Workshop: Tending to the Archive
Sunday, September 22, 2024
2:00pm - 5:00pm
$15 suggested donation
To register: info@millenniumfilm.org
Artists and filmmakers accumulate large amounts of media as we journey through our creative lives and as we research specific projects. How can we care for and organize the media that accrue around us in ways that are meaningful to us and our work? Some media is physical: reels of film and video tapes staring at us from the shelves as they slowly decay. Other media is digital, bulging out of our phones and drives, occupying space in our minds every time we get a notification that we’re at 90% capacity. And some media exists on paper such as notes and drawings or exists as objects. All of these media formats hold time, they hold memories for us and for others. What is that experience like for us as artists, to be responsible for these time capsules, to hold these moments from the past? Can we create ways to catalog our collections, outside of techno-corporate structures? What does it mean for individuals and communities to be the keepers of their own archives?
Julie Perini will discuss her methods for gathering, archiving, and processing ten years of personal video documentation and transforming it into works of art. We will take a close look at the database Perini created to catalog her long-term daily video project, Minute Movies. She will also discuss other projects she’s worked on that involve wrangling massive amounts of media.
Participants are invited to share their own piles of media, notes, and objects: home movies, personal videos, writing, drawings, research for projects, and anything else. We will look at the work of filmmakers, visual artists, and writers to inspire our own creative projects. This workshop will not be technical; it is not about the latest research and recommendations on archival media formats. Rather, it is a generative space to share ideas, practices, and knowledge around organizing our documents, be it personal documentation, artistic notes, historical material, and more. Participants will walk away with resource lists and ideas to support their creative projects.
About the instructor: Julie Perini is a filmmaker, daily videomaker, diary keeper, community-based media maker, video artist, writer, artistic descendent of time-bending mentors like Tony Conrad, product of the suburbs of New York City and DIY culture of the 90s. Her involvement with the post-9/11 “War on Terror” spurred her work with prison and police abolitionist movements. She is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and residencies and she exhibits work in theaters, community spaces, galleries, campgrounds, storefronts, the sides of bridges, and other venues. Her writing has been published by AK Press, PM Press, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism and other publications. Originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, she currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she is a Professor of Art at Portland State University.
This past September - October 2024, I presented the exhibition at Millennium Film Workshop in New York that contained a new large-scale photographic work composed of nearly 5,000 still image thumbnails from the Minute Movies archive, along with several videos on monitors, a screening event, artist tours of the work and a workshop for working artists, tailored specifically for this exhibition called “Tending to the Archive.”