Last week, the National Archive of the British Film Institute announced a new collection of some 430 online videos. The collection covers a spectrum of British viral video content, from cultural phenomena such as Radiohead “Scottish fog” online performance in rainbow and Liz Truss Doomed battle with a head of lettuce. to memes like the dancing badgers and the immortal”Charlie bit my finger” clip. The collection is placed in the broader context of the BFI National Archive’s mandate to preserve the moving image; as said by the Archive’s digital curator, Will Swinburne. explainsthe collection is “an attempt to capture what the world of online moving images has contributed to the broader history of cinema.”
TO parts selection from very british The collection is available at the BFI. Repetition place. (If you’re outside the UK, you’ll need a VPN to access.) Gizmodo spoke with Swinburne about Shockwave Flash, blackout curtains, and what to do if the world ends.
Gizmodo: If you’re trying to put together an archive of videos from the Internet, you have a virtually infinite number of pieces to choose from. What kind of criteria do you use to determine whether something is culturally significant or, more generally, just something you want to include?
Will Swinburne: Our approach with film and television is often a completist approach – we acquire all the films that come out in the UK, we provide a recording of all the television – but that’s not an approach you can take with the internet. That leaves us with the need for a curatorial perspective.
We’ve tried to map some sense of video cultures that exist specifically online or are somehow allowed to exist thanks to the Internet. This could be due to technical reasons, such as things that use platform-based short-form videos. It could also be a more techno-utopian idea: well, there are no gatekeepers on the internet, so people from different backgrounds can create their own web series.
So we were trying to tell a story about what the Internet has brought to you, the viewer, like, what things existed there that didn’t exist before? This takes us to a few places, one of them being points of innovation: who first thought of making some kind of serial episodic television, but online? How did they manage to do that with the technical limitations of that time?
There are also whole genres of videos where you’ll definitely pick one as an example, so we have a video of someone showing you how to put up a blackout curtain, and that video alone isn’t widely viewed or anything, but it’s emblematic that a lot of the internet is how-to tutorials and stuff like that, you know?
WikiHow kind of thing, yeah.
Exactly. That video tells a story much bigger than itself, so that was definitely another guiding principle, yeah.
How did they get some of this material? I suppose there will obviously be newer material on YouTube etc, but I imagine some of the older material could be quite difficult to get hold of.
It’s interesting. I mean, we… we’re a film archive, so we have archival practices, and one of them is we try to go to the creator and ask for an original file. So that would pretty much mean the file they hit “upload” on: to a platform, to a website, whatever.
It’s complicated, and in fact, we’ve found that often people who make videos right now don’t have any practice in files, you know? They treat the platform itself as a file.
They just hit “load” and it was gone.
Good. Obviously there’s a lot of variation: there are very professionalized setups, people who are basically like production studios, so they can have workflows and hard drives and so on. People who do things on their phone have none of that.
But a lot of the people who were making videos in the 2000s, before YouTube… (that’s) a pretty self-selected group. They are quite technical people. They were people who were into computers in the early stages, the Internet, so they often have pretty good records and hard drives and… you know, they save things.
Also, those (videos) have often been played quite a few times. So these early flash cartoons have a second life on YouTube as videos and so on.
The tricky thing is when someone stopped making videos or maybe they just did a little thing that now, 20 years later, we consider maybe quite emblematic of something, but they don’t have a public presence online.
They have become an accountant or something like that.
Yes, exactly. So trying to track them down (it can be difficult) and they might say, “I barely remember that video.” So it varies wildly and it’s not always the case that it’s just the older things that are harder to find.
For things like Flash animations, would you look to get the original Shockwave Flash file that you would then convert into something you could upload to the Internet today?
No. We have to work within the scope of our digital team’s established preservation workflows, and they don’t have a workflow for preserving an actual Shockwave file.
I see.
Then (in those cases), we acquire the video versions of the donor. We do extensive cataloging and with those works, what we have acquired is basically the YouTube version of the Flash cartoon, but in our cataloging we will make it very clear that this particular work has a history beyond YouTube and has different origins. But we are not working to preserve Flash as a technology.
No, we can let it go.
(laughs)
Was there a particular focus on British content?
Yes, so the scope of the archive is that it collects works from the United Kingdom. Basically, that means work produced in the UK or produced by a British person. It was also a National Lottery funded project, so it (also means) focusing on UK things. So there were often videos suggested by the public or that came up in our discussions where… it’s not always clear who did something, you know, so you track them down and eventually find out, “Oh, they’re from Texas.”
Curses.
Yeah.
You’ve collected something like 430 videos. Is this project finished or is the file something you’re going to keep adding to on an ongoing basis?
So the initial project, the Lottery-funded portion, was funded for the first two years. That project is finished, and that completion is what we are marking and celebrating right now.
That project had two objectives: the first was to collect 400 pieces, and we have done it. The second was figuring out how to start collecting videos from the Internet as part of what we call “business as usual.” The archive has collected cinema and television for almost 100 years; How do we start including online videos in our current work? So that’s my role: I’m finding things to preserve, but also trying to support other curators who might have specializations in advertising or fiction film or whatever, and help them understand areas of online video that they might work with.
There are 60 videos online; What’s the plan for what to do with the rest of the pieces you’ve collected?
They are now part of the archive, so they are woven into our overall film history collection. What’s quite exciting is that we can now begin to tell these moving image stories that span across film, television, and online video. So you could have a collection about, say, comedy series, and it could include things from the early days of television to Netflix and web series.
The central purpose of the archive is preservation. So all the works we’ve collected are now preserved in our digital preservation infrastructure, and we’re committed to preserving them for… well, forever.
Until the world ends.
Until the world ends, and we even have some just-in-case scenarios for that.
