FAQs

Media Burn is a nonprofit archive that collects, preserves, and distributes documentary and experimental media produced by artists, activists, and community groups. Our mission is to create positive social change by amplifying underheard voices, both in contemporary dialogue and the historical record. To learn more about our organization and our history, please visit About Us

Media Burn has more than 6,000 videos available to watch online for free. These videos come from artists, documentarians, journalists, activists, and non-profit organizations, and cover an immense range of topics, themes, and genres. We specialize in videotape, a medium notable for being affordable and accessible to everyone. As such, our collection includes award-winning television programs and acclaimed documentaries as well as community-based projects, home movies, and “amateur” productions. Our collection includes both completed works and raw, unedited footage.

Our collection encompasses the full range of portable videotape and digital video history, roughly 1968 onward, but also includes a few dozen experimental and documentary works made on 16mm or 8mm celluloid by filmmakers like Chuck Kleinhans, Tom Palazzolo, and Bill Stamets. There are also a small number of works that pre-date the portable video era, such as the groundbreaking 1950-1952 Chicago television program Studs’ Place.

In the archive you can find extensive documentation of protests and demonstrations, of people and buildings on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and elsewhere; of presidents, mayors, and senators; of journalists and newsmakers. We have footage of major league baseball legends and beer league softball players. Of the 20th century’s most influential and acclaimed artists and writers as well as local craftspeople, graffiti artists, and kids learning to fingerpaint.

Our collection is particularly strong on the history of Chicago, including historical footage of neighborhoods across the city, from Bronzeville to Pilsen to Uptown. You can find numerous documentaries and interviews shot at and around public housing projects like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. Famous Chicagoans like Studs Terkel, Harold Washington, Richard M. Daley, Roger Ebert, Barack Obama, Stephen Colbert, Michael Jordan, David Sedaris, Bill Murray, “Pops” Staples, and Bill Veeck are well represented in the archive. We have the archives of acclaimed Chicago journalists like Carol Marin and Elizabeth Brackett. There are extensive collections of Chicago theater, performance art, and comedy, featuring both celebrated institutions like the Second City and the Goodman and the comparatively little-known but astonishing performances at shows/venues like Milly’s Orchid Show, Wholesome Roc, the House of Avant-Garde, Club Lower Links, and elsewhere.

In 2008 and again in 2012, our collection was recognized as a part of “America’s documentary heritage essential to understanding our democracy, history, and culture” by the National Archives with preservation grants. In 2011, we were again recognized by federal agencies with a “Save America’s Treasures” grant, administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Videotape has always been the most accessible format for creating moving images – it was cheap, easy to learn, and, because tapes could be re-used, it encouraged experimentation. Video was hugely important for artists, journalists, and activists who did not have – or did not want – access to the film or TV industries. It was, from the beginning, a hugely important medium for women, who wanted to make art and documentaries without having to navigate the sexist hierarchies of the media industries.

Even more importantly, video was also available to community members without any special training or significant funding. It democratized the tools of the media in a way that even the cheapest film formats never could.

However, videotape has always had to deal with the problem of “stranding” older formats. As the technology progressed, the old tapes were typically not compatible with new cameras or playback systems. That meant that, by the mid-1980s, a tape made on a Portapak ten years earlier could only be played on machines that were no longer being used.

As a result, there’s 50+ years of incredible video that has either been unavailable or overlooked. Media Burn’s goal is to resurrect this remarkable work – whether it was made by world renowned artists or anonymous amateurs – and to give it the audience it deserves.

There is a great urgency to this mission. Videotape is incredibly fragile – the physical tape decays even in optimal storage conditions. Further, unlike celluloid film, videotape cannot be “restored” in any meaningful way – once the magnetic tape is damaged, that information is lost. Our archivists do remarkable work in order to extract whatever they can from old and damaged tapes, but there’s only so much they can do.

As such, Media Burn is racing against the clock to save as much media history as we can before it’s lost forever. In 2024, we completed a massive multi-year collaboration with the University of Chicago, Appalshop, Community TV Network, Kartemquin Films, and New Orleans Video Access Center to digitize and share tapes from the Guerrilla Television movement. As a result of that effort, we and our partners saved more than 1,000 never-before-accessible tapes, all of which can be viewed on the Media Burn website. That project led to countless extraordinary discoveries, from astonishing, almost unknown documentaries directed by women like Streets of Ulster, The Politics of Intimacy, and First Impressions, to remarkable activist works like Keep County Open and Women of Northside Fight Back, to the mind-blowing abstractions of the Electronic Visualization Lab, to the expansive, hugely insightful community archive created by high school students for CTVN.

The videos in Media Burn’s collections are generally donated by a person who had a major role in creating them: the producer, director, editor, reporter, etc.

Please contact us at [email protected] if you think your collection is a fit for Media Burn, or, if you are a copyright holder who believes your work has appeared on Media Burn in error.

All videos in the Media Burn archive require a license to use in your project. Most, but not all footage is available for licensing. For more detailed information about obtaining permission to screen or license Media Burn’s videos, please visit our Footage Licensing page or contact us at [email protected].

When we first receive a tape, all we know about it is what is written on the box, which is used to create an initial database entry. Later, a person will play back the tape, digitize it, and upload it so it is viewable online. After that, another person will watch the file, describe it in detail, and add information about the running time, credits, date, and anything else they learn. Each of these steps takes a long time. Our staff digitizes and catalogs new tapes every day, but there will always be tapes waiting to be processed. If you notice a tape that is not digitized and wish to view it, let us know and we’ll see if we can move it up in the queue!

Read our overview and get links to detailed “how to” guides on our Preservation Resources page.

We recommend starting with our Digital Exhibitions. Here you will find subject guides for topics like the Guerrilla Television Movement, the Women’s Video Festival, and the Electronic Visualization Lab, artist biographies, and compilations of videos featuring figures like Studs Terkel and Harold Washington, as well as topics like Cabrini Green and Chicago public housing and TV productions by and about Samuel Beckett. Each Digital Exhibition includes background information, clips, and links to other resources as well as lists of videos available on Media Burn.

If you are a teacher or researcher and wish to learn more about a specific topic, or are trying to locate videos related to your area of study, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly at [email protected].  We are happy to answer questions and be of assistance – including speaking to classes or virtual or in-person presentations about the archive.

We are always creating new material and new resources, so please let us know what is of the most use to you and your classrooms!

Please cite Media Burn videos as follows, or adapt the following to the relevant style guide:

Producer name, Video Title, Date of Production, Media Burn Archive, link to page on mediaburn.org

For example:

Julie Gustafson, The Politics of Intimacy, 1972, Media Burn Archive, https://mediaburn.org/video/politics-of-intimacy/

Please note that not all of the videos have official titles. “Descriptive” titles are designated by brackets – whether these are tapes of raw footage shot for a completed work or footage that was never used for another project, these titles were created by Media Burn – not the original artists – to distinguish and identify the content on the tapes. There are several ways to cite these works, for example:

Community TV Network and Rafael Cancel Miranda High School, tape of Puerto Rican Liberation March in downtown Chicago, November 1, 1976, Media Burn Archive, https://mediaburn.org/video/marcha-rafael-cancel-miranda-hs-november-1-1976/

Julie Gustafson, The Politics of Intimacy raw footage: Mona and Theresa Tape 1, 1972, Media Burn Archive, https://mediaburn.org/video/mona-and-teresa-interview-1/

Communications for Change, “[Landlord Protest],” c. 1978, Media Burn Archive, https://mediaburn.org/video/landlord-protest/

If you write about one of our videos, please let us know! We are, also, happy to assist you in your research in any way that we can: [email protected]