Carolyn Tennant

 

 

Archival

 

My first encounter with an archive was in 1994, as an undergraduate fellow at the Salt Center for Documentary Field Studies in Portland, Maine. Later my research led me to the special collections at the Library of Congress, The Schomburg Center of New York Public LIbraries and Duke University among others. In 2002, I began work with the Video History Project, a web-archive designed by the Experimental Television Center; this research inspired an interest in techno-cultural histories that informed my graduate studies.My research is featured in: Early Media Instruments (an 8 DVD boxset produced by the ETC and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology) and The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becomes Unglued, a two-volume text edited by Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking, Mona Jimenez (2014, Intellect Press: UK).

 

From 2003-2017, I worked with Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in its efforts to organize its archive of A/V materials and photographic and paper ephemera, much of which is housed at The Poetry Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo Libraries. From 2006-2017, as Media Arts Director and later archivist, I initiated the organization's Digital Archive, a fully searchable database of artists, events, calendars, catalogs, and ephemera; in addition, I oversaw the organization of over 20,000 35mm mounted slides and photo negatives. A former board member of Independent Media Arts Preservation, in 2007 I helped co-found Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network, a collaborative project of the Experimental Television Center, Squeaky Wheel, Hallwalls and the Burchfield Penney Art Center, which helped assists local artists and organizations with analog video digitization projects. I have presented my research at the Association for Moving Image Archivists, the Guggenheim Museum, i2NY Summit, Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University.