Digital film digitization and restoration

Since 2006, the Contemporary Art Group in the Research Department of the French Museum Conservation and Research Center has been working on the phenomena of technological obsolescence. The purpose of this program is to study the impact of technological ev olution on contemporary art and, more specifically, on its preservation. More concretely, the program deals principally with media installations, which include analogue or digital audiovisual elements, in contemporary art collections. Many of these images are now conserved on obsolete devices and formats. The works? accessibility is threatened, as is their preservation. The projects made actually by the contemporary art group are about film digitization. With the technological obsolescence of film it beco mes increasingly difficult to edit copies in formats other than 16 or 35 mm and, consequently, to show and exhibit certain art films. As a result, curators of avant-garde and experimental cinema have to deal with digitization for exhibition, distribution, and even for conservation. Our main research is about consequences of the technological transfers imposed by obsolescence: the preservation of visual effects, color and temporal like flicker in particular, because some visual effects are not well reprodu ced in digital format. The goal is to evaluate differences between a film and it digital version (depending of the parameters of the digitization and the different projections techniques), and to provide recommendations to minimize them. The step after th is work is to study digital film restoration, because film copies are often damaged and direct film restoration is very difficult. Once the film is digitized, digital restoration is possible as computer based research is without danger for the original fi lms. The stay of two month in the The Norwegian Color Research Laboratory will permit to exchange knowledge about film digitizations and will help my work about film restoration as I am new to this subject.