Section 1: Opening the Archive

The body of my archive is multiple, but in principal form it sits on the floor under my desk on a weighty external hard drive enclosing two high speed discs perfectly mirrored in a RAID 1 configuration. There’s less total space available this way, but much more safety in case a disc should fail. Now and then I back all of that up to a cheaper slower drive that sits on top of my desk in a stack of other drives. If a hole yawns from the ground to take my house the redundancies won’t matter and I’ll lose most of it. The years of tape will be preserved; 2000 to maybe 2005 sit stacked or sprawled in their hard plastic cases in drawers and cupboards and on shelves in my office at USC. One of the beauties of MiniDv acquisition was that it came with a built in backup.

And one of its flaws was the ease with which you could leave that footage locked away, just churning through the tapes and letting the archive grow. Ingesting the footage was a mechanical affair and just rewinding and playing the tapes again put wear on the camera. Even if you had a dedicated playback deck, the process required real time effort and monitoring. Each 63-minute tape might have a timecode break, or the receiving computer might lag and drop frames. Sure you could dismiss these things, but even with a perfect ingest the disc space was expensive and vanished quickly at around 13GB per tape.

The years of tape were about the moment of recording for me, about the way the camera fit into my life and helped me form an image of the world and where I fit inside it. I felt a sense of creative satisfaction seeing my frame put down on tape and a sense of comfort that there would be more than just my memory of the places I went, the people I met, the thoughts we shared in conversation. But I didn’t feel a need to do anything else but make the tapes and keep them.

There were discrete projects with goals and timelines that I made and shared and showed. But they were separate and smaller than the project of videoing my life, and though the practices were intertwined, they remained distinct. But now, a decade and a half removed from the beginning, the nature of that video life practice and the archive that grew from it are an important site of study. More than ever, video making is an embedded practice of social life, a medium through which we see and define ourselves. The smartphones that some of us carry are capable of resolutions and storage capacities that were unfathomable when I was shooting MiniDV, and the idea that they could automatically back that footage up to some corporation’s online storage space would have seemed unreal. But it is real now, and so is the ease with which those videos can be published on platforms with a global reach.

My archive reaches from my floor to my computer. Only recently did I ingest a substantial batch of my MiniDV tapes. When I open the archive and scan the footage I find myself in memories. I find moments that have stayed with me. Like the late afternoon walk my brother and I took across the Millennium Bridge in London in the summer of 2002. I’ve always remembered the sunlight from that day. But I find myself in that footage and see all the things my memory left out and I experience a prismatic shift as this facet of myself shines back at me. I grow when I see that day. I grow when I find the footage of the man who waded into the Thames to save his bird. The scene is striking, but I had absolutely no memory of it until that moment when it came back to me in the video.

I had no memory of the conversation with my brother either, the one on the bench where he opens his notebook and we talk about the drive to remember and to record, the partial nature of words, the triggers that will always be subjective in their ability to conjure back the full sensory experience of a moment under the arbor with the bees abuzz. This act of inscription has shaped my life, my understanding of myself, my relationships with others, my creative practice, my professional evolution, my entry into academe. Opening the archive now is the first step by which I aim to translate a personal experience of practice into a useful exploration of video making as a tool of knowledge production; an emergent framework for an intentional, collaborative form of video making that emphasizes a deep, embodied and critical relationship between tools and self.

My archive is a tool. It never felt right to put it all online or make it public, even when I knew it would be an important part of my dissertation work. No experience I could shape for someone else would provide even a superficial or instrumental approximation of what it is like for me to access it locally on a high speed drive. If it was all in YouTube or Facebook or Vimeo or archive.org the scanning would be slow, the organization would be clumsy, the browser window would pave the way to wander.