final cut archive

I have finally finished capturing all of my footage from my archive of tapes to my archive of footage on my hard drive.

I have the footage divided into folders on my hard drive:

B-Roll

Interviews

Capital

Mine Visit

I'm working on translation and writing out transcripts. Transcripts are annoying and time consuming but I imagine they will be an incredibly important part of my archive. To write these out I now have the interviews saved as audio files... more stuff to archive. I fear this will be an ever expanding archive until the moment I have completed my thesis. This easily might become a habit for every project I do. It's nice to know everything is in one place (as long as I stay on top of it).

This project is making me think of archives in a whole new way. The archive is no longer an image in my mind of giant spaces in faraway buildings with rows and rows of metal framed bookshelves or boxes of overflowing pictures. I now see archives everywhere, even in my own home: they just aren't as well organized as the ones I used to picture.

I haven't done much with the archive yet because i've been working a lot on my group's presentation tomorrow.

When I chose my topic I had no idea how intense the workload was going to be.

I thought talking about my personal archive/collection of the narrative of my life would be quick and easy.... I mean I know my life so well.

But it ended up making me think a lot about my archive and how I've compiled it over the years...

turns out I know my life too well, and that's why it's difficult.

It sure has made me more interested in the questions and implications that come along with the archiving process. I never realized how much needs to be questioned and assessed when a collection is compiled. While photographing it I had a very difficult time deciding what to include and what not to include. I realized at one point that I should NOT be "curating" this exhibit... I'm far too close to it!

Website Archive???

so i got all productive tonight, went to the gym AND started thinking about how i'm going to put together this archive and what the final result should/could look like.

i'm not sure what my biggest obstacle is going to be for this project...

- my general disorganization?

- my general ignorance of archives?

my past archives have consisted of filing cabinet's, filing folders, sandwich bags, cardboard boxes, tupperware, etc...

all of those archives are still probably in existence somewhere. i've moved a lot. there are a lot of my belongings in my mother's basement for "safekeeping", some are in the big storage closet in my apartment that i try to keep in some semblance of organization, and the rest is probably decomposing in a dump somewhere. i find it rather amusing that all of my past archives are stored within "archives"... my closet, my mother's basement, and a garbage dump can all be considered archives in some way.

it all starts to get a little ridiculous in my mind.

i think i've decided on a webpage for Assignment #1. it seems like a logical way to organize all the research tools for my project and a plausible way to present them to the class. i'm not set on the form yet seeing as i'll be learning a lot about archives over the coming weeks and don't want to limit myself in the early phases, but it's how i'm going to get started for now.

Useless Archive

while thinking about archives today i began to visualize the archives of my past.

i remembered an archive i (and many others) have owned that would be entirely useless to me now.

i'm sure it is lurking somewhere in my mother's basement...

The floppy archive

 

i had 50 or so floppy disks in a metal box that had all kinds of documents and programs on them. they were mostly labelled and were all the colours of the rainbow. they are probably hanging in my mother's basement because i wouldn't have thrown them out... all those important documents (journals, email logs, several ideas for books to be written).

now it seems silly that i held on to them just to deposit them in the basement where all things go to die anyway. next time i come across them, while perusing the basement for a book or a memento that i haven't entirely given up on, i PROMISE to throw them out, to not even read the labels, to not imagine grand efforts of finding a way to transfer them to CD. 

sometimes an archive must be given up.