Â鶹ӰԺ

Having now completed the inventory of the 2011 Poetry and Film Symposium put on by Tom Gunning and the Brakhage Center for the Media Arts, Eric Coombs and I now combing through the various media files associated with the project: images, pdf documents, audio, etc.

Most of the symposium was audio recorded, including films, readings, talks, videos, performances, introductions and claps. We’re in the process of matching audio to events listed in the inventory, and making the adjustments when we discover recordings for unlisted moments or events. The opposite is also true – we can’t find the opening remarks so we’ll have to cross reference with another audio recording of the event.

We’re hoping to get our hands on the papers presented as to pull quotes and use text to also represent voice in our curatorial display. We’re saving some of the audio glitches and scratches for possible sound loops in Korsakow – exact use to be determined. We’re also thinking of keywords now that are going to help assemble the showcase…

Technically, we splice the audio leaving a bit of room tone before and after (some of the recordings have rough starts/ends) to give breathing room to the tracks. We adjust the gain bu lowering the dbs of very loud tracks. We then export the splices into event based folder, in .aif 16 44.1 Khz (a quality to match what was recorded) labeled by the speaker or film and so on. We can mass convert to mp3 later, but for now retain the best quality as back up. There are obviously many debates in the archiving world about format and quality and how it relates to authenticity, but we’re of the view that that implies a neutrality to the technologies used to record–and create–the original. So we are cognizant of the issues but forge ahead.

We have yet to come up with a great folder/label system but we’re working on it, thinking it through. This is proving far trickier than any technical aspect so far…

-by