GUEST: Rachel Mattson, PhD, Manager of Special & Digital Projects, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Archives; Core Member, XFR Collective; Historian
READINGS/SKIMMINGS/LISTENINGS
- Christine Mitchell, “Media Archaeology of Poetry and Sound: A Conversation with Shannon Mattern,” Amodern 4 (2015).
- Rick Prelinger, “Workshops, Workflows & Wooden Trains,” Keynote at Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Pre-Conference, Oakland, CA, 2015 – It’s a great presentation, but a bit difficult to follow on Slideshare. As an alternative: “Prelinger Archives Part 1,” C-Span (April 11, 2013) {video}.
- Explore the various kinds of sound archives: poetry archives, radio archives, bird calls, sound art, and so on. Note the breadth of the British Library’s sound collections, and its campaign to preserve those materials.
- Check out the La MaMa Archives Blog
Choose a few from among the following applied texts re: the material challenges of preserving and accessing/exhibiting archival audio-visual material:
- Skim through the program for “Listening to the Archive: Histories of Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences,” Humboldt-Universität and Max-Planck Institute, Berlin, February 11-13, 216.
- Katharine Gammon, “Chemistry is Rescuing our Audio History from Melting,” Nautilus (November 11, 2015).
- Michael Gaynor, “Inside the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation” Washingtonian (May 9, 2011).
- Martha Joseph, “Collecting Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room,” MoMA’s Inside/Out Blog (January 20, 2015) [on what it means to preserve a sonic performance piece].
- Jeffrey Weiss, “Revisions — Zen for Film,” Artforum (March 2016) [on exhibiting archival copies].
- Skim through the program for “The Politics of Film Archival Practice,” Stockholm, November 2016.
SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES
Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (New York: Routledge, 2014); Carolyn Birdsall, Manon Parry, and Viktoria Tkaczyk, “Listening to the Mind: Tracing the Auditory History of Mental Illness in Archives and Exhibitions,” The Public Historian 37:4 (2015): 47-72; Carolyn Birdsall, “Sound and Media Studies: Archiving and the Construction of Sonic Heritage,” in Sound and Popular Culture: A Research Companion, ed. Jens Gerrit Papenburg and Holger Schulze (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016): 133-48; Anthony Cocciolo’s Pratt “Moving Image + Sound Archives” syllabus; Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); Jim Dwyer, “Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest,” New York Times (April 12, 2005); Wolfgang Ernst, Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016); Giovanna Fosatti, “Exploring Film Heritage” {video} (March 20, 2017); Wolfgang Hagen, “On the Impossibility of Archiving the Radio and Its Virtues,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 8:1 (2017): 35-44; Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Brian P. Harnetty, “Performing Sonic Archives: Listening to Berea, Sun Ra, and the Little Cities of Black Diamonds,” Dissertation, Ohio University, 2014; Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Timothy Leonido, “How to Own a Pool and Like It,” Triple Canopy (April 2017); *Jonathan Lethem, “It All Connects: Adam Curtis and the Secret History of Everything,” New York Times Magazine (October 27, 2016); Allison Mills, “Learning to Listen: Archival Sound Recordings and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property,” Archivaria 83 (Spring 2017); Bill Morrison, Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017); NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.; Jonathan Sterne, “A Resonant Tomb” in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 287-334; Jonathan Sterne, “The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio,” in Sound Souvenirs, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009: 55-65.