RE: [-empyre-] Migration & Restoration and mutating aesthetics

["Paul Koerbin" <pkoerbin@nla.gov.au>]

Clare

We do not archive the applications required for viewing web sites in
PANDORA. It is one of the preservation options that is considered
although there are a lot of issues arising from such and approach, such
as licensing the applications and also maintaining the hardware that
would be required. I this has been done by one web archive in
Scandinavia but access was necessarily limited to a stand-alone PC, i.e.
there archived resources were not networked or widely available.

As been mentioned in other postings, emulation is one of the options for
future access to archived digital resources, the other main one being
migration to new platforms (as they emerge and as it becomes necessary
to do so). All this is dependent upon having the necessary metadata for
preservation purposes. We need to know about the files we have archived
in order to do anything such as emulation or migration in the future.
One difficulty for us is collecting and managing this sort of metadata.
It would be very, very time consuming for us to do this in a manual way
(and so from a resource perspective totally impractical). We need to
look at ways to capture this metadata automatically, which is something
we are certainly working towards. 

I guess from the artists' and producers' perspective, the more you are
able to document the applications and formats and programming and
standards etc. that you use for the works you create and include this
with your work, the better able those who may take an interest in
archiving it will be able to manage the long term preservation issue.
Obviously behind this is an awareness of preservation issues and needs
by the producers and cooperation between the producers and the
archivists.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Clare
Stewart
Sent: Tuesday, 29 June 2004 4:57 PM
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: [-empyre-] Migration & Restoration and mutating aesthetics


Furthering one (or maybe more) of the strands of our wildly tangential
discussion (which threatens to join David in 'Runaway Bay'!), I was
having an interesting chat with one of the 2004 artists, Daniel Crooks
today. We were talking about the need not only to archive the works of
art, texts, websites, films etc, but also the programs, applications,
equipment etc. which 'deliver' the work. Most moving image museums that
do this, treat the equipment as 'artefacts' rather than preserving them
in order to be able to view forms that may be rendered 'redundant' by
technological developments. Indeed, talking to another of the 2004
artists, Helen Grace, about a project she is doing with found Standard 8
footage (a format way more 'redundant' than Super 8), we discussed the
difficulty of finding a. functional Standard 8 projectors and b. someone
who could fix Standard 8 projectors.

Paul, I wonder if Pandora is also archiving the applications needed to
run various aspects of websites (leading on from some of Melinda's
comments about preservation)?

In the spirit of continuing our online discussion offline, I had another
great conversation with one of ACMI's treasured projectionists Phillip
Grace... Phil offered these as good examples of altered aesthetics in
recent film restoration projects:

"The 70mm re-release of "Gone With the Wind" where the image aspects
ratio was altered from 1.375:1 to 2.20:1 by a method of deliberate
recomposition of every shot. I think the sound was also re-mixed from
mono to 6-track stereo utilising existing pre-mix components. In various
re-issues of the film the original colour palette was altered (probably
unintentionally) as a result of the different colour processes
available. The most recent restoration corrected the colour palette
using an original 1939 technicolor dye transfer print as reference.

The "Directors Cut" of "Lawrence of Arabia".  Although legitimised by
having been created by the original director of the work, some sound
elements had been lost, and at least one actor was re-voiced for the
restoration.

Those restorations are well documented in "American Cinematographer". In
the case of "GWTW" there is a series of articles spanning many years.

There has also been extensive disussion on the various work done to
restore "Metropolis" over the years as more material has been located
and identitifed. The current black and white version is a very
conscientious work of great merit, but even this has indications that in
some parts of the world the film was seen in tinted colour, which has
not been reproduced nor its absence contextualised."
-Phillip Grace

These examples are fascinating to me, scratching the surface of the many
hundreds of issues that face people working on restoration projects.
Bringing us back around to David's original post... I am now feeling the
incredible weight of how exactly do you start preserving Keith Haring's
mural on the wall at Collingwood Tech? David, are you aware if anyone is
actually attempting to doing this? 

Respect, Clare













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