Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

132 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubecollection case studies133Crashing the Archive/Archiving theCrash: The Case of SAW Video’sMediathequeMél HoganThere is a looming paradox in the way culture is created, circulated, and conserved and preservedfor posterity. On the one hand it is present, visible, and shared; on the other, it is of thepast, stored away, and protected both against and for the future. In debates about the web’spotential and its limitations, this paradox resurfaces time and again. Nowhere is this discussionmore present than in attempts to characterize the online repository as archive, despitethe invariably ephemeral nature of the digital. 1 To ground this paradox, and to reveal somethingmore profound than mere ‘tension’ between the material and immaterial in the politicsof preservation, I look to Canada’s first large-scale online video art repository as a case study.SAW (Sussex Annex Works) Video’s Mediatheque was launched in 2003, and included 486independent Canadian video art works in an online repository. Predating YouTube by twoyears, and reaching a terabyte of content, the Mediatheque is an important project, as it islocated at the intersection of independent video art, internet studies, and archival theory. In2003, the sheer volume of video in the Mediatheque ‘made the internet tip’, as the son of theproject’s digital archivist, Anatoly Ignatiev, so aptly described it. 2In May 2009, there was a server crash that made the project vanish, 3 as nothing of the backendserver was backed up. In June 2009, SAW Video’s summer intern, Tiffany Tse, sent out aletter to video artists to inform them that both the SAW Video site and the Mediatheque portalhad ‘gone down’. The letter was written to explain the server crash, but also anticipated theMediatheque’s rebuilding. However, since this outreach effort, a notice has been posted onthe SAW Video website that diverts users: ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control, theMediatheque will be down until further notice. We apologize for any inconvenience’. 4 Currently,in 2011, plans are underway to recreate a Mediatheque, but in a new light, ratherthan attempting to hastily reconstruct it based on fragments of what it once was. As the term‘circumstances beyond our control’ implies, many factors are involved at different levels inthe construction and maintenance of such a large-scale online archive. According to DouglasSmalley and Michael Lechasseur, technicians who worked on the Mediatheque project, ahard drive failure was the root of the server crash. While SAW Video is ultimately responsible1. See: http://www.ugent.be/en/news/bulletin/memory.htm and http://www.archipel-project.be/2. Anatoly Ignatiev, private correspondence, 2010.3. The Mediatheque has a soft launch in 2003, and an official launch in February 2004. For detailssee, http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/visualarts/visualarts.aspx?iIDArticle=900.4. http://sawvideo.com/.for the Mediatheque’s crash, its reliance on external support invariably extends the responsibility,in the same way that the grandeur of the project, when it was up and functioning, wasshared. However, no fingers have been pointed: the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of the crash became amere by-product – if not an expected consequence – of the digital online realm.Nevertheless, corporate affiliations and legal parameters are involved in the server crash,which is often relegated to a mere technical failure. This holds true not only for the Mediatheque,but for many if not all similar initiatives in Canada, such as Vidéographe’s ViThèque.com and Vtape’s artvideo.museevirtuel.ca – both of which remain largely under-documented.Until quite recently, these projects were delayed or (temporarily) offline, but no documentationis readily available to assess the problems they encountered or the solutions that allowedthem to resurface. 5 Because of this lack of documentation, not much can be done to arguefor a new approach to video preservation and distribution online.The web has now been activated long enough to have large-scale projects come to life andcome to crash. 6 Documenting the Mediatheque’s demise, piecing together fragments of alost digital repository, is an exercise that characterizes our era. As exemplified by the Mediatheque,and several other Canadian online video art repositories, there is no better timeto explore the web’s potential for defining and redefining the role of the online repository asarchive, and its capacity for presenting new modes, models, and definitions of preservation. 7Looking to older, pre-Web 2.0 initiatives also provides invaluable insight into the affectivelabour poured into these early archival renditions. 8 Finally, the urgency of such work lies inthe state of these projects: because the Mediatheque is no longer online, it cannot generatethe interest of artists, curators, historians, and researchers, despite its symbolic and culturalsignificance for Canadian video art history.Between December 2009 and June 2010, I had the opportunity to discuss the Mediathequeproject with many of the people implicated in the project, both currently and at its inception.Working with current SAW Video Director, Penny McCann, I co-curated a public screeningof the now defunct Mediatheque collection at Groupe Intervention Video (GIV) in Montréal.The screening was held in November 2010, along with a ‘live’ month-long online showcaseat wayward.ca. This off/online exhibit was intended to begin the revival of the Mediatheque,generate a wider discussion around the last decade of video art online from a predominantlyCanadian viewpoint, and to further document the project. Here, I also aim both to revive5. http://artvideo.museevirtuel.ca/ remains offline (February 2011); http://vitheque.com launched inMontreal in May 2010 after years of delay. See photos of the launch at,http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitheque/.6. See Mél Hogan, ‘Cashing and Crashing the Mediatheque’ FlowTV.org, 21 May, 2010, Online:http://flowtv.org/2010/05/caching-and-crashing-the-mediatheque-mel-hogan-concordiauniversity/.7. See Felix Stalder, ‘Copyright dungeons and grey zones’, from: nettime-l Digest, Vol 7, Issue 10,sent: 15 April, 2008.8. For a definition of affect see, Brian Massumi, ‘Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,Sensation’, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.