BAVC News
Preservation Access Program Featured Artist: Charles Woodman
A clip from Dance Tracks (1990-1996), an early work by Charles Woodman, mastered on ¾” video at the Experimental Television Center, Preserved by BAVC Media At the end of 2016, we will have celebrated three years of continuous support from the National Endowment of the Arts for our Preservation Access Program (PAP), having provided affordable digitization and preservation services to nearly 100 artists and organizations whose latter-century works are locked into obsolete media formats. In celebration of reaching that milestone, we will be highlighting those participating artists whose dedication to preservation and access is exemplary. Featured this month is Charles [...]
Why our Job Search Success Team works
I wake up early in the morning to run. I put my sneakers by the bed so if I happen to forget it’s a running day, I trip over the shoes when I get up. For a long time I ran past a man sitting on a bench downtown, waiting for his shift to start at the local market. He’d always give me a wave and a happy “Hello.” I could make him out from blocks away and started to look forward to seeing him. Over the months and years, whenever I had an urge to skip the run, I’d [...]
The Unlikely Pioneers of Video Art
This post is written by former BAVC Media Presevationist Kelly Haydon Video cameras arrived on the consumer market at the same time women’s liberation entered mainstream consciousness, a dual-nascency that would beautifully intersect in the form of video art. In the 1960s and early 1970s, women artists were still largely excluded from the film and fine arts factions that offered high-profile openings, exhibits, and funding. Video was different. Free from the trappings of social construct, video provided a safe space for women to experiment and explore a novel medium while achieving levels of notoriety comparable to their male counterparts. A [...]
BAVC Media Youth Partner with The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
Since the beginning of the school year, four afternoons a week, the labs here at BAVC Media have been humming with the sounds of Next Gen students at work: editing together interviews recorded for their podcasts, adding green screen effects to their personal documentaries and coding interactive features for their websites. Even though graduation is quickly approaching, we’re so excited to announce that the hum we’ve all become so accustomed to won’t be quieting for the summer. Instead, students have the opportunity to put their industry-standard production skills and understanding of social justice frameworks, honed through our project-based curriculum, to [...]
QCSchool: Mean Square Error and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio Filters
Our second installment of QCSchool salutes the launch of QCTools 0.7.1 and the continued support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This post is written by former BAVC Media Presevationist Kelly Haydon If you have spent any time canoodling with QCTools playback filters, you may have noticed that the phrase “field difference” pops up a lot. The term “field” in videotape technology is something of a misnomer, but it refers simply to the odd or even number of scan lines that form a single frame of video. Imagine, if you will, a picture. Any picture will do – but [...]
Want a tech job? Stop looking!
So you’ve heard it before, when it comes to scoring a new job in tech, “It’s not what you know but who you know”. Good advice. In fact you’ve probably already come to realize that the online job-hunting routine is just not cutting it. The reality is that if you are looking at tech jobs that are posted right now, it’s already too late. Most jobs get filled by a qualified person who has benefited from the right introduction at the right time, namely before the position became vacant. Trolling job boards will never do that for you. It is [...]
The Future of Work with BAVC Media
Reviewing the requisite buzzwords of the moment in the world of work in the US, you’d think we’re at an inflection point: gig economy, portable benefits, diversity, and fissured workplace. It's easy to conclude that the pundits have something brilliant up their sleeves, and that the way we earn a living is about to be revolutionized. At BAVC Media we listen to the people who walk through our doors, a broad range of people from teen-aged, emerging media makers to septuagenarian journalists learning tech for the first time, to thirty-something hiring managers from some of the most innovative tech companies in [...]
BAVC Media Turns 40 in 2016
“It’s for video people; regardless of what your trip is. If you’re into video, do it.” In a 1976 video shared with BAVC Media by the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, a man in the San Francisco’s Castro district is being interviewed when suddenly he stops mid-interview and suggests that the man behind the video camera – the interviewer – go to a meeting at “the main library, Civic Center” to share with “all the video people in the Bay Area” what they could do if they had a center for video. He says that there is a “study [...]
Preservation Access Program Recipients Spring 2016
The Preservation Access Program, or PAP (pronounced p-a-p and not pap like the funny ladies in the Finance department like to say), is our popular, ongoing relief program for artists and small arts organizations seeking to preserve their works recorded to magnetic media. Thanks to a generous subsidy provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, BAVC Media is able to digitize and provide other preservation services at heavily discounted rates. PAP holds two application rounds per year, the latest one ending on January 14th, 2016. We’ve just told some amazing artists and organizations that they will be receiving the [...]
CLIR the Air with BAVC Media Preservation
dance magic, dance. Our 1/2" Open Reel decks have long been identified by their Bowie incarnations. Our January depression, sparked by the death of famous U-matic user, David Bowie*, was relieved only by the announcement that the Hidden Collections unit of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is accepting applications for its 2016 cycle. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CLIR has distributed millions of dollars to organizations with historical collections in the hopes of increasing access to scholars of all stripes. The mission of the grant is marvelous, offsetting the maddening expense of digitizing physical [...]
