format’s possibilities for automated analytical work. This essay will survey the tools and methods available to process digital audiovisual content; evaluate ethical concerns inherent in these approaches; and interview archivists and technologists who have put these tools into practice. The consolidation and summary of tools both predicted and in actual use will give archivists a place to start tackling their digital audiovisual backlog.

7:15 PM - 8:15 PM
Sigga Regina - Cold Storage: Icelandic Home Movies

This thesis is a preservation project and research paper that examines Icelandic home movies. It focuses on collections in the Icelandic National Film Archive in context with similar international institutions. The paper proposes a collections policy and set of recommendations for the acquisition, preservation and promotion of this undervalued cultural heritage.

Thursday, April 4

9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Ari Greenberg -  A Preservation Plan for Sidney M. Goldin's Führe uns nicht in versuchung, or The Polish Jew

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Anne-Marie Desjardins - When the Woman Shoots: Countering the Horror Film Canon in the Archive

The film "canon” has been marginalizing individual works for far too long and claiming authority over our understanding of the art form. The goal of this research is to break the gendered boundaries of the horror film canon by proposing an intervention, whereby women filmmakers will be inscribed into the history of the genre. The result is a curated series and a discussion on the role of the archive as gatekeeper, cause and symptom of the social limitations of our access to film histories.

Friday, April 5

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Miles Levy - Streaming Media Architectures and Related Archival Practices

This project will explain various streaming and on-demand media architectures and protocols employed by modern media outlets. Case studies conducted at media outlets will document practices centered around digital asset management of original content being created, archived, and streamed.

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Jeffrey Lauber - History and Ethics of Film Restoration

Film restoration and its products have been subject to scrutiny and debate since the dawn of the practice. The numerous unresolvable uncertainties inherent to the process have sparked discussions amongst archivists, restorers, scholars, critics, and audiences alike over the ethics of restoring motion pictures. As discourse of the sort can tend towards ideology, an understanding the ethical implications of film restoration should be achieved through analysis of a diverse set of perspectives and case studies. This thesis draws from both theoretical discourse and restoration cases to examine the ways in which restorers have confronted and mitigated the unending ethical and technological obstacles of their practice. As a contextual frame, the thesis charts the ways in which both the practice and ethical discourse of film restoration has evolved from the 1970s to present.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Danielle Calle - Climate Change as a Prompt for the Digital Archive

The lure of a non-material and tech-reliant tomorrow promises a future that is free from material waste, turning away from the analog towards bits. In a rush to digitize born-analog content, how will the institutions responsible for our cultural heritage respond to the impending issue of digital materiality, and the physical systems required to sustain digital content? Climate Change as a Prompt for the Digital Archive offers a critical approach to the environmentally costly infrastructures that power digital stewardship initiatives across the cultural sector.

2:15 PM - 3:15 PM
Draye Wilson - The Fleeting Moment: Radical Archival Praxis for Ephemeral Cinema

Archivists and conservators have long struggled with the notion that not everything can, or should be, preserved. This presentation will focus on moving image work which by its nature, actively resists preservation. The term "ephemeral cinema" is used to loosely describe a form of expanded cinema based around disappearance, self-destruction, disruption and constant mutability. How can archivists attempt to preserve works which are meant to decay or change over time? How can this process be done in a manner which respects the integrity of the work? This presentation will examine how ephemerality and fixity can be understood in terms of politics, philosophy and spirituality. It will also attempt to ground the discussion within a greater context of preservation and art conservation by examining issues concerning indigenous material, performance art and landscape art. Works will be discussed by artists such as Jack Smith, Raphael Ortiz, Luther Price, Joel Schlemowitz and Bradley Eros. As a rhetorical exercise and experiment in radical archival practice, a hypothetical preservation plan will be posited for an interdisciplinary work by Bradley Eros entitled Prayer Wheel/Incline/Decline. The goal is to explore how the archival process can exist in continuum with artistic creation, and how radical and ephemeral work can continue to live, grow, decay and regenerate over time.