New Art Video Straight to DVD: Glitches and Fiction in Archival Practice

The New Art Video group presents ‘Straight to DVD’, a discursive event and film screening that aims to interrogate the traditional practice of archiving through a series of playful interventions and anecdotal discussion. New Art Video invites artists Erica Eyres and Samuel De Lange as well as CCA Director, Francis McKee to explore notions of the archive, narrative, and misinformation through a series of short talks with a discussion to follow.

The event will open with the first public screening of Eyres’ film, CPR Conference. Originally intended for an academic conference on comedy, the film’s content and format proved problematic for the institutional environment and was omitted from the conference publication.

De Lange will follow with his presentation of Em Progresso. Images captured by his stolen camera have been retrieved and collected using specialized search software. Described as a “performance as much as pedagogy,” De Lange will show a selection of images and reflect on the ethics of this archival process.

CCA director, Francis McKee will explore glitches and anomalies from the CCA archive including a mislabelled Julius Eastman video and memorabilia from ‘spectral’ exhibitions that never took place.

New Art Video (Alasdair Campbell, Xiaolian Lan, Christiana Myers, and Jennifer Tipton) will conclude by discussing their archival experiment. In the weeks leading up to the event the group have sought to insert Eyres’ film into archives across Scotland. They will present their findings and lead into a discussion with Eyres, De Lange, and McKee exploring the archive as both a personal and institutional site.

New Art Video would like to thank the CCA for hosting this event.