Preserving the Interactive Telecommunications Program

posted October 20, 2012

Matthew Epler and colleagues were tasked with development ways to archive a large body of audiovisual and other material. Here is what he and Kate Watson said about the challenge in a presentation at IMAP’s Archiving the Arts: A symposium addressing preservation in the creative process approaches that took place on Saturday, 13 October 2012

Matthew Epler and Kate Watson were among presenters at Archiving the Arts: A symposium, a recent day-long event organized by Independent Media Arts Preservation, a New York-based service, education, and advocacy nonprofit organization that assists caretakers of collections of non-commercial electronic media. (See, an interview with IMAP director Jeff Martin.)

Here is Epler and Watson’s presentation, in Googledocs format (to access, click on link, then click on “start presentation” at the top right of the start page, and follow directions, including how to access notes for each slide by clicking on the “settings wheel.”

Here’s Matthew Epler’s introduction to his and Watson’s presentation:

The Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University is a graduate program that fuses art and design practices with cutting-edge technology.

For over 30 years, it has been a place “for the recently possible,” producing a massive body of work that spans disciplines such as industrial design, web, fine art, and computer programming. The work of its students represents a unique record of the relationship between culture and technology and requires a different approach to archiving than most fine art collections.

In its second year, the ITP Archive has been given the task of archiving every thesis project ever produced at ITP. This is the first archiving work every done at ITP. This talk discusses some of the challenges and approaches being addressed by the team of students who lead the project.

Matthew Epler is an artist and creative coder at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. After graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, he lived abroad for many years teaching film history and theory. Now, he says, “he makes machines, visualizes data, and generally pokes around in stuff related to computers.” Kate Watson is a curator, designer, and “digital content strategist.” She holds an MPS from NYU’s ITP program and a BA in art and art history from Sarah Lawrence College.

Printed from Moving Image Archive News: http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org

URL to article: http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org/preserving-the-interactive-telecommunications-program/

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