Preserving Sound + Image While Keeping Sustainability In Mind

One of the challenges of capturing and archiving sound and image from the past is preserving the material of the mediums on which the data was recorded. Prelinger was innovative in having the foresight to preserve old discarded educational film reels dating since the WWII era, and it’s great to see that people still find his film archive to be useful for research and other kinds of media production. I’m curious about how the Library of Congress is preserving each delicate film reel from the collection they had acquired from Prelinger. It’s one thing to have a temperature-controlled vault within a building to store them. However, I would imagine that the actual handling of the material, many of which are probably at least over seventy years old, would still have to go through some kind of preservation and/or restoration process.

Even when it comes to recording and archiving performance art, such as spoken word poetry, we still face the same issue of trying to preserve an ephemeral experience in a more permanent medium that could withstand time. “The Politics of Film Archival Practice” touches on these same issues of exploring the processes of preservation and restoration of materials. As old and current media formats get outdated and replaced by newer technological advances, we still have to consider which sets of materials are worth saving and ensure that data is not lost and that the quality of the materials is not sacrificed in the process. In her piece “Chemistry is Restoring our Audio History from Melting,” Katherine Gammon wrote about the gradual degeneration of tapes, discs, and film recording materials, and she also addressed the ways in which they are being restored and preserved through high-resolution digitization. This reminded me of our previous reading from Zack Lischer-Katz, “Studying the Materiality of Media Archives in the Age of Digitization: Forensics, Infrastructures, and Ecologies.” As we replace old film reels with data servers, but we also need to keep in mind the effects that our media waste in archival practices have on our ecological environments.

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