Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2015 October

# 02 Oct 2015, 06:01PM: Preserving Your Old Art Or Activist Videotapes: These notes on a panel about digital preservation of fanvids spurred me to note down some links in a comment, and I figured it was worth publicizing further here.

I myself put vids on Critical Commons and have started also putting them on the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is also willing to digitize and post VHS tapes (witness the John Morearty archive), but you may want to take a preservationist approach and pay someone like Bay Area Video Collective to digitize the tape more carefully and in higher fidelity, if it's particularly historic or visually artistic. In my experience that kind of preservation service might cost about USD$135 for a 60-minute VHS tape. BAVC and similar nonprofits often have grants to help with this, e.g., the Preservation Access Program.

You can find vendors for $20/tape but those vendors basically do parallel digitization, with lots of consoles going at once, so there's more risk that a problem will happen with any one tape.

The California Preservation Project's CAVPP (California Audiovisual Preservation Project), which also has a grant to make archival-quality digitizations of historic media, has put together a useful guide to identifying and taking care of various kinds of cassettes, DVDs, etc. Page 9 (Environmental Conditions) has more details on the best temperature and relative humidity for storing these things. Here's a version one can print out. And here are some more resources, including webinars, for people getting into video preservation. I went to a CAVPP workshop this summer, which is how I know their particular resources.

If you or your organization have activist or artistic videorecordings on analog media, now is a really good time to start planning to get those into a digital medium. Magnetic and other media deteriorate, and the clock is ticking.

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# 28 Oct 2015, 11:15AM: A Month, Ish: I have been fairly low-volume on this blog lately. Some stuff I've been up to:

I wrote a Geek Feminism piece about feminist tech demos I saw at a showcase in New York City. I also asked the Geek Feminism book club what we want to read next, and then posted some thoughts on Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. I'll be posting more about Sorcerer to GF this week.

I wrote fanfic about Star Trek: The Next Generation and current events.

I helped spread the word about a bunch of openings for UX experts, developers, and sysadmins at the New York Public Library.

For the first time, I've signed up to participate in the Yuletide Treasure fanfiction exchange (my "Dear Author" letter). I'll get my assignment by November 1st and I'm pretty curious -- this experience will inform my answers to my question: What would a "Secret Santa"-style gift exchange along the lines of Yuletide Treasure look like in other parts of open source or open culture?

Leonard and I finished watching The Legend of Korra and I read Ancillary Mercy (my review), and I got most of the way through Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. I listened to the entirety of Gimlet Media's show StartUp and cried at the end of the second season. And I got super into the musical Hamilton, getting to see it for $10 via the lottery for front-row seats, buying the cast album, and listening to it many, many times. I've started posting thoughts about it in the Hamiltunes community on Dreamwidth. For those of us who miss The West Wing and good Star Trek it fills quite a void.

Leonard and I hosted various visitors. I cooked a few dishes I'd never cooked before. I cycled places (my longest ride on this bike so far: from Astoria to Park Slope and back, about twenty miles) and learned how to clean and lube the chain. I worked on business planning and started talking to leads. I got used to a Jolla phone running SailfishOS (it's a little underfeatured but improving steadily).

In perhaps the most boring news at all, I'm trying out the world of the standing desk, using a stack of books to raise the laptop to typing height; I'll have to take out Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic by David J. Schwartz from this pile in order to finish it.

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# 29 Oct 2015, 09:13AM: A Few More Fanvid Forebearers: Next week I'm speaking to a college class about my video art piece "Pipeline" which critiques the tech industry's hypocritical diversity narrative (making-of). When I posted the vid in May I also posted a list of some vids I'd learned from.

But just now I also remembered a couple of other pieces of video remix art I'd loved:

In 2008 Leonard and I discovered a super-erudite "lyrics misheard" video focusing on religious history, anti-oppression organizing, and Star Trek. If you have not watched "Wishmaster Misheard Odysseus' Idealist Alchemical Revolution" and you like silly juxtapositions plus extremely 2008-era "and now a few reminders of the US same-sex marriage debate" please take the five minutes.

And from just before the US general election of 2006, "Freedom", a witty and angry and comprehensively anti-George W. Bush montage. Warning: Upsetting photos throughout, including dead or injured people from Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps my favorite part is the extremely didactic 3:19-3:40 visuals atop the "that's what you get!" repetitions, reminding us to vote for specific Democrats and finishing with a triumphant shot of Ned Lamont.

In "Pipeline" I enjoyed the self-indulgence of inserting references I loved even though they'd only resonate with a teeny percentage of my viewers. And I got straight-up didactic and wordy with screencaps and onscreen text, and I got funny-angry in a way that's hit a chord with some folks. It's hard to trace precisely but I think KleistGeistZeit and mgarthoff helped me see how to do this -- thanks!

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