Stephen Partridge
REWIND

Good Afternoon everyone, I am delighted to be here to share experiences and learn best practice from my peers and colleagues across the world. I will talk about a major research project that I am undertaking as Principal Investigator along Jane Prophet at CARTE (Centre for Arts Research Technology and Education) University of Westminster and my co-presenter Jackie Hatfield who is the Research Fellow on the project. The project is called REWIND | Artists’ video in the 70s & 80s and has received £433,000 from the UK Arts & Humanities Research Board – a relatively new body in the UK which is having a major impact on research in the arts and humanities and represents a profound shift in its status with the AHRC and the disciplines it represents, now being a full and equal member of the science research budget of the UK.

Just to set the context of the REWIND project, I would like to quote Sean Cubitt one of the UK’s leading media theorists:

«Of the 47 minutes of film exposed in 1895, the world's archives presently hold about 42. But of the work from 1896 to about 1915, a tiny fraction remains. In those years the feature film was born, and we have reports of extraordinary experiments with colour, sound and widescreen as well as revered performers and artists captured on film but now lost.

The arrival of the video-portapak in 1968 was as essential a moment of cultural history. The early days of a new medium are always immensely fertile, since no-one knows what they are supposed to do with it, so that pioneers feel free to try everything. Those experiments can be immensely fruitful for new makers.»

During the 1970s and 1980s the UK was a pioneering centre of vibrant, though disparate independent film and video activity. The first wave in the 1970s derived from two important drivers: the independent (film) scene in New York and London, and a move into alternative media and contexts by British artists, particularly conceptualism and a questioning of the market-led art world. A second wave in the eighties brought new interests and the locus moved away from the gallery and workshops into more mainstream areas influenced by popular culture and the emergence of Channel 4.

Then of course the 1990s saw the art market strike back and a return to the white (or more probably) black, cube.

In developing this project we felt that artists’ film and video have separate histories, and although experimental film has a small critical history, there is a distinct lack of writing and scholarly activity about artist’s video. Artists’ experimental video work was often installation-oriented or included performance and the audience as part of the event. Without consistent archiving and further historical reviews, there is a danger that much of this innovative work will be lost. The critical history of technological invention and installation has been overshadowed by filmic-oriented single-screen concerns. There is a need therefore, for a critical review of historical electronic work, and a re-evaluation of overlooked and often pioneering expanded artists’ video. We feel that it is important to locate artists’ individual critical reflections around their practice to create a body of scholarly material, which can contribute to the understanding of the history of electronic moving image. Time-based work is ephemeral and with a limited life, both within the gallery and technologically. Historically artists’ installation and experiments with technology and context have all but disappeared as artworks, because of what may be called the ‘half-life’ of the viewing experience and media. In addition this field of artistic practice in the UK fell between the briefs of the Arts Council and the national collections: the BFI and the National Film and Television Archive. Very few installation works have survived intact. Some technologies intrinsic to the artistic nature of the works are now obsolete, for example, reel-to-reel videotape decks used in tape-delay installations.

When we started REWIND early last year, we determined that much of the early work was indeed in poor technical condition, many works (particularly multi-screen and installation work) were ‹lost›, or at least not easily accessible in any usable sense.

While collections (such as the LUX in London) do exist, they are neither comprehensive nor do they often consist of master tapes of the original works. Detailed associated information and critical texts on this output is scattered and patchy. Certainly the establishment of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies at Birkbeck, has established the importance of over 100 years of British culture in the moving image and it has been recognized in a research context. For the past three years, the British Artists Film & Video Study Collection at Central St Martins, working in partnership with the AHRB Centre at Birkbeck, has been collecting copies of works and ephemera from the earliest part of the 20th Century to date, and now constitutes a significant resource which REWIND has been able to draw upon.

These initiatives at Birkbeck and Central St Martins have led directly to new interest by curators in the period, with major exhibitions at the Tate – «Shoot Shoot Shoot» at Tate Modern in May 2002, «Early British Video Art» and «A Century of Artists’ Film in Britain» at Tate Britain in March and May 2003. The LUX collection has been rescued from the demise of the LUX centre and has the largest body of early video work in the UK. Another AHRB funded project led by Julia Knight at the University of Luton is researching «Independent Film and Video Distribution». However none of these initiatives have a remit to provide archival quality versions of the early work as REWIND intends. We have been working in partnership with these organisations and resources to address the gap in the available research and the body of knowledge, and to preserve and make available the artefacts for present and future study.

Internationally efforts in this area are much advanced as this symposium demonstrates. Collections and archives of analogue videotape works and support material are being transferred to digital format sometimes with access through the Internet. In the USA the programme to preserve the collection of Electronic Arts Intermix started in 1995. The Netherlands Media Art Institute has brought together national collections and has pioneered the technical standards and procedures necessary. Through its public portal «Cyclope» over 1000 video works and information on 60 installation pieces are available. The Video Data Bank Denmark has tested the standards and methodology and built up its collection. In France Heure Exquise and in Germany ART Tapes 22 and ZKM Center for Art and Media are also undertaking research and preservation programmes. All these initiatives tend to be national in their focus and rarely include work from other countries apart from the United States. However there is a great deal of goodwill between all of them and networks are emerging, and this symposium represents an important milestone along the path towards international collaborations.

• Address the gap in historical knowledge of the evolution of electronic media arts in the UK, and the loss to international art history of a number of significant and influential bodies of work from the period.
  
• To make available for scholarly and creative uses an archive of artists' video work produced during the period. There is an urgency to this research, illustrated by the fact that many pioneers of this generation are already in retirement, and some have died.
  
• Address the gap in the knowledge of younger artists experimenting with audiovisual media, leading to repetition of earlier works and a loss of orientation in the medium-specific developments of video art.
  

• Provide the material basis for a reassessment of artistic careers of the period and for future substantial interpretative and historical assessment by other scholars.
  
• Establish a national public archive, collection and website of video art works and associated material.
  
• Produce a major publication.
  

Research and scholarship focuses on the artists/makers and the artefacts, documenting and interrogating both a range of conceptual issues and questions of representation. Interpretative and historical assessment will be an element within the final publication.

The primary method of research is the evaluation of video works produced by UK artists during the period. The evaluation is multi-facetted addressing the following concerns:

• To obtain a representative sample of work - illustrating best practise, both in terms of technological development and critical status.
  
• To obtain additional information from the artists, main actors and agencies – enabling greater understanding of the individual works; the undercurrents within the field of video film-making at the time; and the recreation of installations both virtually and in exhibition spaces.
  
• To document video-making as a whole during the period specified.
  

The evaluation is carried out through the use of literary reviews, subject interviews and 'salons'.

The qualitative information gathered will be analysed using standard methodologies. The knowledge and expertise of an Advisory Panel is drawn upon by the research team. The Advisory Panel was established under the stewardship of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies (and its Director, Professor Ian Christie, Birkbeck) to oversee the project. The Panel also includes Janet McBain of Scottish Screen Archive; Pat Whatley Archivist at the University of Dundee; Charlie Gere writer and lecturer at the The Institute for Cultural Research University of Lancaster and PI on the AHRB-funded research project: The digital and computer-based arts in the United Kingdom from their origins to 1980, and Chair of Chart Computers & the History of Art; Clive Gillman, artist and Artistic Director of DCA; Cate Elwes, artist and Reader Camberwell College of Art; Julia Knight, Reader at the Dept of Media Arts, University of Luton and P.I. on AHRB-funded research project: Independent film and video distribution in the UK. This Panel is central in the determining and selection of artists to be interviewed and work to be included in the REWIND collections. During each year of the project it is estimated that a minimum of 12 artists will be interviewed, and up to 100 individual works adopted into the final programme.

The varying technical condition of much of the early work will mean that sometimes a distributor will have the optimum copy, original or sub-master, and sometimes this will be with the artist. To achieve the objective of producing the best possible understanding of the period and an archive master of each work, an d duplicate the associated supporting material, and be able to re-create multi-screen/installation works, it is imperative that, wherever possible, the ‘source’ - the artists themselves- are involved in the process. To re-create installation works would be extremely difficult without the technical direction and information of the artist. The advantage of adopting a methodology that includes fieldwork with the artists is that the research will include oral testimony that will tease out information, data, and ephemera at present ‘lost’ to scholarship.

The Research Fellow uses structured and semi-structured interviews to gather data from artists, curators and funders. These interviews are transcribed and form the basis of further ‘reflexive’ research, which may include a second round of interviews to pursue emergent themes or issues that are considered to be important to the archive and the final Publication. Most interviews are one to one, but the second round of interviews will include a series of ‘salons’ at which groups of key practitioners, curators and funders will be invited to discuss their practice as a group. These salons will also be documented.

The semi-structured interviews with the artists have proved to be highly effective, significant and rewarding to this aim. The Research Fellow will have recorded over 50 hours of oral testimony during her first 12 months. These oral testimonies are aiding the formation of a clear picture of video-making as a whole during the period and previously unknown links between the artists and their ideas are emerging. The on-line edited transcripts (and video and audio clips) will enable a greater understanding of the artists and their individual works; and the full un-edited tapes and transcripts will be available for further scholarship to facilitate different approaches to, or interrogation of the data

The Research team is further supplemented by a special external advisor, Professor Sean Cubitt (Professor of Screen and Media Studies, The University of Waikato, New Zealand), the leading authority on media art in Britain, who will be co-author of the final publication.

The technical operation involves three centres: the University of Dundee, FACT Liverpool and the LUX in London. All the data texts, scans, audio and video clips will be digitised for the REWIND Content Management System – an online Database which goes live later this year with the first 20 or so artists. A Digital Master tape and a ‹clone› of the original works collected, will be stored at the University of Dundee and deposited with Scottish Screen Archive as the national depository ensuring its permanent preservation. DVD copies will be made to form The REWIND Artists’ Video Collection which will be a centrepiece at Dundee Contemporary Art’s Visual Research Centre (VRC) and at CARTE in London.

The project runs for four years starting February 2004. In 2005 the first volume of the REWIND Collection will be launched as a pilot project through an exhibition, including re-staged installations at DCA, and roll-out of the CMS. There will be further launches of the REWIND Web site in 2006 and 2007. In 2006 work on the final Publication will commence. This will be published at the end of the project in 2008 hopefully coinciding with an extensive exhibition at a major venue.

Stephen Partridge
»Installation No 1«, Third Eye Centre Glasgow 1976

Stephen Partridge
»easy piece« 1974 installation view (top)
»Monitor« 1975 installation view (bottom)