Approaches, Strategies and Theoretical and Practice-Based Research Methods to investigate and archive video art. Some reflections from the REWIND projects

This paper will discuss methodologies, approaches and issues, emerging out of three major research projects that have investigated early histories of video art in Europe: REWIND (2004 ongoing), REWIND Italia (2011-2014) and EWVA (2015-2018). The paper will discuss how the projects have engaged with the history of the apparatus, the identity and status of the artworks, preservation methods, and the legacy of these video artworks today. A particular focus will be on semi-structured questionnaires for interviews structured to capture oral histories, memories and recollections, that in some cases would have been otherwise lost to future knowledge and the uncovering of lost artworks and their available documentation. The speakers directly involved in the projects - will discuss solutions, risks and experiences encountered in the projects and future research perspectives for re-covering, collecting, archiving and narrating the histories of early video art in Europe. The paper will discuss also different practice-based research methods, platforms and engagement strategies, including re-installation and re-enactment.


INTRODUCTION
This paper will discuss methodologies, approaches and issues, emerging out of three major research projects that have investigated early histories of video art in Europe: REWIND (2004 -ongoing), REWINDItalia (2011REWINDItalia ( -2014 and EWVA European Women's Video in the 70s and 80s (2015)(2016)(2017)(2018), developed at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee by the REWIND Research Team.
A particular focus will be given to how the projects have engaged with the history of the apparatus, the identity and status of the artworks, preservation methods and migration to digital formats, curatorial and engagement strategies and the legacy of these video artworks today.

REWIND
Due to the obsolescence of early video technologysuch as various open reel tape and cassette formats utilised in the 70s and 80s -, over time many pioneering early video artworks were no longer available. Some artists and video art centres had migrated artworks to newer formats like VHS to allow for easier distribution and viewing but in most cases of inferior quality to the original. Also due to generational copying the quality of the copies with time progressively deteriorated. So even if some works were in fact available, the result was in most cases poor, and in some cases looked visibly different from how the work was shown in the 70s and 80s (this might also include different versions of the work on later formats).
Prompted by this situation, in 2004 artist and academic Stephen Partridge initiated the REWIND project at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, in collaboration with artist and academic Jackie Hatfield, and received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Partridge had experienced first-hand the obsolescence of the medium as he was a video artist who had pioneered the medium in the mid 70s and was a founding member of the renown British collective London Video Arts.
At the same time, independently, similar projects of migration and recovery were developed in Europe as well as new research around histories of early video art. Most significant cases include the digitisation of the ZKM video archive in Karlsruhe (Frieling & Herzogenrath (2006); Blas & Weibel (2010)), the video archive at Montevideo, Amsterdam (now LIMA) (Wijers (2003)) and the art/tapes/22 video collection at ASAC -The Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts at the Venice Biennale (Saba (2007)).
The REWIND project aimed to fill a gap in the history of video art by recovering a number of seminal early British video artworks that were at the time believed to be in danger of being lost due to them being held on obsolete formats and therefore not available for viewing. The project migrated them to digital formats and collected bibliographies, conducted interviews -securing the memories of an aging generation of pioneers, and collected various items of documentation (including ephemera e.g. posters, flyers etc). This methodology -which encompassed bibliographical and archival research and the collection of oral testimonies through semistructured questionnaires -allowed the gaps to be filled and to verify information in written resources and to recover data and stories that were at risk of permanent loss.
The migration of the videotapes -including 1/2" EIAJ, 1/2" CV, VHS, U-matic, U-Matic Hi Band, Betacam, Betacam SP, 1 Type C, MII to Digibeta and then to file -was carried out by Media Archivist Adam Lockhart at the REWIND Media Preservation Lab (Lockhart (2012)). The lab was founded for the purposes of the project and has been developing techniques in the recovery and restoration of obsolete media, such as heat treatment, signal processing and postproduction. Since its inception, the REWIND Lab has recovered and digitised more than 450 videos. Furthermore, the lab has provided consultancy services and collaborated with other organisations, such as LUX, TATE, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Glasgow School of Art on the digitisation and restoration of video works.
During REWIND Partridge and Lockhart were also involved in the AHRC funded research project Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema (2008-9) initiated by Dr Jackie Hatfield (then David Curtis on Hatfield's death), which focused on theories and histories of this artform and its relation to the contemporary digital practices. This collaboration impacted profoundly the canon of REWIND, and resulted in a publication (Rees et al. (2011)).
The project also investigated how to re-exhibit, screen and re-perform the recovered works using a combination of old and new technology, whilst endeavouring to keep the work as close as possible to the original intentions of the artist. For this purpose the REWIND Lab collected display equipment including CRT monitors etc. This collection enabled the re-instalment and reenactment of significant early video artworks at various REWIND events. In 2010 in conjunction with Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow, works from the important Event Space One (1986, Transmission Gallery) and Video Towards Defining a n A esthetic (1976, Third Eye Centre) video exhibitions were restaged in the exhibition Lost and Found, and included works from Tony Sinden, Stephen Partridge, Stephen Littman, Pictorial Heroes, Zoe Redman and Kevin Atherton. The Duvet Brothers Live Multiscreen show which toured in 1986 was re-enacted as it was originally, in 2010 at the DJCAD Visual Research Centre, then displayed for several weeks as an exhibition, for the first time.
In the early stages of the REWIND project an Advisory group compiled a selected list of artistsattaining to the criteria of equality and diversitythat would be involved in the project. This list was revised and implemented at later stages, where more artists were included. The information, the materials and the interviews collected were made publicly available through the online database/website.  It is remarkable to notice that Monitor Live! stressed elements as repetition and the performative aspect of the original Monitor and its investigation and selfreflection into the specificity of the medium (Rewind+Play (2009) The re-enactment was very interesting for me: for the first time, maybe surprisingly I saw how performative the work was from the very beginning, rather than just a very structural and formally didactic piece. The anachronistic use of colour and video projection added a further dimension, and my presence as an older person added a further layer of poignancy. The work seemed to be opened up to new interpretation and audiences' (Leuzzi 2016, p229).
Monitor Live! has stimulated an interesting response to the work, in particular among younger generations, and inspired other re-enactments reaching new audiences on the World Wide Web and exploring contemporary technology (Youtube (2010)). Near the end of the exhibition run, the analogue TV signal was turned off at the local transmitter, signaling an end to analogue and the rise of digital. All of the screens displayed white noise for the remaining days of the exhibition. The piece could be considered a unique experience due to the substantial effort displayed in sourcing and installing the 1001 monitors as well as the impossibility of re-installing the work, due to the switch off of the analogue signal (Lockhart 2012, p208). This was also the first time Progressive Recession was shown since its debut at The Video Show in the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1975.
This time being shown in colour and not black and white.
Two years later Richard Saltoun approached Partridge to curate (assisted by Lockhart) the exhibition: David Hall Situations Envisaged (17 July -14 August 2015) which included a number of video installation works, single channel works, and 16mm films (the latter made in partnership with Tony Sinden) These 16mm films were, at the time, recently scanned by funding received from the Henry Moore foundation awarded to LUX and Steven Ball at CSM, University of the Arts, London. Saltoun as a private gallery dealer had been working with David Hall shortly before his death in 2014, and arranged the acquisition by TATE of his work and archive in collaboration with Hall's daughter Debi Hall. Saltoun continues to represent Hall, and with the interest of commercial galleries once again, confirming the impact of the REWIND project.
One of the main outputs from the REWIND project is a miscellany -edited by media theoretician Sean Cubitt and Partridge -that includes chapters on different aspects, approaches and artworks explored during the project (Cubitt & Partridge (2012)). It is interesting to notice that several chapters reference the interviews collected during the project. These interviews have effectively become a primary source for the REWIND book and more in general for academic research. Also, REWIND published a DVD of UK work from the 1970s (2009) -in collaboration with the art agency LUX-with a curated selection of the recovered works. This publication was a fundamental tool to promote diffusion and availability of these works and through the accompanying booklet to contexualise and analyse the work.
As a follow-on engagement project from REWIND, Lockhart developed the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project TV21 (DJCAD, University of Dundee, 2014) in collaboration with Dundee Contemporary Arts and film educator Sandie Jamieson. The project was structured as a workshop for young people (aged 16-19) who were trained in the production of video and sound and familiarised with the REWIND collection. The intention of the project was for the young people to make short works in response to work from the REWIND collection in the spirit of David Hall's TV I nterruptions (1971) and the UK Channel 4 series produced by Fields & Frames 19:4:90 TV Interventions (1990). An exercise as part of TV21 gave the participants the chance -under Lockhart's supervision -to explore and re-enact an iconic early British video artwork (David Critchley's Trialogue, 1977, 7 min) to investigate how the old medium and the new medium worked. In this case, the re-enactment -to use concepts outlined by Anglo-Canadian media art curator Sarah Cookenabled the transmission of how the medium worked and how contemporary technology can be Some reflections from the REWIND projects Leuzzi • Partridge • Lockhart 277 employed to translate an obsolete apparatus (Cook 2007, p136).
Further work by Lockhart on the preservation of media artworks, was investigated with the recreation of two works by David Hall using virtual reality. These are to be seen not as a replacement for the work but as an illustration of how they would be seen once the original display equipment (CRT monitors) have gone obsolete. These works were A Situation Envisaged: The Rite II (1989), displayed at NEoN festival, Dundee, Scotland in 2017 and Television Interruptions: The Installation (1971Installation ( /2006 shown at Besides t he Screen conference, King's College London, 2018. These were made in conjunction with VR professionals Rhoda Ellis and Sang-Hun Yu respectively.

REWINDITALIA
The REWIND project was followed by REWINDItalia which officially started in 2011, with the support of the AHRC.
Differently from REWIND, REWINDItalia did not aim to recover and migrate early Italian video artworks to digital, but to explore and re-assess the pioneering contribution of Italian video art centres, productions and artists in the development of the medium as an artform in the 70s and 80s.
It aimed to uncover the systems of production and distribution that characterised the early Italian video art scene and the international relationships and collaborations developed with European and American galleries, curators, artists and festivals.
Based on these premises, REWINDItalia -similarly to REWIND -carried out a rigorous literature review, archival research in private and public archives and a number of semi-structured interviews conducted in Italy, to retrace the multiple and complex stories of Italian video art. Relying on the available literature (including Bordini, Fagone), the project pursued, at the same time, the idea of providing an overview of the known stories -which were in many cases marginalised in the art history canon -and to fill some gaps in the existing narratives. The semi-structured questionnaire explored, in particular, access to apparatus, participation in exhibitions, festivals and symposiums and access to International early video artwork collaborations among Italian video art centres. The early stage of data collection led to the publication of the Chronology of Video Art in Italy ) (Leuzzi

Luca Maria Patella: a Case Study
Although REWINDItalia did not aim to recover any works, some significant exceptions were made. Leuzzi discovered that the video and media pioneer Luca Maria Patella had in his private collection some 1/2" EIAJ open reel tapes from the 70s. These had never been recovered before, so there was an opportunity to preserve some pioneering works by the artist. Considering the importance of the contribution of Patella in early video history and the fact that at the time there were no early video artworks by Patella available (although many were documented in old catalogues and books), the open reels were recovered by Lockhart in the REWIND Lab. The reels revealed three video artworks -that were poorly documented in the available literature (Di Marino (1994)) -showing the synergy in the use of different types of media, highlighting the signature style of Patella (including film, carousels, home-made machines, photography, artist's books and prints), his famous word plays (inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy ), his reference to psychology, theory of perception and colours and self-quotes (Leuzzi (2015), Barilli (1975) (Leuzzi 2015, p170). The machine -now dismantled -allowed the performer to create fade in and fade outs of slides in a gradual and complex rhythm, accompanied by a musical score. The video is today considered the only visual trace of this apparatus. The migration of these videos finally allowed the inclusion of Patella's contribution in the Italian video art canon and more in general in the art history of the 70s (Lancioni (2013)).
& Catricalá (2015)). The chronology acted as a tool to organise and map relationships, genealogies and exchanges, outlining production and distribution centres, exhibitions and theoretical publications and retrace the cross-fertilisation of video with different media.

Engagement Events
REWINDItalia's participation at the VideoEx Festival at the Walcheturm (Zurich, July 2014) marked a milestone in the project: Partridge and Leuzzi invited musician and composer Claudio Ambrosini -who Some reflections from the REWIND projects Leuzzi • Partridge • Lockhart 278 had experimented with video in the 70s and early 80s at Galleria del Cavallino in Venice -to create a re-enactment of his early video performance Videosonata (1979) in front of a live audience at the VideoEx Festival in Zurich, as part of a curated screening program dedicated to Italian experimental film and video. The original Videosonata was opened by Ambrosini introducing the work: the artist explained to an imaginary audience that his objective was to replicate how a video could work on the piano and re-create the scanning of the cathode ray tube using a monitor and an electric piano. In the version at the Walcheturm, Ambrosini decided to mediate the work to the audience in the room, by introducing the original piece and explaining the historical context and the analogue technology employed with which it had been produced. After this introduction, he proceeded to perform.
Projecting the original Videosonata on the wall -both in Zurich and later in a second iteration at the CCA, Glasgow -allowed Ambrosini to literally engage live with the original video, but also stimulated a higher involvement and empathy within the audience, expanding the work in space and time. Present and past were confronted in the same temporal and spatial frame and interlaced a 'palimpsest' of sound -one recorded in the past and one live in the present -including moving image (Leuzzi (2019)). This re-enactment helped to collect further traces of the original work, incorporating original oral recollections and data in the existing documentation of Videosonata. The rehearsals provided pivotal opportunities of research: while the artist re-performed the work several times to refamiliarise himself with the gestures and the different equipment, the research team was allowed to collect documentation and to dissect the work via the new production. These approaches aim to inform the preservation of the work, beyond mere migration, exploring forms of re-interpretation and engagement and contributing to the current conversations and debates on forms of preservation of new media art (Rinehart & Ippolito (2014)).

The Book
The REWINDItalia book marked another milestone: which emerged in reviews and scholarly papers, REWINDItalia has become an important research tool in Italy and internationally likewise (Tozzi (2015); Blackwood (2016)). The book included a number of historical and seminal pieces about Italian video art translated for the first time into English as well as new commissioned chapters which analysed aspects, themes and approaches from different perspectives. In particular the translation of historical pieces by Renato Barilli, Lola Bonora, Silvia Bordini, Paolo Cardazzo, Simonetta Fadda, Vittorio Fagone, Marco Maria Gazzano, Luciano Giaccari, Sandra Lischi, and Valentina Valentini, allowed the English-speaking academics, curators and practitioners to have access for the first time to video art histories, data, theory and primary sources which documented the most relevant video art centres, artists and exhibitions from the 70s and 80s including art/tapes/22, Centro Video Arte in Ferrara, VideObelisco in Rome, and Galleria del Cavallino. Furthermore, some of chapters, as for example those by Bonora, Giaccari and Fagone, are now rare or difficult to access. For this reason, REWINDItalia has become an important resource for Italian academics as well.

EWVA
During REWINDItalia, analysing Italian women artists' early video in relationship with works in the REWIND Collection, several early women artists' video artworks shared similar imagery, and common features and themes, sometimes even if the artists did not have direct contact between each other (Leuzzi (2012)). This aspect can be especially traced with women artists who were addressing feminist issues, even if they were not involved in collectives or considered themselves feminists. Of course, this can be also directly linked to the specificities of video (including for example live feedback, the difficulty in editing the material, the portability of the apparatus) as a recently acquired medium that at the time, artists were interested to experiment with.
This fil rouge had not yet been fully investigated at a European level and EWVA (DJCAD, 2015(DJCAD, -2018 -led by feminist video pioneer Elaine Shemiltreceived funding to explore the subject. The project was developed through a mixed methodological approach inspired by the previous REWIND projects, that encompassed archival and bibliographical research; collecting and comparing published and archival materials, including video artworks, video documentation etc and qualitative interviews. The interviews spanned issues previously covered in projects like REWIND and REWINDItalia including access to apparatus, distribution and production but also issues specific to this project including feminist theory, feminist video collectives, and political movements. Particular attention, for example, was paid to feminist collectives such as Circles in London, which enabled production, promotion and distribution, playing a key role in supporting women artists moving image (Deepwell (2014)).

Curatorial Platforms for EWVA
In 2015 -a few months into the project -the EWVA team started exploring curatorial strategies and platforms as forms of practice-based research methods to carry out the research, receive feedback and engage both with specialists in the field and a general audience.
Autoritratti (The Showroom, London, 12 December 2015) was a performative screening which explored different methodological tools, including dialogue, autobiography, critique, cross-genre and fragmented narratives ). This approach was inspired by Italian feminist thinker Carla Lonzi and her book Autoritratto (1969). In Autoritratto, Lonzi merged different interviews recorded independently with artists. The result was an imagined and fictive dialogue, that outlined a portrait through the relations among artists and their critics.
Inspired by Lonzi's approach and theory, Autoritratti created a dialogue of selected video 'self-portraits' by women artists -both pioneers and from younger generations -who have explored the themes of identity and selfhood from different perspectives, investigating the female and male bodies, eroticism and desire, motherhood, the stereotypical and patriarchal image of women in media and the marginalisation of women in the art system. The platform employed real and interpreted voices, that were performed by artists and performers.
The curated selection included Italian (Anna Valeria Borsari, Ketty La Rocca, Federica Marangoni) and British (Catherine Elwes, Tina Keane and Shemilt) video pioneers, and therefore showed some of the common themes (as the body, motherhood, identity) and approaches -that fil rouge -at the core of the EWVA project ).  (2017)).
Being part of a feminist program allowed EWVA to explore the works from different feminist theories, and stimulated the debate and feedback on the project from a younger generation of practitioners, curators and art historians.
This event was also an occasion to recover a video artwork by Anna Valeria Borsari, which had been partially migrated to digital by La Camera Ottica in Udine and thanks to what could be defined a 'light' digital restoration of the work it was possible to show in full for the first time at the Showroom.
In December 2016, a second iteration of this curatorial platform was curated by Dr Diana Georgiou, Giulia Casalini and Leuzzi and drew inspiration once again from Lonzi and from the Italian femi-nist philosopher Adriana Cavarero's book Relating Narratives: S torytelling a nd S elfhood (2000), where exploring one's identity is possible only through the desire to hear their own story narrated by another person. The selection encompassed works by artists from different generations and countries expanding on EWVA's core idea of common thematic and approaches in women's artists' video. The themes spanned from motherhood to identity, eroticism, love and representation within the patriarchal system. The choice of adopting this form of re-enactment was inspired by the experience gained through REWIND and REWINDItalia. From a researcher's perspective, in Doppelgä nger 's case the reenactment could play a fundamental role as practice-based methodology, to dissect the work and investigate how it was technically created: the re-enactment allowed us to learn that Shemilt utilised a video monitor to provide a live feed from the camera. The live feed was featured on a monitor that was reflected on the corner of the mirror used in the video. Based on the reflected live feed, Shemilt drew her self-portrait on the mirror creating the doppelgä nger. The reenactment stimulated the artist's physical memory and allowed the curators to be actively engaged in the new production.
Other experimental curatorial platforms, adopted during EWVA, included For this event Finnish video pioneer Marikki Hakola recovered, with the support of AV-arkki, the video The T ime is Right for... that was presented for the first time in its recovered version at Summerhall. In this case EWVA stimulated the independent recovery of the video, providing an outlet for exhibition and contextualisation.
For this exhibition we also re-installed Giny Vos' Giovanni Arnofini and his Young Wife (1984). This re-installation allowed investigation into the apparatus involved in the original work and the themes raised by the work.
As can be immediately assumed from the title, that work employs a reproduction of the famous 15th century masterpiece by Jan van Eyck located at the National Gallery in London. In a still debated and controversial interpretation by Erwin Panofsky (1934) the painting would represent the Arnolfini wedding, and the two figures visible in the reflection on the convex mirror would be the witnesses at the ceremony, a necessary element to legalise a marital oath. In Panofsky's view, this interpretation is reinforced by the graffiti-esque inscription in Latin that reads 'Jan van Eyck was here 1434' which appears above the mirror. The latter, in Vos' version, is replaced by a monitor, which shows the live image of the viewer, captured by a video camera. In this way the artist literally embraces the futurist concept of placing the viewer 'at the centre of the painting'. Drawing from Panofsky's fascinating interpretation, the contemporary viewer is the witness of the scene, testifying the 'hic et nunc ' (here and now). This interactive feature must have seemed particularly new to the visitors in the 1980s when portable video cameras and CCTV were not readily available as they are today.
Giovanni A rnofini and his Young Wife also raises issues of surveillance and control evoked by the fact the work was made in the infamous Orwellian year of 1984.

The Book
As for the previous projects the most relevant output for EWVA is a book edited by Leuzzi, Elaine Shemilt and Partridge (Leuzzi et al (2019)). The book includes a number of thematic chapters (including identity, eroticism, motherhood, the ephemeral use of the apparatus) as well as chapters dedicated to specific geographical areas and countries (e.g. Poland, the Balkans, Ireland). Due to the expanse of the area and the period, neither the project nor the book could cover exhaustively the subject. Therefore, the EWVA book aims to become a powerful tool to stimulate further the research into women artists' fundamental contribution to the development of early video art in Europe.

CONCLUSIONS
The REWIND projects have managed to successfully recover and promote artworks and histories from the early development of video art in Europe that -otherwise -would have been lost. Through exhibitions, screenings, and various engagement projects and events, articles and books, the team has aimed to support the recognition of those video pioneers that had been marginalised in the art system and were not yet in the art history canon. The REWIND projects have impacted the field, influencing curators, authors and practitioners, and inspiring exhibitions, publications and projects.
Looking at the various outputs of the research, with time, the REWIND team has identified areas, aspects, artists and mediums that could benefit from further investigation. Therefore, in the future the team will continue to develop projects from the REWIND Archives and projects, with the aim of further promoting knowledge and research in the field, capitalising on the exceptional expertise and network gained in the past fifteen years.