Interview with Mona Jimenez (part 2/2)

PACKED: What are the other ’issues‘ and ’obstacles‘ that you could encounter with videotapes?

Mona Jimenez: There seems to be a number of different problems. One is sticky shed syndrome where the introduction of moisture breaks the polymer chains in the binder system. The chemical changes in the binder system are experienced as stickiness on the surface of the tape and during playback debris is deposited on the tape transport and clogs the heads of the video players.

To return to the 1 inch problem – as different tapes have different binder systems with different formulations – I have heard that some 1 inch tapes are particularly subject to binder degradation that shows up as white crystalline formations. I have also seen this problem on U-matic tapes from Ghana were temperature and humidity are very high, so it could be the problem is more the environment rather than the tape stock. By-products from degradation that come to the surface of the tape pack, and these fatty esters, compounds migrating to the surface of the tapes in a crystal formation, have sometimes also been called lubricant loss. No one knows precisely what is happening, as it is just basic degradation that people are describing. The process that is used to deal with it is cleaning of the tapes, either by hand or by using cleaning machines.

During my first year teaching video preservation at MIAP I had my students call RTI⁵ to ask questions about their cassette cleaning machines. RTI said that when they first sold the machines, their objective was to resurface new tapes. New tapes had a lot of debris on their surface and the cleaning machine would take off whatever loose material was on it from the manufacturing process. I also have heard people say that they would run a tape through a deck before recording on it for this reason, or just that a tape plays better after it has been used. Because of the friction from playback, the tape was going through the mechanism better.


PACKED: Do you always clean the tapes in your laboratory before playing them?

Mona Jimenez: We don't have a cleaning machine for ½ inch open reel tapes, we can only clean U-matic tapes. It seems that people often clean tapes before they put them on the machine, but I would put the tape on the machine and see how it transports first. If there were problems, like the transport is straining or there’s a lot of drop-out, then I would clean them and use desiccants because if the tape has sticky shed or there is just other loose material on the tape, it is going to clog the heads of the video player.


PACKED: When would you use baking as a treatment for the tape?

Mona Jimenez: I would use baking to deal with hydrolysis but I'm always asking these questions myself, and to this point I have never baked a tape. This year will be the first time that we will have desiccants, a dehydrator and a cleaning machine for U-matic tapes. We are going to try all three. What I've been told by the Image Permanence Institute, who did the testing on dehydrating films using desiccants, is that they think using a dehydrator is quite a radical solution. They would consider baking to be a last resort because it drags out the moisture so quickly - it doesn't allow the material to go through a more gentle process of dehydration over time. They think that you can then have problems with deformation of the tape. In a tape there is the polyester backing⁶ and then there is the binder. The theory with desiccants is that the more slowly you do the dehydration, the better the tape can adapt to the changes. But obviously most vendors are not used to putting tapes in cold storage for two weeks, so they would probably use baking instead of desiccants.


A bag of Silica Gel.


PACKED: Is this mostly a problem for ½ inch open reel format?

Mona Jimenez: Yes, with ½ inch we have the sticky shed problem but it is something that happens with video and audio over time with the introduction of moisture. Also, with the U-matic format, a U-matic deck from 1974 might not playback a U-matic tape from the 1980s or vice versa. I think the problem is that the U-matic format was manufactured for a long period of time and that the decks have undergone a lot of changes. You have tapes that need to be played back on the same type of decks on which they were recorded.


A Studer A807 quarter inch Reel-to-Reel audio deck and a Sony AV 1/2 inch open reel video deck.


PACKED: Could you also experience problems with a modern U-matic player being too sensitive for old U-matic tapes?

Mona Jimenez: Yes, because as videotape technology was developed and electronics got more advanced, the newer decks have tighter tolerances. You also have to find out which TBCs will work best with which tapes. If an old tape is used in combination with a new TBC, the TBC may not be able to deal with it.

There are a number of different problems that we can try to tackle to make it a lot easier to the field to do tape transfers. Also, there is the whole question of the aesthetic of the display: old tapes are tied to cathode ray tubes as a display device. For example, apparently U-matic tapes played through a digital projector look pretty bad. I feel that the museums are tackling the issues of CRTs a little bit more whereas we are not tackling the underlying issues, like how do you get a U-matic deck to playback properly?


PACKED: Probably because this is something that the museums would like to outsource.

Mona Jimenez: Yes, and most of them are just assuming that people are always going to be out there doing preservation. The thing is that there are a number of vendors who are doing the work but only some of these vendors are making money. It is not a very lucrative business as the decks break down so much and because you have to have specialised knowledge. For a vendor whose primary business is duplication, preservation is just too much trouble,. In the United States there are a number of different vendors, for instance Duart⁷ in New York, The Media Preserve⁸ in Pennsylvania, Scene Savers⁹ in the Midwest and DC Video¹⁰ on the West Coast - they specialise in 2 inch tape. Of course the for-profit vendors are needed, but we also need to have the non-profit centres, and they need to be open enough to tell us what they are doing, to share information.


PACKED: How could this information be more easily shared?

Mona Jimenez: One of the things I'm trying to do – and I guess it would require people to be open - is to organise the centres here in the United States: BAVC, Standby with Mercer Media,¹¹ a place that has just started up in Buffalo called Migrating Media¹², along with Blaine Dunlap in New Orleans who is getting a non-profit organisation started called The Southeast Video Preservation Center¹³, and also others such as the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, who are doing in-house transfers¹⁴. It is important for all of us to get together because all non-profit centres are really struggling. What we would like to do is to get everybody together so we can talk about what everybody is doing and what kind of research needs to happen. What do the centres need to operate? How much does it really cost to do preservation? We still don't really know how much it costs. If we could say it takes 300 US $ to do a 60 minute tape and we know that non-profit archives can only pay 100 US $, then we know we need subsidies of 200 US $ per tape, and we need to start looking for funding for the subsidies. We don't even have good numbers on this. I don't think anybody has ever said publicly ”this is how much it costs, on average, to preserve a tape“. They may think ”this is all we can charge because people don't have much money“ but they haven't thought on how much it actually costs. This analysis is needed to know how non-profit centres can be sustainable.


PACKED: What you want is to make some kind of survey of the cost and needs of these non-profit centres to know how much you should ask for to help them continue their activities?

Mona Jimenez: Yes. In the United States the funding is really small for culture anyway, but we are realising that funders are putting much more money into production than preservation. We are now starting to talk about how much has gone into production, and asking ”where all these tapes are that people have been making?” and why there can't be more money for preservation. As a field, we don't have a good clear message like ”this is how much it costs, and this is how much we need“. We are just struggling along.

I also think that it would be great to be able to do this together with our Canadian and European partners as well, to really get together and to have some dialogue. When we organise preservation events in the United States, we usually work with V-tape¹⁵ in Canada where they are also doing video preservation on independent media and media art. It is always good to have them as partners.


PACKED: What is your relation with the state archives likes the Library of Congress which is also preserving ½ inch open reel tapes?

Mona Jimenez: We know what they are doing but they are only working on their own material. They have the intention of doing preservation work for other people but they are not at that stage yet. When they built that the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation they had to ask for staff incrementally and everything takes a long time with the government. Every year they are able to add new people. I think that they have just added some people in the video area but they are not able to do more than their own tapes for the moment. They started with transferring their own U-matic cassettes using a robotic system. As they add staff, they are getting their 1 inch and 2 inch tapes transferred as well. They are definitely people that we need to partner with, and we have good relationships with the staff and leadership there.

In 1997 there was a study in the United States on the preservation of television and video, and there were a number of recommendations that were made. There was a recommendation to establish a national television and preservation centre, and there was a recommendation to establish a national television and video registry – but none of these ever happened. There has been no plan of action and nobody has taken any steps in this direction. Although we have the national mandate and a national plan and goals, no one has actually set up the structures. There is a National Film Preservation Foundation but we don't have one for television and video. There is no money going into it, but we are in the process of asking the Library of Congress to fund projects like, for example, to bring video preservation experts together and to conduct new research.


PACKED: What would be the aim of such a project?

Mona Jimenez: If I had the funds to go around the world, I would interview everyone doing preservation on the same set of questions: how do you prepare the tape for transport? What sort of equipment do you have in your system? How do you monitor the signal? How do you treat the tape before playing it? What are you listening for when the tape transports?, etc. I would just go all the way through the preservation process from inspection and treatments through digitisation and storage and I am sure we would get a lot of different stories.


PACKED: Would it be possible to extract a general solution from all these different stories?

Mona Jimenez: I'm starting to think there is maybe not one solution, even if we can look at different ways people do it - how Bill Seery¹⁶ does it, the way BAVC does it, etc. Even if you take four different examples - I think you could make an educated guess about what the process would be – but I don't think that a general solution is ever going to get pinned down. Video is dynamic and it is created in real time. Somehow I just think that this translates into the people who are doing it too; they are dynamic and they are doing it in real time, too. We are never going to get everybody to agree. That is the way it is. (Laughs).


PACKED: In your opinion, what kind of specific knowledge should a conservator have in order to deal with the preservation of media art, what should they know about tapes and video?

Mona Jimenez: One of the things that we have been struggling with here at MIAP is exactly what we need to teach people about video, particularly with conservators because conservation training is traditionally very structured. Although you have conservators like Agathe Jarczyk who has set up her own business, the majority of our graduates are going to work in museums, in private practice, in historical societies and in organisations where they will need to communicate with people who are doing the work for them. I think that conservators need to start by knowing a history of technology and how to identify formats. They also need to know how to safely handle and playback tapes, and how to handle the equipment in a proper manner. They need to understand what the common failures are. But I think that they also need to understand video signals, what happens with video signals, how they are constructed and how signals flow in a studio. We consider that there are three points of failure: the tape, the equipment - which would be the system - and the operator. You can have failures in any of these three areas or you can have failures with all three.

It is important that the conservators not only understand the way how tape behaves, its basic components, how it's produced, etc., but also how video systems work and the devices in systems that need to be there in order to have a faithful reproduction. So they need to understand the different types of signals: component, composite, s-video, etc. They need to understand for different time periods, what the different formats allow for in terms of types of signals. They need to understand how to do monitoring and basically what one looks for in signal characteristics. They need to be familiar with the different standards and reference signals, how one calibrates equipment and how one maintains integrity throughout the system. They don't need to be able to do the transfers themselves, but to be able to ask the right questions. It is also very important that they understand destination formats and the implications that preservation decisions have along the way. They don't necessarily need to be operators but they need to understand the vocabulary in order to be able to ask the vendors, for instance, how often do they calibrate their equipment? What do they use for monitoring equipment, what their maintenance schedule is, what they recommend for the signal coming out of the U-matic … If the vendor doesn’t know, for instance, that U-matic has a funny component output – the dub output – that needs to be converted to be s-video, and they say U-matic is only composite, then you know the vendor doesn’t know what they are talking about. If conservators are told that a tape can't be transferred, they need to be able to ask why. They need to be able to understand the basics.


PACKED: The basics are what they will need to be able to interact with technical partners?

Mona Jimenez: Yes, they need to be able to evaluate whether vendors have the necessary knowledge to do preservation and they should not feel intimidated to ask questions. It is more about being able to communicate and do quality control. This is also common with other types of conservation practices. Conservators don't necessarily learn to do all aspects themselves but they learn how to manage things. They have to be trained, but of course it is also something that you learn by doing. They have to understand that they have a role to play in the health of the larger community in which they live (in terms of video), and that they have to be actively involved in working together with other conservators, media artists and vendors to keep the field going so there are resources once they want to transfer a tape.

Then there are all the issues surrounding installation. Understanding what the production process is, what is required to maintain the works and how to make decisions. I think the case studies that are being done through research projects on installation art are really useful for decision-making about specific installations. There is a lot of good information out there on specific installations and decision-making models, etc. But what I think that we are losing are a lot of the tapes out there.


PACKED: Do you think that having a shared technician or a shared laboratory could be a solution for those small collections that you have been working with?

Mona Jimenez: We have a big country, you know. If you are in Nebraska, you probably won’t go to New York to find a technician and a laboratory. This is a problem. I really believe in regional non-profit video preservation centres. Like I already said, the private sector is needed and the vendors are needed, but I think that the non-profit centres are the ones who will also be able to educate people who are holding those collections about what it means to get a catalogue, to do preparation, give unique identifiers, name your files correctly, etc. Vendors won't do this. This means that we have to have centres that help people to understand the whole range of tasks that are involved in video preservation and not just the actual transfer process. I have always asked when going into communities: “You have two museums here, two universities, a public television station, a public access television station, and you have a media arts centre. Why don’t you just get together and solve this problem for yourself?” But people don't usually think this way; they only think about what they individually need. I think that there is a real need to have shared technicians and shared centre.

The museum is one part of an ecosystem. The museum may be healthy, but if the other part of the system has died, it will impact that museum. In the media arts system, you can't just have distribution and exhibition and then expect that someone out there will take care of the transfer issues. It’s not the way it works.


PACKED: In 2005, as part of the ‘The Artist Instrumentation Database Project’,¹⁷ you created an Access database to catalogue equipment. Has this been used since then?

Mona Jimenez: I don't think it’s been used much because almost no one ever got in touch with me or e-mailed me about it. The only one was Martin Koerber¹⁸ who said that he was going to try to use it. A lot of people have told me that they were going to use it but I haven't got any feedback. I don't know how widely it is known. Maybe people just don't think about cataloguing equipment.


PACKED: Did you think about this tool as something that could be added to the existing cataloguing tools that the museums have?

Mona Jimenez: At the time I was thinking that we needed something for the collection of tools at the Experimental Television Centre and I was interested in how we could describe custom-made tools. I knew that the Daniel Langlois Foundation¹⁹ was interested in artists’ tools and that I could have a good conversation with Alain Depocas²⁰ as he (and later other researchers in DOCAM²¹) were interested in the cataloguing of machines. I thought a template could be useful, not only for people with collections but also for people who are caring for installations – to maintain all of the equipment information. What I found was that museums usually don't have any standardised way to manage their equipment. They often have some equipment that is dedicated to installations and then other equipment that is taken care of by an audiovisual department that installs exhibitions or just does screenings. What I found is that museums often don't have a good system for tracking equipment, and I think that often they don't even know where the equipment for a particular installation artwork is stored.


The website of the Experimental Television Center.


Another issue is that a lot of conservators don’t use databases; they are more used to creating conservation records in the form of printed documents. Conservators are starting to do a lot more of their work electronically, but at the time when I did my database project they were often not even taking digital photos or storing documentation as electronic documents. Conservators are more aware that they should know where their equipment is located and what state it is in, but they are not thinking of using a database to track this. What databases are great for is, for example, to know how many projectors you have in your collection, how many of them are in working order or when was the last time that they were used, etc. My impression is that most people tend to use more narrative reports for those matters because they are not typically using databases to help them to generate reports about an overall collection.

I talked to Pip Laurenson about it. She is not really fond of using databases – except for a collection management system like TMS – for conservation documentation; also because she has a great system with folders and manuals for equipment that works well, she does not feel the need for a specific equipment database²² .


PACKED: Could it be because the equipment is not used on a regular basis but only when the work has to be shown, whereas in a TV archive the maintenance of the U-matic players for instance, the location of the spares, etc. needs to be managed with a structured database to proceed with the daily transfers in an efficient way?

Mona Jimenez: Yes, maybe most museums don’t have enough dedicated equipment. After I did the ‘Artist Instrumentation Database Project’, I had an idea to take some of the fields from the template and create an online registry where people could register the video equipment they had - not using the whole database structure but just a part of it. People could input what equipment, like a Sony deck or whatever, into that structure and share the information. The Experimental Television Center has already catalogued various pieces of video equipment. The idea was to take the twenty or so most popular decks and make catalogue records for those. Then if you had one, you could copy that record and just put your local information into it. I thought my database template might be helpful for that, for some kind of collective effort.

I tried to get IMAP²³ to do an equipment registry but after they did a feasibility survey, they decided not do it. They were not sure that a registry was needed and that people would really use it. IMAP is a small organisation and for the feasibility survey they talked mainly to people in the North East of the United States.

I think that in an ideal world the registry and the Artist Instrumentation Database template might be useful. If I knew that you had a U-matic and I had the parts that you needed, then we could talk together. Isn’t this how the world works? I hope so. (Laughs)


PACKED: What is your feeling about the future of all these works? What strategy should be employed?

Mona Jimenez: Obviously, I believe in a collective solution. With a collective solution, we will more likely have media art works last. If each museum is going to try to solve these problems on their own, I think that only a few works are going to be saved. For the videotapes that are outside of museums, my sense is that without a local community around them that wants the collection to keep going, they are probably not going to survive. We really just need to start pulling out tapes and transferring them. The collections in small arts and culture organisations are not going to survive if we keep on saying that they first need to get a grant to hire a professional archivist to have their tapes catalogued. I don't think it is ever going to happen, because there are too many tapes and because you will never get money for cataloguing in the United States if you are not an official cultural library, archive or museum.


PACKED: How could this community around a collection be involved?

Mona Jimenez: I have this idea that I'm testing out now and which I have been working on since last year; it is called 'activist archiving'. The idea is to go into a community, like to go to a media art centre, do a workshop and try to recruit people for cataloguing tapes. In June I will go to Philadelphia and meet people at the Scribe Video Center,²⁴ then in the Fall I will bring my students and give some kind of simple workshop for people who are part of Scribe or who are associated with the centre. We will try to recruit them for another event that is going to happen at the same time as the IASA/AMIA joint conference in November 2010²⁵. It will be one day where I am hoping to get thirty people working in pairs on laptops to catalogue a collection of two hundred to three hundred tapes that we will choose in consultation with Scribe. The objective is to have those tapes catalogued and then to carry out a visual inspection. One of the aims is to be able to locate all the different versions of one work.


PACKED: Did you already try this working method?

Mona Jimenez: I did it last year Upstate New York at the Visual Studies Workshop where they have the collection of a now defunct media arts centre called Portable Channel²⁶ .

I give the participants an Excel spreadsheet with maybe ten fields and then everybody catalogues the tapes. Later the spreadsheets are merged and exported into a database. If I could have fifteen pairs of people working together, which makes thirty people, and give fifteen tapes to each pair, that is two hundred and twenty-five tapes catalogued in a day. Then I want to have Scribe pick some tapes and remaster them in my Video Preservation class with my students. The main idea is to try to recruit people who care about a collection to work with archivists to learn how to take care of the collection. Then when we have a small number of tapes remastered, the idea is to go back to the community and do screenings of the preserved tapes, and try to build more support and repeat the cycle.


Students capturing VHS tapes at the Tisch School of Arts lab.


If at a minimum a few tapes can be remastered, there is something to show and to say: ”this is what is in the collection“. If we just talk about saving hundreds of tapes, people get bored immediately and lose interest because it seems like an impossible problem. But if we preserve a few tapes and then screen them back in the community and keep talking about the collection, I think it is possible to get something started. Over time an organization like Scribe can maybe find another institution to partner with, and then the collection can find a permanent home.

I think we really have to start transferring as many tapes as we can and at the same time get the information about how to do preservation out there. There are people interested to do the work, for instance people graduating from our program. They not only need the classes that they take here, they also need mentors. What is important is that the entire ecosystem has to be taken care of. People can't just stay in their little worlds and expect to solve their own little problems.


Click here to read part one of the interview.


Notes

¹ See http://www.tisch.nyu.edu/page/home.html
² See http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/
³ Howard Besser is Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation masters degree program (MIAP). He is the author of “Digital Longevity” in Handbook for Digital Projects, a Management Tool for Preservation and Access (Northeast Document Conservation Center, 2000). For more information : http://cinema.tisch.nyu.edu/object/BesserH.html
⁴ See http://imappreserve.org/
⁵ RTI is an American company that sells, amongst other things, machines that clean and evaluate videotapes of different formats such as 1 inch or Umatic.
⁶ The backing film layer that supports the magnetic layer in a magnetic tape. Source: The National Film and Sound Archive Australia.
⁷ See http://www.duart.com
⁸ See http://themediapreserve.com/
⁹ See http://www.scenesavers.com/
¹⁰ DC Video is located in Burbank, California and run by David Crosthwait. See http://www.quadvideotapegroup.com
¹¹ See http://www.standby.org/standby/rates/preservation/
¹² See http://migratingmedianet.org
¹³ See http://vimeo.com/user3203241
¹⁴ See http://www.tamisarchive.orgTAMIS_Web/TAMIS_home.html
¹⁵ See http://www.vtape.org
¹⁶ Bill Seery is in charge of the video transfers at Standby. See : http://www.standby.org.
¹⁷ See http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=708
¹⁸ Martin Koerber is a film restorer who worked amongst other on movies by german filmmaker Fritz Lang.
¹⁹ See http://www.fondation-langlois.org
²⁰ Since 1999 Alain Depocas has been the head of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D) of the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal, which holds a collection of documents covering the history, works and practices associated with the media, electronic and digital arts. From 2002 to 2004, he has co-managed the Variable Media Network as part of a partnership between the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. And he also co-managed the publication entitled Permanence Through Change : The Variable Media Approach. Since 2005, he has been Director of Research for DOCAM, an international research alliance studying the documentation and conservation of the media arts heritage.
²¹ See http://www.docam.ca
²² See interview with Pip Laurenson where she explain how the equipment is managed in the Tate Modern collection. http://packed.be/en/resources/detail/interview_pip_laurenson/interviews/
²³ See http://www.imappreserve.org/pdfs/IMAP_Equipment_Survey_Report_2008.pdf
²⁴ See http://www.scribe.org/about/aboutscribe
²⁵ See http://www.amiaconference.com
²⁶ See http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/groups/gtext.php3?id=80