With support from Memoriav, the project is securing the future of the surviving performance tapes from VIPER and experiMENTAL. The aim is to preserve two of the most important video festivals in Switzerland as a digital festival archive for future screening, education and research, and make it accessible via the Media Archive of the Arts.
For that purpose, the ZHdK Archive and the Department of Design & Art at the University of Lucerne have taken over the video collections from the experiMENTAL festival in Zurich (1991–1997) and from VIPER (Lucerne and Basel 1980-2005). The objects are not originals, nor are they one-off items. What is unique about the collections, however, is the opportunity – by preserving the entire context of the two festivals – to reveal their cultural and historical importance and role as contemporary focal points for anyone interested in video. The collections from the two festivals document a period of great change in video-making and offer a broadly-based perspective on the medium. Although the majority of the works can be categorized as art video or video art, nevertheless the two festivals presented video-making that crossed all the then still unclearly defined internal boundaries (art video, community video, exercise video, ethnographic video, documentary video).