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video archives. The first presentation of the day is from Mél Hogan who talks about the
rise and fall of three large online video art repositories in Canada and the setbacks they
encountered. Mél Hogan is currently completing her research creation doctorate in
Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Her research
documents defunct, stalled, and crashed online video art repositories within a Canadian
cultural context.
The title of her presentations (and of this blog) provokes the title of the session and
questions whether the web provides a dynamic databases or dead collections. The
growth of YouTube and its popularity has set new standards for online video databases,
archives, and interfaces. More often online projects become entities on themselves
instead of just bringing an offline collection online.
To showcase the difficulties of bringing video art repositories online, Mél discusses three
cases from Canada and the setbacks they encountered. These cases were created by
interviewing the people, partners, and organizations involved, by reviewing ground
reports, and tracking the visual history of these collections and website by using the
Internet Archive Wayback Machine. A general notion among these online projects is the
implied value of the content the archives contain and the focus on the broader context.
All the project envisioned an archive of videos and described a context in which those
videos should be placed, however, the cases show that this context is often harder to
develop and control, and affects the popularity and success of the online archives.
The first case describes the start of Vidéographe by viThèque which started in 2010 and
is still online. The project encountered several setbacks in the development of the
channel because of the involvement of several different partners and getting copyrights
for the content. After years of development the project is now taken into the courtroom to
settle arguments between different ex-partners, resulting in a widespread of competitive
online channels presenting the video material of Vidéographe. A showcase how context
is hard to manage and control on the web, and how the offline organization of projects
can influence this.
The second case discusses the Vtape project which started in 2006 and ended in 2008
being a part of the virtual museum of Canada (Musée virtuel du Canada). The website
has an active link to the archive but has been offline, or ʻtemporarily unavailableʼ, for
many years now, questioning the access of websites beyond the technical framework.
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