AMIA 2024

Throughout the 1970s, video artists were studying, deconstructing, and recomposing surplus scientific and consumer video equipment in pursuit of new technological languages. What emerged from this period of invention were hand built video tools such as the PaikAbe synthesizer and the Jones analog/digital synthesizers - machines that had been custom crafted (or ‘hacked’) by artists who were pushing the boundaries of existing technologies to create instruments that could serve a purpose beyond that which was deemed commercially desirable. Fifty years later, the work made by these innovators requires equally inventive workflows and technologies in order to be preserved. This session will explore archivist Nilson Carroll’s (Visual Studies Workshop) preservation of works made by video artist Peer Bode (Experimental Television Center, Institute for Electronic Arts) in the 1970s. Carroll has been working closely with Bode to preserve the artist’s early experiments recorded on ½” videotape, many of which feature “glitches” that push the video signal to its limits or display the signal in new ways. Examples of Bode’s tapes will be shown and the problem solving that went into the preservation of those tapes will be discussed.