ALL ARCHIVAL WORK IS DEATH WORK: PRESERVING, SELF-HOSTING, AND WORSHIPPING MY GRANDPA'S VIDEO8 TAPES

Azad Namazie

Content note: mentions of death & suicide.

I work in an omni-locked, windowless room surrounded by the endless droning of vintage computing equipment. I spend hours at a non-networked computer transferring deprecated filetypes from CDs, DVDs, and removable storage media. While managing these unpolished traces (documents, images, videos) of people, most of whom have since passed on, I thought to myself: all archival work is a kind of death work. And I do not just mean death in the biological sense. People die, yes, but also digital storage media fail, due to material degradation, environmental conditions, hardware malfunctions, or software corruption. When our devices fail, how will we resurrect the familiar (and unfamiliar) traces of our loved ones?

This was the urgency that motivated me to self-host a digital archive of my grandfather's Video8 tapes as my own experimentation with solidarity infrastructures. These tapes document the first 10 years of family's life (late 1980s - 1990s) in the us after forcibly migrating from Iran as asylum-seekers during the Iran-Iraq War. My grandpa is a physical media head, having ripped thousands of hours of television programming on VHS and amassing a large collection of home videotapes. I asked him if he had any home movies I could transfer for him, and he immediately offered a collection of 8 Video8 tapes to preserve.

I stopped thinking fondly or positively about nostalgia when my grandmother died in April of this year. Not only has nostalgia been weaponized by fascistic regimes to distort the past and consolidate power, but it also locks us in a state of viewing the past as an outside observer rather than an active shaper and participant. My grandmother was our family historian. She carried a lineage, our story, and a diaspora on her back. She took her own life this year when the grief and alienation of her struggles with mental health and the hyper-individualism of US society became too unbearable. In her absence, I felt insurmountable grief, rage, and betrayal. How could she do this to us? To me? Then, in the first few weeks of this course, our instructor Meghna shared an essay by Dagaaba spiritualist Sobonfu Somé on embracing grief:

"I believe the future of our world depends greatly on the manner in which we handle our grief... There are things we can do in society to help heal. We can begin by accepting our own and each other’s grief."

She goes on to describe different infrastructures we can develop to process grief: places like grief rooms and shrines in public where people can visit. What if I could develop a virtual grief room for my loved ones to view these tapes? Could archival practice be the key to unshackling (and processing) my grief?

Unsurprisingly, her spirit is all over these tapes. Through my grandpa's gaze, we see her in various states of candor, reticence, domesticity, and play. After deciding to proceed with this as my final project for this course, it took a mountain of courage to finally interact with these materials and become an active participant in their digital preservation.

I started by cataloging all the tapes in a spreadsheet, assigning unique identifiers, date ranges, transcribing any container annotations, and documenting other preservation actions. I then handed the tapes over to my dear friend and collaborator Jackie Foryste, who is Technical Director at TAPE Los Angeles (if you are in LA, hit them up!), a worker-owned non-profit dedicated to the preservation of tape-based media. She graciously completed the digital transfers and loaded my hard drive with high-quality preservation .mkv files and access .mp4 files.

For my server practice, I purchased a raspberry pi5 that I situated in my living room with peripherals I secured from e-waste: a monitor, a keyboard and mouse, and an assortment of legacy cables. I first wanted the virtual grief room to take place solely in the terminal, so I configured the DebianOS and uploaded the digitized materials and inventory spreadsheet directly into a directory entitled tangdel-tapes (trans: nostalgia, heartsick). Then, I experimented with different ways of viewing the footage directly from my terminal. This side quest led me to discover a compression algorithm from the libcaca graphics device driver that converts pixels to ASCII characters through a process of vector quantization. This means sampling the frame down to grayscale with less than 8bit precision, assigning a character for each value, then quantizing to a full RGB colorspace.

All you have to do is cd into the directory where the file lives and input the following script:

DISPLAY= mplayer -quiet -vo caca /path/to/directory/input.mp4

And here is your output, directly within the terminal:

In these renderings, I could still make out her face— the gentle slope of her nose, her kind but mournful eyes— and even eerily, her joy. I had almost forgotten what it was like to see her smile, laugh, and dance. There is a hil malatino quote about interacting with archival specters: "haunting is not so different from loving." To behold her spirit again at the altar of my terminal felt like technological divination. Here she was, beaming at me, once again.

After a chat with Meghna, I decided to download the Jellyfin application to host the digitized files and accompanying metadata. Jellyfin is a free and open-source media server that allows you to organize, manage, and share digital media files to networked devices. I had a few stumbles at the beginning with the built-in hardware accelerator and transcoding software which made it impossible to play any of the files back. I think it has something to do with the video codec, but I will continue to tinker in the new year.

Though my flirtations with lossy compression reinforced some questions Meghna had posed: what is the purpose of a self-hosted media server? Will this server outlast the fall of empire?

To consider this question, I thought about migration as both a technical and cultural process. The tapes crossing borders; the signal crossing formats; each crossing incurs loss, but also survival. All information degrades over time. With some filesystems, even the act of interacting with a file can permanently alter it. While we cannot always achieve bit-level or lossless preservation, we can implement interventions that extend the lifespan of our precious digital materials beyond the limits of media failure, technological and societal change. The more labor we invest, the more autonomy we maintain.

This server practice allowed me to unearth the often invisibilized labor that sustains our memory infrastructures and material connections to the past. There is a popular adage within the digital preservation community: no one thinks about infrastructure until it breaks. But we know that decay is an inevitable part of all lifecycles, do we not? So are infrastructural ruptures. What if we not only thought about the ruptures in advance, but we pursued them fervently? What if instead of running away from our grief, our rage, our dead, we harnessed the unseen labors of our computers to create devotionals for our mourning?

Next Steps

I still need to tinker with Jellyfin and sort out the playback errors. Once I get that up and running, I plan to share the public link with my family members so that they can view the tapes by themselves at their own computers, or communally. Then, who knows! I might expand the media server for other home videos, not just those on tape.

༘⋆📼˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚༘⋆📼˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚༘⋆📼˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚༘⋆📼˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚༘⋆📼˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚༘⋆📼˚ ༘ ೀ

About the author

Azad Namazie is a poet, performance artist, and digital archivist from Los Angeles, CA. They create websites, archives, and multimedia performances for live and internet audiences.