Timetabled

We started the new year much as the last was concluded, tending to community networks, sorting media archives and refurbishing a stack of donated decade old iMacs, VOIP phones, HP printers and servers ready for redistribution.

Some have already been put back to work with friends of friends having picked out one or two and others awaiting replacement SSD drives and fresh warez. One or two now run Linux Mint very nicely and so will have an extended life once Apple drop OS X. Others are already defunct.

Inura 2016 Transylvania

Amongst those getting in touch it was great to hear from Mark Sanders at Spectacle. We first met at an Undercurrents workshop in Oxford, 25 years or more ago and then again in Transylvania during 2016’s Inura meetup in Romania. We were there to present Mazi, reviewing it’s beta features whilst tuning to the needs of this unique group.

Mark recently visited the SPC shed on a sunny but chilly afternoon to catch up, then this week several of the iMacs were delivered to the Lavender Hill studio that will usurp his defunct Apple G5 workhorses. What a hoard of vintage video tapes, playback decks and cameras collected there in a bramble of AV cables and catalog of 30 years urban documentary practices.

Post pandemic Mark is keen to reactivate this archive and extend some access to the space for those seeking tape rescue and a rationale for their own collected media. Several hours of hardware surgery and reconfiguration later, the stack of aging drive arrays had been consolidated around a working G5, ready for file sorting and transfer to a yet larger SAN. The stack of analog video Hi8, Betamax, Umatic, tape decks is now re-synced for digitisation duties, alongside digital format devices. Perhaps your collection holds forgotten treasures to release?

Lastly, the Spectable archive online was marooned when flash video format support was abandoned in favout of html5 embedded video formats. Such is the volume of material in the archive another solution may seve better. We looked at pan.do/ra as used for AMP now hosted and operated at MaydayRooms. Their comprehensive system for media cataloging and inline annotation may be just the solution?

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