Active Archives

Simply put, archiving connects the practices of creative production with those of preservation. As such it is a process that bridges the "high level" conceptual, communicative and social aspects of a work down to "low level" details of a work's physical form. The archivist asks what are the necessary conditions for keeping a work "alive" and accessible on both levels. Active Archives reconsiders these concerns in the face of new possibilities for network-based collaborative production. In this context, how might, for instance, the development of media codecs (the software algorithms that represent audio/visual data) and the development of new kinds of editing tools be opened up for discussion alongside each other to take account of the particular concerns of each.

To this end the activities of Active Archives involve:

1. build an open platform for software development,
2. commisioning new content to be produced with network-based collaboration in mind,
3. hosting events that bring the developers and practitioners from the varying "levels" into dialog

The situation of online video might be compared with the state of relational databases 15 years ago. In the mid 1990's, as the web began to take off, relational databases were still rather "big and heavy", with key players like Oracle charging thousands of dollars to license software that often required special training to program and use. Since then, the success of open source software projects like MySQL (and "accessory" projects like phpMyAdmin) have made relational db's a standard part of many entry level web hosting services, and form the "backends" of a wide variety of web-based applications from amateur blogs to database-driven artist interventions.

Open source projects like ffmpeg and mplayer have attempted to do the same for video -- "bursting the bubble" of complex world of video formats, where the volume of conflicting formats is more a reflection on the complexity of corporate dealmaking and protectionism than on the actual variety of techniques for encoding motion and sound. What's missing however is connecting these "low-level" tools to web-based "front-ends". Active Archives is thus part of a search for a new kind of content-management system, blending the experience of systems like wiki's and blogs, with digital media (audio / video). In addition Active Archives aims to produce a open software platform that can be decentralized -- that is used independently by a number of cultural institutions -- and linked as desired. (uh this needs revision)...

Following the advice of Adrian MacKenzie, AA seeks to stimulate artistic intervention / engagement in the realm of the digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms central to the transmission and reproduction of audio and video material online. Current techniques, such as temporal compression and the introduction of keyframes, often complicate or stand in the way of later editing. How might a video codec inherently support (even benefit from) sharing / editing / change over time.

A platform; a web front-end to ffmpeg?

Software like ffmpeg / mplayer / mencoder offer an enourmous wealth of technical possibilities for manipulating / transforming media. An easy to use web-based interface to these tools offer an powerful means of supporting new kinds of collaboration around audio and video material.

(maybe also interesting to note the practice of production and translation of subtitles around films distributed on the net)

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original text:

Constant will continue to support the maturing of the project and allow other people in. Maintaining? who does that?
Constant will also contribute with content, expertise, test-usage, feedback
The promise of on-line video editing - current situation for makers (archivists, collaborative videomakers) is not ideal; Free Software or not.
Licences, codecs, tools... it is really messy and unneccesarily complicated. We need to work on this!
AA is a meeting ground for these problems; a conversation between developers and users. AA is a meeting ground for programmers and makers.
Codecs (what is this) are one of the main problems; regard codec as a medium (Adrian Mackenzie).
Questions of coding and transcoding -- collaboritive editing brings up these questions.

The needs of makers, editors and editors to the codecs and formats.

Possibly developing another way of coding video on-line ... Theora input? An editing and sharing friendly codec? What w/could that be? From high end to low end questions.