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Media Burn Archive

@mediaburnarchive

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Media Burn is a nonprofit dedicated to video’s overlooked histories and its most fiercely independent voices, from the 1960s to today.

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Show your love for preserving video history!

Become a member, be part of something neat, get cool stuff, and access even cooler experiences like our upcoming virtual field trip in partnership with @esschicago (open to members of Experimental Sound Studio or (hopefully and) Media Burn!)

Link in bio.

ABOUT MEMBERSHIP:
📼👽$1+ / month | Tape Head👽📼
The tape head converts electrical signals into magnetic patterns on a tape, translating material into meaning. As a Media Burn Tape Head, you see how the small alternating electrical current of our work allows patterns of empowerment, helping undertold stories to emerge. Tape Heads:
🌟Are invited to a Quarterly Discussion Group or Quarterly Virtual Field Trip to an archive
🌟 Get a Sticker + Membership Card

🧑‍🤝‍🧑$10 + / month | Preservation PAL🧑‍🤝‍🧑
PAL is an acronym for Phase Alternating Line, and is one of standards for electrical signals and frame rates for analogue television. As a Media Burn Preservation PAL, you understand the importance of the more technical aspects of our work and champion video preservation through your actions and words. Preservation PALS get all Tier 1 perks plus:
🌟Swag (like a fanny pack or Chicago-made art print)
🌟Adopt-A-Tape adoption certificate

🌊$25 + / month | Waveform Generator🌊
Waveform generators create electrical signals with specific shapes, frequencies, and amplitudes for testing and troubleshooting circuits. As a Media burn Waveform Generator, your support encompasses the technical and the cultural: you are shaping the future of our archive! Waveform Generators get all Tape Head and Preservation PAL perks plus:
🌟One In-Person Field Trip in Chicago

JOIN US JOIN US JOIN US BECOME A MEMBER TODAY AND GET INVITED TO THIS AWESOME UPCOMING PROGRAM! by @mediaburnarchive

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23 days ago

Take a virtual tour of the Media Burn office and hear some words on the importance of video preservation from Senior Archivist Dan Erdman! Produced by 2026 Communications Intern @sophcasa

Support from people like you makes our work possible! Be part of preserving video history - become a member today! Link in bio. by @mediaburnarchive

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a month ago

Alexandra Juhasz is a scholar and filmmaker whose work is in our collection, and she organized a 30th anniversary screening/symposium of The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye, which Juhasz produced. by @mediaburnarchive

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15 hours ago

We are proud to contribute SEXUAL FANTASY PARTY (Betty Brown & Rikki Ripp, 1973, 12 min to this event.

In 1968, a coalition of sex-positive, politically progressive San Francisco religious leaders and homophile activists founded the National Sex Forum. Led by the Methodist Rev. Dr. Ted McIlvenna, the NSF began producing films the following year, and was soon supplemented by a distribution arm called the Multi-Media Resource Center. The MMRC distributed both NSF films – most of them directed by McIlvenna’s friend and fellow minister Laird Sutton – and erotic avant-garde cinema by filmmakers from the Bay Area and beyond, among them James Broughton, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer, and Jan Oxenberg.

The MMRC was radical not only in its ethos of sexual freedom as compatible with Christianity, but also its framing of experimental film as a form of sex education. While some NSF productions consist primarily of structured group conversations, many depict real couples and friends engaging in unsimulated and unscripted sex, termed “pattern films” or “sexual cinéma vérité.”

Produced in San Francisco in the midst of the free love, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and disability rights movements; the films of the MMRC reflect a commitment to engaging with queer sexuality, women’s sexual autonomy and pleasure, and the sex lives of people with physical disabilities. They were also crucial to the development of Sexual Attitude Reassessment, or SAR, a technique originated by McIlvenna and his collaborators involving multi-day intensive sessions of explicit film and accompanying discussion.

Despite contacts with legendary avant-garde filmmakers, and a long afterlife in the form of McIlvenna’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (which ceased operations in the mid-2010s), the MMRC is little-known today. Guest-curated by @talbotallen, this series introduces a modern audience to a body of work that has seldom been shown theatrically. Films distributed by the MMRC are paired with those that could have been: erotic avant-garde, educational, and agitprop films from the 60s & 70s sharing an ethos of free sexual expression. by @mediaburnarchive

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a day ago

Happy Global Handwashing Day!

Suds up and sing your favorite song while you scrub away your contact with the outside world. Just don't touch your face.

This 1981 visual study of a blue-tinted face and hands eventually became part of a 1982 experimental art video by Barbara Sykes. A video artist, documentarian, and curator, her work in the 1970s and 1980s pioneered striking new forms of visual abstraction using image processors and video synthesizers. by @mediaburnarchive

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2 days ago

Happy Dessert Day!

In this 1993 clip from footage shot for Chicago Slices, Andrew Jones tours the kitchens of Chicago Caterers and is invited by Chef Greg to taste test a specially-made dessert on camera. by @mediaburnarchive

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3 days ago

Happy Train Your Brain Day!

Nina Sobell is a sculptor, multimedia, and performance artist who pioneered the use of EEG technology, closed-circuit television, and internet communication. Her work transforms brainwaves into art.

Sobell is best known for her Brainwave Drawings, a now decades-long series of interactive works that began in 1974. The technology and the visualizations have taken various forms since then but the basic components of the projects remain consistent: the brainwaves of two participants are visualized as different aspects of the same pattern or image.

This clip is from the 1975 video EEG: Video Telemetry Environment: Continuous Drawings in Four Quadrants: Color-tinted footage of BrainWave Drawings, presented in four quadrants. Watch more of Sobell's experiments on our website. by @mediaburnarchive

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4 days ago

James Black, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, discusses why he chose to build hogans, a traditional Navajo dwelling, in his community. This footage was shot by Jeff Spitz as part of the 2000 documentary The Return of Navajo Boy which portrayed the lives of Navajo citizens and their experiences with media representation, environmental racism, and the preservation of culture.

Watch the full video on our website. by @mediaburnarchive

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5 days ago

Happy Marathon Day, Chicago!

Get inspired to run by 11-year-old marathoner Jessica, interviewed here by Lilly Ollinger for a 1982 episode of Image Union.
Watch the full episode on our website. by @mediaburnarchive

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6 days ago

Today is World Mental Health Day.

The ethics of mental health care have long been debated, as evidenced by this short clip from the 1971 documentary St Vincent’s Health Day: Mental Health Confrontation, produced by Peoples Video Theater/Survival Arts Media. Here, a man engages in conversation with a doctor about treatments for mental illnesses such as depression, and they discuss the social stigmatization of suicide and mental illness as well as the desire for the freedom to refuse psychiatric treatment and refuse labeling or disclosure of mental illness.

View the full documentary on our website. by @mediaburnarchive

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7 days ago

Thanks for coming to October Learn With Media Burn! We learned that babies, dogs, and jump cuts are the secret formula for funny home movies and we learned that makeup artist extraordinaire Dick Smith made all of his creepiest and most incredible looks in his basement.

See you next month! by @mediaburnarchive

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8 days ago

🎃TODAY Learn With Media Burn! Spooky Edition🎃

Have you ever wanted to clip your own claws, or eliminate blood stains from your clothes? Looking to learn how to perfectly startch your collared capes? Perhaps you need to cast a spell or brew a charm. Maybe you are just hoping to finally figure out how to do your makeup in a way that enhances your big eyes and even bigger teeth.

Learn with Media Burn - Spooky Edition!

This month Media Burn Archive will select a surprise slightly scary, maybe spooky, and definitely kooky vintage educational video to screen. Materials to complete educational activities and light refreshments provided. Comfortable clothing suggested (we may end up practicing our were transformations! Who knows!).

📆10/8
⏰ 5pm - 7 pm
📍Media Burn Archive, 348 N Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60607
💸 FREE
💌RSVP via link in bio by @mediaburnarchive

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9 days ago