Media Burn – saving video history from forgetfulness
Exploring and archiving overlooked histories in video format.
Read ‘til the end for some musings on history, and some of its quirks.
What’s cool about this org?
Media Burn collects, preserves, and distributes documentary and experimental media produced by artists, activists, and community groups.
Our mission is to create positive social change by amplifying underheard voices, both in contemporary dialogue and the historical record.
Media Burn gets us thinking about what is worth remembering, and the default forgetfulness of our media worlds.
(You’ll be pleased to know that Tom Weinberg, founder of the Media Burn archive, was a collaborator of Ant Farm).
If we stay in the lanes of mainstream media, we only get to experience a narrowly-defined slice of what’s out there. We risk never being exposed to a fuller picture of life and its overlooked histories. That strikes me as a huge loss.
I’m not anti-YouTube; I think YouTube is great. In fact, in a previous post I described how Vulfpeck started as a YouTube channel, for example. There are hundreds of great content creators out there who might not be doing what they do if it weren’t for YouTube.
But, after all, it is a commercial platform of the contemporary, walled-garden internet. As such, it is prone to enshittification, a termed coined by Cory Doctorow to explain the lifecycle of platforms like YouTube (and Substack and X and TikTok etc…):
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
What Media Burn offers, then, is not a replacement but an extension pack to the internet of video content. You get more out of the internet than YouTube’s abundance of hard-to-escape sameness. (Hint: Media Burn has a YT channel!)
Through Media Burn’s work and footage archives, you can dive into the quirky, weird, hobbyist, politically charged realms of video production, from documentaries to low-budget films and advertisements for some of the strangest projects out there, like the afore-mentioned Bluestar.
Or Electronic Masks. Or this cozy documentary about a double dutch rope jumping competition in NYC: Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show.
I tell you: these archives are full of gold. Checkout their Watch Videos page and see for yourself. And for curated guides to topics in their collection, visit their Digital Exhibitions page.
Media Burn also enables creators in making new projects. They help people use their footage and archives to create new works, encouraging projects of all scales, from studio-funded feature films to student projects shot on smartphones. You can read more on their Licensing page to learn more.
Beyond preserving their own collections, they also work with clients of all sizes to digitize their obsolete videotape and audiotape media. According to their website:
Media Burn is one of only a handful of facilities in the United States with the capacity to play and digitize the many formats that were used during the 50-year-history of commercially available videotape.
That’s really cool, and more of a necessity than we might think.
The entropy of history and media
In data transmission and information theory, entropy is a measure of the information lost in a transmitted signal or message.
For instance, in an oral culture, only those thoughts that can be formulated into sayings, proverbs, and other dicta are likely to survive the entropic effects of oral transmission.
Video has its own entropic effects going on, which Media Burn tries to address by doubling-down on preservation efforts.
History, too, is subject to entropic forces and effects, primarily in the shape of political forgetfulness, our collective inability to tell the story of what really happened and, instead, record the story only of those with power during a given era.
Here I’m using the term political in its broadest sense: how we make decisions, as a collective, about what is valuable, just and desirable. Because forgetfulness is something that happens, but/and what we choose to do about it still requires a great deal of consideration.
Ways of remembering
For at least 200 years, more information and knowledge was better. It was the beacon of hope on which the internet was predicated upon. Until somewhat recently, sometime in the twentieth century, information became too vast to the point where it became detrimental to our well-being and functioning.
I’m not offering a solution, but I do encourage more experimentation! We will continue to struggle with this overwhelming abundance of information, and we’ll need to continue to come up with strategies to live and thrive in it.
It’s critical to highlight that forgetfulness happens both intentionally – think conquerors burning the villages, art, artifacts and literature of the conquered – and by default.
We forget when we fail to convince others of the the value of what we’re trying to continue to remember. We forget when those who cared about remembering retire, lose their cognitive abilities or die. We forget by sheer volume of content produced.
What can be remembered? Af first glance, this These we could call objects of history: events, stories, bodies of knowledge, songs, literature, rituals, oral traditions and many more.
What’s key to keep in mind is that what can be remembered also changes, as do our means to remember, encode, store and transmit. Media Burn acknowledges this, admitting that video killed the radio star, and that something else is already killing video; they’ll at least rescue some of the remains.
History’s quirks
You’ll have to fact-check these, but there’s a thread on Reddit about unlikely simultaneous historical events, shared by Jason Kottke here.
Here’s a sublist from that post:
Spain was still a fascist dictatorship when Microsoft was founded.
There were no classes in calculus in Harvard’s curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn’t been discovered yet.
Two empires [Roman & Ottoman] spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.
When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.
The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.
Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.
The past ain’t fixed
Here I mean fixed as in unchanging. The past is constantly changing, through the expansion of our curiosity and interest, technological advancements and the need to look at our recorded history through the lens of current events and cultural impact.
Of course, this process can be politicized and weaponized. The term revisionist has become an excuse to squeeze out supporting evidence for whatever public policy, cult ethos or fear-mongering agenda out of history. History, and the past, are infinitely malleable.
The goal, then, is not to fix the past and preserve it without change. We should, instead, continue to keep it alive by asking questions like:
Who’s story is this?
What are the recurrent motifs of history and in what ways have they changed or remained the same?
Can technology help us remember? And how does it impact our forgetfulness?
How can we know what really happened in the past?
How do we remember/forget as individuals, and as a culture/society?
Forgetfulness is history’s entropic force. But we can choose to fight back against this form of entropy, and how we choose to fight matters a great deal.