Dear Experimental Intermedia community,
On this Giving Tuesday we reach out to you with a fundraising appeal specifically for help with the preservation of the portion of the Experimental Intermedia archive consisting of some 400 DATs, recorded between1986 and 2009, which could completely deteriorate if nothing is done soon.
EIF is around the corner from getting through its first full year of activities post-Phill Niblock, not without many difficulties, under the curation of new Artistic Director Katherine Liberovskaya and the help of a number of invaluable assistants. While we are looking ahead and contemplating various approaches to continue, and perhaps modify, EIF’s programs into the future, we also face the important challenge of finding a worthy home for the extensive EIF archive.
Experimental Intermedia Foundation, founded in 1968 by Elaine Summers, has been presenting performances as of 1973. Since that time, Phill Niblock has produced and curated over 1500 concerts at his NYC loft, opening his doors to hundreds of composers, providing them with a place to explore the use of new ideas and technologies in their music. His original plan had been to choose 20 composers whose work interested him and then present them every year, giving an audience a chance to observe how their careers evolved over time. But each year the numbers grew and soon Experimental Intermedia was producing 35 to 50 concerts a year.
What has made the Experimental Intermedia series different from other concert series is that each evening was typically focused on only one artist’s music, as opposed to a musician or ensemble playing the works of many different composers.
Archiving these concerts has been a primary concern for Experimental Intermedia, and each concert since 1978 has been recorded on audio and, as of the 1980s, video. The goal was, on the one hand, to provide the performing artists with high quality recordings of their work, on the other to constitute a physical historical record of work presented at EIF that could eventually find a home in an institution that would make the material available to the general public and for archival research. From 1973 through the late 80s the recordings were analog, and after that, in digital formats. From the late 80s to the mid 2000s the audio format EIF used was DATs.
Since 2017-18 there has been quite a bit of interest in EIF’s archive from different institutions, even one informal agreement for it to be taken leading us to believe that it would be off our hands by 2020. But then the pandemic halted everything… to not ever come back to how anything was pre-Covid. And thus, here we are 8 years later with no concrete developments with any previous interested parties, no confirmation for the archive going anywhere… A stand-still.
And the problem is that the entire audio archive from the late 80’s to 2008-09 is all on DAT. Some 400 DATs. (See below the impressive list of all artists presented by EIF between 1986 and 2009, most recorded on DAT, except for screenings or other non-music). And DAT tapes are notoriously unstable. They degrade over time. That means you can’t rely on them as a long-term preservation tool. In fact, DAT tapes can degrade completely in just 20 years. When you bear in mind that the earliest DAT tapes date back to 1986. And recordings made at that time are now nearly 40 years old. So, they may already have begun to deteriorate. Digitizing them as quickly as possible is vital and urgent to prevent their contents from being lost forever.
Now EIF has been given a very generous estimate for their transfer to digital from a local sound engineer (who was one of Phill’s favorites), and we would like to move forward on this process as soon as possible.
To this end we are hoping to raise $8,000.00 to cover the cost of this process.
But whatever we can raise we will use to start the process of transferring little by little, and seek more funds to continue later.
So, if you were inspired, challenged or moved by Experimental Intermedia Foundation’s programming over the past 50 odd years, or if you performed yourself, or have come to see friends perform, or to see any of your experimental music heroes… we hope you will consider supporting this fundraising effort. Your fully tax-deductible donation of any amount can be crucial for SAVING THE DAT(S) or at least some of the DATs!
Donations can be made through the “Donate” button on the landing page of our website:
experimentalintermedia.org (PayPal) or by sending a check by mail.
