Preservation of Original Video and Audio Recordings

FAIN: PW-253911-17

Performa, Inc. (New York, NY 10011-0028)
RoseLee Goldberg (Project Director: July 2016 to June 2019)

A project to plan for a Website that would provide access to Performa’s archive of performance-based art works representing over 700 artists, dating from 2004 to the present. The archive includes more than 500 hours of original video recordings, 500 hours of sound recordings, over 150,000 photographs, and physical and digital ephemera such as artist renderings and curatorial correspondence documenting the production and presentation of works in Performa Biennial Visual Arts Performances.

Funding is requested to help facilitate the discovery process, planning, and prototyping towards development of a website for the presentation of materials from Performa's archive. The archive has recently been acquired by New York University's Fales Library, who will begin the process of cataloging and digitizing the archive in Fall 2016, preserving all materials for posterity and making the archive available to researchers at the Fales. Planning is underway to make the archive available via an accessible interactive digital platform for broader audiences as well. Conceived of as a "living archive" the website will encourage research and critical dialogue on interdisciplinary performance practice, fulfilling a crucial aspect of Performa's mission of providing audiences with direct access to artists and providing the intellectual tools necessary to understand and critique performance-based art and thereby interpret the artistic and cultural shifts occurring in the world around us.