Welcome + Keynote
We were delighted to welcome George Oates, the co-founder and chief executive of the Flickr Foundation, to present our keynote address.
Drawing from her vast experience working with organisations such as Flickr and the Internet Archive, George’s presentation reflected on the challenges of curation and preservation in an age of super-abundance.
She was introduced to the stage by Patrick Russell (Senior Curator of Non-Fiction), who also welcomed delegates to a day of discussion and debate, and provided further background on the archive’s contemporary collecting project.
Charity Shop Sue: Embracing the online space
As part of the BFI National Archive’s recent in-person and livestreamed symposium, Archiving in the Age of (Super) Abundance, we shone a spotlight on online comedy series, Charity Shop Sue.
Online moving image remains heavily under-represented in the national collection but, with thanks to the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, the BFI National Archive is now actively addressing this gap via a dedicated acquisition programme.
The symposium saw the official launch of this programme at BFI Southbank with an array of content creators, archivists, cultural institutions and academics from across the UK engaging with a series of talks exploring the history, development and current landscape of online moving image.
A celebration of the stories of now, the newly curated collection will trace the technological advancements in online moving image through the range of creators and online platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as well as looking at the work of early internet creative pioneers and defunct video platforms like Periscope and Vine.
At the Symposium, we were delighted to welcome queer Nottingham-based creators behind the mockumentary web series Charity Shop Sue and production company Dead Sweet, Matthew Chesney, Timothy Chesney and Stuart Edwards. The trio gave an in-depth interview about their creative process, embracing all the opportunities that the online space has to offer, and what it means to be selected by the Archive.
– Becky Vick, Assistant Curator (Our Screen Heritage)
Preserving the Early Internet
Last year, my dream of preserving the iconic video Badgers (2003) in the BFI National archive came true. We also had the pleasure of meeting its creator Jonti Picking (Mr Weebl) who came to our industry launch in Bristol and spoke on stage about his videos and experiences.
I resisted the temptation to hang up my hat after the achievement of such a big life goal and decided to keep going to work. As a result of continuing to turn up to the office, I found an opportunity to explore the early internet at our symposium. The halcyon days of dial-up modems, watching loops of dancing badgers and sitting on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and Limewire, were due their moment on a BFI stage. I was keen to explore the DIY communities that formed around these areas of the internet, outside of the traditional gatekeepers that had previously controlled how and when we consumed moving images.
I wanted to further highlight the online community from which so many early internet memes such as Badgers developed, before social media as we know it. The British website B3ta.com launched in 2001 and became a hotbed of internet creativity, surreal humour, and viral content. This DIY playground of ideas was a launchpad for many animators and digital artists. The filmmaker Ben Wheatley was also a keen b3ta boarder and has acknowledged that he wouldn’t have had the career he has without it.
With insights from two of its co-founders, Rob Manuel and Denise Wilton, we explored the history and legacy of this early internet community, who it was, how it was managed and nurtured, preservation issues around the content, and the website’s continuation today. Joel Veitch, the creator of Rathergood.com and member of b3ta.com, shared his experiences of making early viral content on the web such as We Like the Moon, as well as the challenges in preserving original Flash animations from that time.
Filmmaker Jamie King discussed his film series Steal This Film (2006-2007) in relation to the P2P (peer-to-peer) movement and decentralised distribution models while also highlighting the differences between the two main areas of our session (the web and the internet). Despite this, it dawned on the speakers during the session how much common ground they all had, having worked in the relatively small circles and clusters of agencies of the early 00s. This is a history worth preserving, both through the work itself and the stories behind it.
– Kristina Tarasova, Assistant Curator (Our Screen Heritage)
What Isn’t a Genre? Online Video and the Archival Catalogue
The ‘What Isn’t a Genre’ panel focused on a deceptively simple question: What is a video essay? Months ago, this was a question we were asking as we attempted to define some of the new genre terms we encounter while cataloguing online video. In my case, as a new starter at the BFI National Archive, this quickly led to another question: what, in this context, is a genre?
The panel aimed to explore both questions. We looked out from the BFI toward creators, with Grace Lee (artist and video essayist with her YouTube channel What’s So Great About That) and Leigh Singer (Film critic, video essayist and lecturer on video essays at the National Film and Television School, you can find his work on Vimeo), to better understand the rich history and diverse present of the video essay. We also invited everyone to join the conversation we’re having within the archive about online video, genre, subject and form with Natasha Fairbairn (BFI Information Specialist).
I came to the day with the (perhaps) ambitious goal of leaving with a nice, clear definition of the video essay. Spoiler alert: as the panel progressed, we were uncovering more questions than answers. But that is what makes the contemporary collecting project so exciting – the opportunity to look outside and inside the archive to puzzle through questions of archival and curatorial practice and the place of the archive in the vast world of internet video.
Thanks to our panellists and audience and despite these big questions we did come, against all odds and right at the end, to a conclusion that might just have answered our video essay question after all…
– Will Swinburne, Digital Curatorial Archivist
The internet is the archive: communities creating and documenting their histories
At the OSH Symposium, I had the penultimate panel of the day, so spent the morning finding ways to stave off stage-fright.
The theme I’d come up with was ‘the internet is the archive,’ and I wanted to speak specifically to the idea that marginalised or underground communities, subcultures and movements are able to create moving image archives online, even unintentionally. Though this was something that happened before the internet, it’s an unprecedented platform to assert presence and existence, without having to fit into standards of traditional institutions. I’d got the idea after scrolling through the Ballroom Clips UK Instagram page and seeing the whole history of uploads to the page and thinking it was its own archive, a ‘born-online’ medium preserving a community, where the people making and making up the visuals had agency over the form and content of this record.
Sapphire 007, who runs Ballroom Clips UK, was the first to come on board in the panel planning stage – I wanted someone who could speak to this instant (and possibly inadvertent) archiving that could take place through their sharing of videos, as one person motivating themselves to capture and document this. I then spoke with Sweatmother, visual artist and founder of Otherness Archive, an online library created specifically for moving image works for and by the trans and queer community, which has creatively reimagined the way in which language and search terms are used across a collection; and finally a representative from the English Collective of Prostitutes – I’d been to an event at King’s College London about sex workers advocating for their own rights, and wondered what moving image material the activist groups represented there might have; looking at the ECP’s YouTube page I saw it was a place where they shared video of current activity as well as historic materials, making use of the online possibilities for continual activation and recontextualisation. Part of their archive is held at the Bishopsgate Institute, so I also thought they’d be able to speak to what institutions can do to reassure and build trust with marginalised groups, who have led on grassroots preservation and archiving for years. Niki Adams, spokesperson for the ECP joined us on the day (substituting at almost the last minute for another ECP rep, not that you could tell) and spoke passionately about the work the ECP does and the stories they hold and share.
Having amassed a notebook full of thoughts, each time I spoke with the three panellists in the run-up to the event I felt immediately reassured that they’d barely need me, that all of them had passionate, thoughtful insights to share. And sure enough, on the day, the conversation was both wide-ranging and very focused, covering individual and collective efforts at archiving, the balance between assertive visibility and safeguarding, how online spaces can be empowering but also precarious, with their own forms of censorship, and fundamentally how important it is for communities to have their own voices and structures in place (and valued) when it comes to preservation. For me, it was emphasising that archiving is not just a retrospective activity, and it’s not just about preservation – that presentation and agency can be contained within the act of archiving, and that, vitally, it imagines and hopes for a future. As OSH has opened up new ways of thinking about storytelling and storytellers, and new forms of engagement with donors and creators, the entire symposium was a great balance of past and present in terms of content, practice and collaboration, and – hopefully – is the start of many more conversations to come.
– Kitty Robertson, Assistant Curator (Our Screen Heritage)
“Archiving in the Age of (Super) Abundance” Closing Panel
Our closing panel (masterfully chaired by Nicky Williams, Heritage Programmes Manager) featured our very own Dylan Cave, Mark Duguid, Patrick Russell and Annabelle Shaw reflecting on the challenges of collecting during the era in which thousands of hours of original content is produced and uploaded daily. After the event we asked them what they got out of the day and about their favourite online videos.
Dylan Cave, Collections Development Manager
What did you get out of the day?
The Contemporary Collecting symposium was an incredibly rewarding day. Arriving at the mid-point of Our Screen Heritage’s collecting activity, the day offered a moment to reflect on the giant leaps in understanding we’ve taken in the past 12 months around our procedures and ways of working. Notable issues that surfaced on the day (such as Will Swinburne’s genre discussion) reflect the transformative way the archive sector is responding to online. Each session provoked and pushed further layers of thinking about this complex collecting practice – a testament to the well-grounded steering from our terrific chairs. Most valuable take-away was the physical coming together of delegates and participants from a diverse range of disciplines, organisations and collectives – each with unique but interweaving perspectives – to get our collective heads around how best to preserve online.
What is your favourite online video?
My favourite online video changes daily but I often find myself circling back to Jazz Emu, a practitioner of absurdist jazz-funk Yacht Rock, landing somewhere between Steely Dan, DāM-FunK, Thundercat, Harry Hill, John Shuttleworth and Vic & Bob. Groovy and silly. Time for A Mind-Bending Discovery!
Mark Duguid, Senior Curator of Archive Projects
What did you get out of the day?
The whole day was incredibly inspiring, from George Oates’ pioneering ‘data lifeboats’ and anti-algorithm polemic to acute insights from all the panels: on memories of a near-utopian pre-corporate internet, cataloguing new media, building a viral sensation and, perhaps especially, protecting community video archives in the face of increasingly aggressive policing of gender and sexuality norms.
What is your favourite online video?
I got a bit addicted to the series Soviet Soldiers Dancing, which deftly cut kitsch dance sequences (presumably culled from 1970s and 80s Soviet TV shows) to hits by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, the Killers and more. Posted on Twitter from late 2019 by ‘Communist Bops’ (a then-17-year-old British student), they were a lockdown phenomenon. Probably coincidentally, they remind me of Charles Ridley’s 1941 satirical Schichlegruber Doing the Lambeth Walk, in which goosestepping Nazis (ripped from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) are forced to dance to a popular 1930s song.
Patrick Russell, Senior Curator of Non-Fiction
What did you get out of the day?
The symposium hit both parts of my brain: the intellectual and the emotional. The intellectual, because online video raises so many deeply fascinating, often knotty issues about moving image forms, functions and effects (cultural, technological, societal and – our focus of course, and connected to all these – archival). The emotional, because many of those of us plugged in (cerebrally but, let’s also admit, somewhat romantically even spiritually) into the whole sweeping history of ‘film’ that’s unfolded since the 19th century, will see ‘webfilm’ as a major (so far in our century, the major) addition to the canon of moving image forms. To see it getting addressed archivally (as in previous moments of media change, the archival moment, at least on the part of institutions, has kicked in later than the media moment itself did) is moving and satisfying, but also anxiety-making given the dizzying scale of the challenges and opportunities. The symposium dug into so many of both, through the excellently curated panels and George Oates’ keynote. I was struck by George’s comment on the two contradictory pieces of folk wisdom in play simultaneously – one assuming that everything digital and online is ephemeral and just shrugging when things disappear, the other assuming that ‘the internet never forgets’ and digital content will somehow just self-archive forever. The truth lies somewhere in-between and the role of conscious archiving and curation is to optimise both how much survives and how meaningfully it survives for the future to enjoy and interpret.
What is your favourite online video?
Favourite online video? Crikey! There’s hundreds of course but with my curatorial hat on I’m going to plump for Control (2017).
This film, which by the way is preserved in the BFI National Archive, was produced by creative online film agency Raw London as a pro bono project for a local domestic abuse charity, aimed at young people for use in schools and elsewhere. But it went viral, getting accessed and shown much more widely as a great prompt for thinking and talking about the subject. It creatively does this not through talking heads but by means of dance, the forms and dynamics of abusive relationships compressed into two finely choreographed, shot and edited minutes. So it combines moving image categories that existed long before the internet – educational, training, charity and public information film, and dance film and music video – into something uniquely online. And it’s ‘pure cinema’ but with a real-world function – a combination I love.
Annabelle Shaw, Public Access Researcher
What did you get out of the day?
What a day, so much food for thought, an abundance indeed. While not a focus of the day, I was, inevitably, finding a rich seam of copyright ideas and questions coming up from the panel discussions. These fell into two main areas: 1. The extent to which material created for online publication poses challenges for traditional copyright definitions and concepts, the difficulties in sometimes establishing authorship and ownership and mapping roles and contributions to online works where they do not necessarily fit easily onto defined roles in copyright law. These are not unique challenges to online material. 2. How does an archive like the BFI deal with online material that has been shared freely and or via peer-to-peer networks where their copyright status is best described as murky (again this is not a unique issue for online material). So, lots more to think about!
What is your favourite online video?
My favourite online video, I’m torn between a Sound of Music Flash Mob at Antwerp Central Station and Randy Rainbow’s parody MAGADU.
Help us collect online moving image
The day culminated with the launch of a public call out, asking people across the UK to nominate online moving image titles they feel should be added to the BFI National Archive.
If you have a favourite webfilm from the last 30 years, can’t get a viral sensation out of your head or have fond memories of a now defunct video platform (e.g. Vine), we’d like to hear from you!
To submit your recommendations, please click here and complete our short submission form.
The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.
