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Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (Ciudad de México, MÉXICO)
With the filmmaking collective Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (LEC) in Mexico City I have organized several film, video, and archival projects, including: a year-long residency at Churubusco Studios, the Independent Analog Film Labs Meeting, and a Community Archiving Workshop.
Here is a presentation about our videotape digitization initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic:
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Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC, USA)
As a media conservation consultant with multiple entitites at the Smithsonian Institution, I have worked on a variety of projects since 2018, including: writing Web Content Accessibility policy for the Digitization Program Office, and the content editing and creation of a web resource for the Time-based Media & Digital Art working group consortium of art museums.
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National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington DC, USA)
Relocating to Washington DC in 2014, I served as Media Archivist for the Smithsonian Institution. Over the course of four years, I founded the Media Conservation and Digitization unit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In conceiving and executing the creation of an entire department's equipment resource and technical workflow capacities, I had the life-changing opportunity to work with an AV preservation Dream Team of Ina Archer, Jasmyn Castro, AJ Lawrence, and Blake McDowell, alongside curators Rhea Combs and Jon Goff.
Our unit's Great Migration Home Movie Project provides digitization of home movies for African American families, in a one-day "photofinishing"-style free service to museum visitors. To date, the initiative has digitized hundreds of hours of moving image memories and works of African American self-presentation. (Check many of them out, online!) The Great Migration Home Movie Project received the 2019 NDSA Project Innovation Award for digital stewardship.
In addition to building the museum's audiovisual conservation and public digitization capacity from scratch, my position played a central role in construction of the museum's moving image theatrical exhibition facilities inside the Oprah Winfrey Theater, and in buidling our National Collections of archives, films, and videos by makers such as Geoffrey Holder & Carmen de Lavallade, Hortense Beveridge, Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, and Jefferson Pinder, among many others.
Here is a talk I gave at the University of Maryland about my experiences at the museum:
Walter Forsberg Digital Dialogue: 'Yes, We Scan: Building Media Conservation and Digitization at NMAAHC' from MITH in MD on Vimeo.
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Kramlich Collection and the New Art Trust (New York City, USA)
In 2014, I worked as AudioVisual Conservation Associate for Pam and Richard Kramlich and their globally-renowned private media art collection.
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New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York City, USA)
All summer '013-long, I managed the video and data migration project XFR STN at the New Museum, in New York. The exhibition ran July 17 - September 8, 2013 and enabled dozens of artists to publicly transfer years of their work in a gallery setting. You can read the exhibition catalogue and the accompanying essay I wrote, here. My XFR STN co-architect, MoMA's digital conservator Ben Fino-Radin, has a fun blog post about recovering Apple ][ artwork, here.
My loyal and talented XFR STN digital preservation technicians were: Rebecca Fraimow, Leeroy Kang, Kristin MacDonough, and Bleakley McDowell. Special thanks to Erik Piil, Peter Oleksik, and John Klacsmann. BTW Andrea Callard is awesome, and also snapped most of the photos above.
Visit the XFR STN portal on the Internet Archive for all of the digitized video content produced during the project.
The New York Times hung out with us. So did Art in America and The Atlantic Monthly's WIRE. Manhattan Neighborhood Network's thrilling ESPTV even broadcast an episode from the 5th floor galleries! Watch that here.
Check out this video from Animal NYC, below:
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Cory Arcangel Studios (Brooklyn, USA)
From 2012-13, I served as a project consultant for Cory Arcangel on his AUDMCRS: Arcangel Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound work, debuted at the Carnegie Museum of Art show Masters. Subsequent exhibitions of the massive interactive work occurred at Montréal's DHC/ART in 2013.
My archival preservation consultation involed co-designing and team-leading an extensive cataloging and documentation effort for a trance music LP collection. You can watch Cory speak about the project, above, at 2:08. And, Cory has made a great website of all of the photo documentation, here.
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Fundaciòn Patrimonio Fìlmico Colombiano (Bogota, Colombia)
In June 2013, a team of 15 audiovisual archivists from NYU partnered with the Colombian national film archive though the MIAP Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program. Over the course of ten days, we collaborated with the staff of Patrimonio on a concentrated effort to inpsect camera originals for a 16mm ethnographic documentary from the 1970s on the Yuripari, negatives from the 1960s 35mm newsfilm series Panamericana, and to consult on implementable digital preservation strategies for their analog videotape collections. MIAP alumni Kim Tarr, Stefan Elnabli, and myself also led a day-long workshop on personal digital archiving.
Check out the APEX Colombia blog, with photos, here.
Watch some home movies from the project, below.
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Rutgers University, Laboratory of Vision Research (New Jersey, USA)
Grant-writing and 2013 film preservation project for pioneering Random Dot Stereogram film made at Bell Laboratories by cognitive scientist Béla Julesz.
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Northeast Historic Film (Maine, USA)
As the 2011 William S. O'Farrell Fellow at NHF, I performed condition inspections and photo documentation of the Donald C. Brown, Jr. Collection of 35mm drive-in intermission reels from the Northeastern United States, circa 1960-1980. The project improved cataloging granularity for the collection and generated conservation documentation of the original film materials.
Read my blog about the inspection process, here.
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The Ohio State University Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts (Columbus, USA)
Grant-writing and 3D film preservation project for early computer animation works made by computer programmers and artists working at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s. Institutional recipient of a 2011 National Film Preservation Foundation Avant-Garde Master's grant to preserve five works.
Read my essay about the preservation of these works, here.
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Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (Nashville, USA)
Collection inventory, condition assessment, and database creation for the Hank Snow Collection of Recorded Sound and the CMHOF's 1" videotape collections.
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