From the production and aesthetic perspectives, film and video offer quite different processes and results. These technological differences have also a knock on effect on the way each formats behaves physically and subsequently how they should be looked after.

This site has distinct sections for film and video, each one addressing how that format should be handled, preserved and stored. The information below discusses how these formats relate to the broader institutional preserving strategies of archives and galleries. This is something worth thinking about as it indicates the possible divisions in responsibility and also the current realities for those with more long-term preservation experience.

Film preservation issues
Users of film can draw on a long history of expertise and experience but unless it is embraced into a formalised cannon, much experimental film, even older material linked to well-known artists, does not always receive the institutional preservation care that other films might. This is reflected in, and re-enforced by, the context in which this work is produced. If you're shooting film outside the structures of production companies and formalised commercial distribution, it is unlikely that you will have the extra prints to be taken up by an archive.

Unfortunately, as an experimental or artist filmmaker, it often follows that the usual independent, personal manner of filmmaking must be extended toward conservation and preservation responsibilities too. (And heighten, if there are few prints and/or no negative.) While it can be hard to think in the long-term when it seems removed from the day-to-day production of work, it is well worth recognising these responsibilities because the difference careful considered storage can make to the long-term life of your film, can be great.

Issues for video and other new media
While the practicalities of artist film preservation stand on less than solid ground, video art and other electronic moving image work are marked with a lack of standards in regard to both the institutional approach and the format itself.

Video is a relative young format, a fact that makes it hard to predict how it will age and behave in the future. The on-going updating and arrival of new video formats only exacerbates this problem: nothing is given very long to age and make itself known. Also, as new formats have been introduced and the market changed, manufacturers have in most instances ceased producing the parts necessary to maintain the older machines. This introduces the very real problems of maintaining the reading equipment as well as the material to be read.

The lack of standards for video has the knock on effect of a lack of standards for video preservation. The fact that video can be copied so easily and cheaply, at one level allows work to realistically proliferate into any number of moving image archives (unlike film) but creates a play off between the importance of the video as an original art object and the potential need to copy to arrest irreversible deterioration or to just to make the work viewable at all (before no machines are left to play it). It also raises the question, is it important that a work is seen on its original format?

These issues extend over to digital information media and also installations where the status of the art as original object is potentially even more significant. Installation also has its own sections as part of the larger site.