Digitising performance art from obsolete carriers within the Locus+ archive

Jemma Singleton is the Archivist at Newcastle University and Melanie Clifford works at Great Bear Audio and Video Digitising.

‘Because…information can neither be created nor destroyed – it’s accessible or it’s inaccessible, but it is.’ – Pat Cadigan, Synners.

Digital preservation is having a hot moment at Newcastle University. The Special Collections department is experimenting with semi-automated approaches to processing vast quantities of born digital material already ingested into its systems. This in turn has improved the rate of cataloguing and making accessible archivally relevant born digital material across multiple collections.

Whilst awareness of the scale of the digital preservation challenge is accepted within the department (and wider library), how to tackle the digitisation of content held on obsolete audio-visual carriers remained a challenge. One collection in particular has been integral to addressing the inaccessible born-digital to viewable digitised content challenge. This collection is known as Locus+ which was a visual arts commissioning organisation operating in the North-East of the UK, between 1978 – circa 2015, focusing primarily on performance art and temporary site-specific installations.

Paper documentation from the collection consists of project planning and publicity, with other formats containing photographic evidence of the pieces themselves. One strength of the collection is the video record and audience reactions to the performance pieces themselves. The table below indicates the quantity of audio-visual carriers within the collection requiring digitisation intervention in order to remain accessible.

Table one with quantities of obsolete formats for digitisation

With around 800 individual carriers suitable for digitisation, but without the capability to do so within the university, the following decisions had to be made.

Who could externally digitise the range of carriers? What would be the cost of external sourcing? How long would this take and what logistics were required? Within the university, item level metadata could be readily captured to align the carrier with possible archival content, but the process of digitising would be conducted externally.

And so began a fruitful partnership with external digitisation company, Great Bear Audio and Video Digitising. Funding was obtained through an internal Digital Humanities Fund and tranches of material were couriered to Bristol between 2023 and 2026. As a specialist digitisation company, they were able to address carrier degradation displayed and described below.

Partially burned Ampex ¼ audio tape boxes from Basement Group archive (earlier incarnation of Locus+)

This project was a particularly exciting one for Great Bear Audio and Video Digitising as the collection contained so much important artwork from such a wide range of artists. Locus+ (and its earlier incarnations The Basement Group and Projects UK) were groundbreaking in commissioning women, migrant artists, and artists of colour, at a time when this was not the norm within live art in the UK. The collection contains so many gems, including early work by artists such as Mona Hatoum Isaac Julien, who have since become internationally recognised.

Partially melted ¼ tape spool from Basement Group archive (earlier incarnation of Locus+)

Grear Bear Audio And Video Digitising expected the recordings held on these tapes to present with far more distortion than they did, given that the high temperatures they have been subject to would typically cause warping of the PET tape base, exacerbated hydrolysis of the binder (chemical breakdown) and disruption of magnetic signal storage.

Raw unedited camera “rushes” for Richard Grayson’s Magpie Index (2010) on XDCAM HD discs.

These Sony XDCAM “Professional Discs” are now rarely seen, being an early digital recording optical disc format. These are an example of a born-digital format within the collection, transferred digitally (rather than migrated), using both Sony PDW-F75 XDCAM HD and Sony PDW-U1 Professional Disc recorders.

The final tranche has recently been ingested into the University systems and processed in accordance with the University’s digital preservation workflows. Cataloguing metadata is being prepared so that AV content can be viewed by request in the Special Collections reading room. It is hoped that recorded and digitised AV outputs of ephemeral performances, situating the North-east within a vibrant visual arts landscape will continue to be accessible and viewed by audiences in the future.