Symposium Panel 5: Technologies of Heritage

The current archival moment faces the threat that companies with anti-emancipatory intentions are seeking to replace archival records with machinegenerated fake pasts. The operation of these technologies is further predicated upon the largest theft of intellectual property in human history, and one of the aims is to make the specialized knowledge and skills of historians and heritage workers obsolete. Against this backdrop, how can we assess and harness the potentials of new technologies and machine learning in particular to recuperate, restore, and disseminate film heritage?

Caroline Fournier has become the head of the heritage department in 2024 at Cinémathèque suisse, after serving as manager of the film conservation/restoration department and head of the film collections. In 2014, she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on multiple versions in Spanish cinema at the University of Paris III. She is an active member of the Technical Commission and the Executive Committee of the FIAF.

Robert Ochshorn is an artist, engineer, and cultural theorist based in Brussels and New York City. He is co-founder and CEO of Reduct.Video and a researcher at KASK School of the Arts. Working collectively, collaboratively, and in correspondence, he makes software and interface that offer new tactility and perspective to media and archives.

Benoît Turquety is a professor in film and media studies at the University Paris 8, director of the ArTeC graduate school for artistic research. Educated in cinematography, he has been a director of research at the Swiss National Science Foundation, for a project on Bolex cameras, and another on Nagra sound recorders. He has written several books and articles about the history and epistemology of film and media technology from a decentralized perspective.

Sreya Chatterjee is a doctoral researcher and lecturer pursuing a collaborative PhD on the materiality, politics, and pedagogy of film restoration at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and HTW Berlin. Her interdisciplinary work bridges film and media studies with the theory and practice of conservation and restoration. A member of FIAF’s Technical Commission and Graduate Representative of NECS, Sreya draws on media archaeology and postcolonial studies in her research and practice.