Nate Dinwiddie - The Venus Project Archives - JF's Centennial Event (Repository)
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Nate Dinwiddie graduated
from University of Kansas
where he studied filmmaking
and philosophy.
As a student
he gained experience in archiving
while working
at the Dole Institute of Politics
and Archiving and Museum. Since 2011,
he has been helping TVP with the main focus
of archiving its materials.
What's up.
That's alright- the first slide.
A few preliminary remarks
before I get into what's up there.
I found from the beginning
that when I first arrived,
a lot of the materials were sort of
disorganized because Jacque and Roxanne
had been busy
all their lives working on everything
that generates that collection, so
it was a bit disordered,
and I immediately saw the need to
organize that all into
a comprehensive archive and
that to me appeared to be the most
crucial task that I could contribute to.
So yeah...
for obvious reasons, if we agree that
the work of Jacque Fresco is important
and valuable to humanity, then
it should seem obvious that
archiving it would be the...
most fulfilling thing to do.
It's also the-... I grant that
[I'm] the lucky one to get to do it.
Just as a note on archiving itself,
one...
sort of a general description of it
is you might say that it's a-...
it's an attempt to resist entropy
in the most general form.
Everything in the universe
is subject to deterioration
and breaking down and getting lost
and being dispersed.
So archiving is precisely that:
trying to resist
the entropy that afflicts everything.
So it's creating order
where there is none.
Now one way of doing that is
mainly through... a database.
It's all done through the computer and
all you do is,
you assign identification numbers to
all items in the archive
and try to correlate them and
make them as immediately and
thoroughly accessible to the user.
So obviously, why archive?
Well, it's a treasure trove of information
and as we continue and begin new projects
it can be used as
a source of information,
but more importantly,
especially as Jacque grows older,
as a reference to the man who brought
all this information together,
it acts as a precise reference for-
or as a guidance.
Plus Jacque and Roxanne, they worked
together for 30 or 40 years now,
and Jacque long before that.
So it always seemed clear to me:
why let all this creative work
go to waste?
and to try and make all of it
as accessible as possible,
because so much work
has already been done.
A lot of new projects are started up
and a lot of new work is created but
as long as that stuff remains neglected,
we'll be at a loss.
It's also a way for me
to develop my own understanding and
to come more in contact with
the detail of the project.
I'm also kind of interested in
the history of The Venus Project
and the biography of Jacque Fresco so
it's interesting to see
the evolution of the ideas over time.
So, as far as the actual archive,
I've attempted to
conform to the DAX standard of archiving,
which is just about the
complete standard for archiving,
at least in America as far as I know.
Of course as resources have been limited
my conformity to that standard
has been also limited, so
I've done the best I could
with the resources I've had.
And that standard is derived
from a book 'Describing Archives:
A Content Standard'
which is a publication of
the Society of American Archivists.
OK so, the content of the
archive mostly ranges from
the 1970s to the present.
Much of the work
Jacque had done prior to the '70s
has been lost so that includes sketches
and technical work and
maybe illustrations and even paintings.
And of course, a lot of the lectures
of that time was more difficult to record,
but, those would be lost too.
So, here we are with the first slide.
The main asset of the archive
would be the audio and video material.
From that we get Jacque
in all his glory from back in the day.
These are the numbers here,
and just briefly run through them.
There are 705 recordings
in audio and that spans across 611 tapes.
You can see in the picture here
that's just about all
of the audio-visual content
that exists currently in the archive,
and that totals to 740 hours
and there's also everything
that was produced digitally,
outside of this physical set you see here,
which amounts to 345 hours.
And then the video content:
1810 tapes, and that's 1500 total hours.
Some of that is, just stock footage,
some of it's footage that
Jacque had recorded of his models,
and then much of it is also lectures.
And then there's the digital content
of that, of video which is
as you see there: 2,700.
But as far as lecture content,
which would be the most informative,
you can see down at the bottom
below the photo, that's 4,000 hours.
That's about 166 days of
constant nonstop streaming, 24 hours.
So the uses of this material
would mainly be for further productions.
As you can see in 'The Choice Is Ours'
a lot of the interview footage
that was used for that,
that is of Jacque,
was taken from 2007, so those were
tapes from the archive. And...
those and even earlier lectures
from the '70s
or any illustrations and sketches
that Jacque has done will serve as well in
producing further audio-visual media
to disseminate.
And also a long-term goal
of the website is to
make available a lot of this content,
especially the audio and video,
through some kind of web streaming
or maybe a subscription service,
and that's one way to help support
The Venus Project.
And then, I'm interested in arranging
a timeline of all this material,
see how it spans across time.
And secondary...
would be the design work
that Jacque has done, which
so far as I've counted -
the numbers aren't exact, it's estimated -
of 5800 items,
specific unique items
that Jacque has created
visually through sketching
or technical illustrations or paintings or
even concept art.
And if any of you have been
to The Venus Project or
you've probably seen
much of the video online,
there's hundreds of models that Jacque...
he's created over the years that
really is a strenuous process
and takes a long time, so
accumulating 400 is quite a task.
And then there's a lot of photographic items
which are not yet processed but
it's estimated about
5,000 of those which-...
a lot of it is of the models and of
the construction process of
The Venus Project as they were doing it.
And then...
less important would be a lot of
the documents that they have there,
a lot of unprocessed paperwork,
sort of like manuscripts and
publicity files and
Jacque kind of has his own little library
too which I worked on archiving.
Now an important thing -
the most important thing of archiving -
is preservation, and as you can see here
this is an illustration Jacque had done
a long time ago,
probably in the '70s; it's not dated.
As you can see,
he encased it at the time in a plastic
enclosing and... time has gotten to it.
So, this entropy at work.
This has entered a stage of
what they call vinegar syndrome,
which is just the chemical breakdown
of the plastic, and
as far as I can see here
the illustration underneath is still-...
the ink hasn't smeared,
it's all still intact. So,
perhaps a long-term goal
would be to get funding
to restore an illustration. This isn't
the only one, there's a few more.
And that's a painstaking task
to restore something like this.
You'd have to hire a conservator,
who's probably an expert in chemistry,
and they have to soak this in
several chemical solutions
to dissolve the plastic on the outside and
moisten the paper to...
bring it back to shape.
So the method of preservation temporarily
is online storage
and there's estimated 60 terabytes of data
that has to be backed up and I'm
in the process of backing all that up now.
But the more long-term solution,
not just for us but for archivists
everywhere, is something called the M-Disc,
which is sort of a-
a novel invention
as far as recordable discs go.
There's a layer on the disk
that is made of sort of a metallic substance
and it requires a stronger laser
to burn the-
to encode the data onto the disk,
and, the estimated life of a disc like this
is 10,000 years, so they claim.
So that would be the long-term solution,
however,
again the problem is
resources and funding. So,
to buy the discs required to
store 60 terabytes of data
is in excess of $10,000, so
perhaps someday we'll seek funding
for the archiving materials.
OK so this is related to archiving:
we have a transcript project
for the audio and video materials,
and this is so that we
can gather all the texts -
everything that Jacque has ever said,
that's ever been recorded saying -
and we can process that through
a database, and that gives us a sort of map
of... his brain you might say,
and that will allow us- that'll serve
as a guide for any future projects.
And there's a treasure trove
of information
in especially these older lectures
where he goes into more detail because
his audience is familiar
with his ideas already so...
That is a project
that I'm trying to get going.
Hasn't gone far,
but so far there's 38 transcripts
of the classic lectures from the '70s,
and I can thank Filip Ivanov
of the Bulgaria team
who [has] transcribed about half of those,
and then
a guy named Pejman Parchami from Sweden,
who has transcribed the other half.
And then there's about 58 transcripts
for video tapes.
Ideally, we'll get...
all of these video tapes
and audiotapes transcribed.
[It will] probably take several years but,
I invite anyone to participate
in that way.
It doesn't require much background, just
proficiency in English and ability
to endure a tedious task of typing.
So if anyone wants to contribute
to that they can
email at [email protected] and
I can get you started on that.
So the uses of this transcript information
like I said
is to process it through a database,
so that we have a big picture
of Jacque's ideas and then also,
for activist reasons,
perhaps to develop a study guide
for activists in their own learning,
and then any future publications
that they may want to put out.
Last thing is, I'm interested in
collecting anything and everything I can
pertaining to Jacque
and the Venus Project, so
if any of you here or out there
online or anywhere
has any material related to
any events that they have held
such as the World Tour,
or events like this,
or if any of you have been
to the tours in Venus on Saturdays, then
I'd be glad to collect anything
that you can contribute, so-
Or, also any essays or articles
or if you're academic
any theses or dissertations
or any journals
you may have seen any articles in,
and any magazines or newspapers
that you think
we may not have seen,
which would be mainly
anything outside of the United States, so
you can send that to the
[email protected]
That's all I got for you.
[Applause]