0 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:00,000 Interview with Rick Prelinger 1 00:00:05,438 --> 00:00:11,611 So the Prelinger archives online stemmed out of casual conversation 2 00:00:11,611 --> 00:00:16,449 that I had when I first got on the phone with Brewster Kahle in 1999 3 00:00:16,449 --> 00:00:20,653 and within the first 20 seconds he said: "Do you want to put your archive online for free?" 4 00:00:21,021 --> 00:00:24,724 And I started to stutter, I said "I make money 5 00:00:24,791 --> 00:00:29,329 charging for access to my collection, how could I give it away, I don't know about this". 6 00:00:29,429 --> 00:00:35,001 And I was new to California, I hadn't been inculcated in the values 7 00:00:35,068 --> 00:00:37,837 of the open source movement and I knew nothing about free culture. 8 00:00:37,871 --> 00:00:45,311 But after thinking about it for a while I realized this was an experiment worth trying because 9 00:00:45,511 --> 00:00:49,015 I'm a contrarian and I felt that there were a lot of things wrong about the 10 00:00:49,015 --> 00:00:51,317 whole archival and stock footage world. 11 00:00:51,351 --> 00:00:56,556 And in addition we had always given out footage for free or just for duplication costs 12 00:00:56,589 --> 00:01:03,563 to worthwhile projects like this one or social and cultural artistic community projects 13 00:01:03,563 --> 00:01:06,733 that we wanted to see - do our little bit to help enable. 14 00:01:06,800 --> 00:01:10,236 But it was expensive, because it cost just as much to give something away 15 00:01:10,270 --> 00:01:16,342 as it does to charge for it, it's still time and all that, so in a lot of ways 16 00:01:16,409 --> 00:01:23,083 this seemed like it offered us a way to do the right thing without experiencing the adverse consequences of doing that 17 00:01:23,083 --> 00:01:30,457 and beginning at the start of 2001 we started to put material online. 18 00:01:30,490 --> 00:01:34,761 To the best of our knowledge we've had over 7 million films downloaded 19 00:01:34,761 --> 00:01:39,099 Now this may not seem like much but these are very obscure films, 20 00:01:39,132 --> 00:01:42,635 the most well known film that we've put up "is Duck and Cover". 21 00:01:42,702 --> 00:01:47,640 But there's a lot of stuff that's of interest just to rail-road buffs and train-spotters, 22 00:01:47,640 --> 00:01:52,579 or the telephone collectors, or the people interested in the history of 23 00:01:52,612 --> 00:01:58,918 Southern California, the small slices, small interest groups. 24 00:01:58,952 --> 00:02:03,289 But all in all we think about 7 million films, our estimate, 25 00:02:03,289 --> 00:02:09,562 and this is an educated estimate, is that about 80,000 derivative works 26 00:02:09,662 --> 00:02:13,133 have been made from the material that we've put up online. 27 00:02:14,234 --> 00:02:22,008 A lot of people who own content or who control content or who are gatekeepers to content, 28 00:02:22,408 --> 00:02:26,279 are freaked out about giving things away and our experience has been 29 00:02:26,312 --> 00:02:28,414 to them, very counter intuitive. 30 00:02:28,648 --> 00:02:33,520 To us quite fulfilling what we found after we put all this material up online, 31 00:02:33,520 --> 00:02:38,525 and we put all our good stuff, the stuff that we knew people wanted, is that our sales went up. 32 00:02:40,059 --> 00:02:44,397 One of the things that intrigues me tremendously about the proliferation of material 33 00:02:44,430 --> 00:02:51,771 that's out there in the world for people to grab is the potential creation of millions of new authors. 34 00:02:52,172 --> 00:02:57,677 And the consequent breakdown of that long lasting barrier between 35 00:02:57,710 --> 00:03:02,815 consumers and producers that's bandied about all over the place as participatory media 36 00:03:02,949 --> 00:03:07,620 My personal experience is that when you begin to get millions 37 00:03:07,620 --> 00:03:10,523 of new authors really, really interesting things can happen. 38 00:03:10,523 --> 00:03:14,894 And from an archivist's point of view, or a librarian's point of view when you put 39 00:03:14,894 --> 00:03:21,167 put primary materials in the hands of ordinary citizens really interesting things can happen. 40 00:03:21,201 --> 00:03:28,875 History is no longer the province of academics and intellectuals, 41 00:03:28,942 --> 00:03:33,246 definitions of culture begin to shift and change in very interesting ways 42 00:03:33,246 --> 00:03:38,384 and as we know questions of what's high culture and what's low culture often get inverted 43 00:03:38,384 --> 00:03:45,525 or scrambled in ways that I think are tremendously productive. 44 00:03:47,660 --> 00:03:52,465 Larry Lessig talks about the model of scarcity being supplanted by the model of plenty, 45 00:03:52,465 --> 00:03:59,005 which is a way of thinking that I like a lot. When the model of plenty begins to rule, 46 00:03:59,005 --> 00:04:04,177 as I think it is now, people have a tremendous amount of information at their disposal. 47 00:04:04,911 --> 00:04:10,183 Some of it is fact, some of it is not necessarily fact, but in terms of history, 48 00:04:10,183 --> 00:04:17,523 which is what i work with, when you put history in the hands of ordinary people 49 00:04:17,523 --> 00:04:21,761 you enable them to do what I call historical intervention. 50 00:04:21,894 --> 00:04:27,100 Our archive is a historical intervention, this library is a historical intervention. 51 00:04:27,100 --> 00:04:36,576 It means re-injecting the past, re-injecting the content, the discourse, the ideas, the text, 52 00:04:36,576 --> 00:04:39,979 the images of the past, into the present and giving 53 00:04:39,979 --> 00:04:42,248 us the opportunity to look at the present differently. 54 00:04:42,248 --> 00:04:47,287 In other words recontextualizing the present through infusion 55 00:04:47,287 --> 00:04:50,089 of historical material - tremendously exciting. 56 00:04:50,089 --> 00:04:56,929 It means it gives us the opportunity to snap ourselves out of this eternalised present 57 00:04:56,929 --> 00:05:00,633 where we believe that everything is new, everything is fresh, 58 00:05:00,667 --> 00:05:05,004 we're the first generation to experience what's happening now. 59 00:05:05,004 --> 00:05:13,813 I actually find it provocative and fascinating, when I started showing people old educational 60 00:05:13,813 --> 00:05:19,986 and industrial films back in the 80s I realized that we all had tremendously sterotypical ideas 61 00:05:19,986 --> 00:05:27,060 about the 30, 40s, 50s and 60s in American life, and when I started showing people these films, 62 00:05:27,060 --> 00:05:32,665 quickly, in conversation, we could move beyond these simplified formulations like 63 00:05:32,699 --> 00:05:36,703 'it was a simpler time', 'people were kinder', 'it was safer', 64 00:05:36,703 --> 00:05:40,807 'it was better for kids', 'there was no dissent in the 50s'. 65 00:05:40,807 --> 00:05:43,343 All these simplified ideas kind of fell away 66 00:05:43,343 --> 00:05:48,781 and we could see the past and the present in its complexity. 67 00:05:49,215 --> 00:05:55,154 In general I'm all for abundance because I think it enables new forms of 68 00:05:55,188 --> 00:06:00,460 social expression and critique but I don't think that's inherently true. 69 00:06:00,526 --> 00:06:05,264 People could always go to libraries and use what they find in libraries in different ways. 70 00:06:05,264 --> 00:06:12,538 Its not so much the pre-existence of a lot of information that changes it, I think it's 71 00:06:12,538 --> 00:06:14,674 the use that people make of it. 72 00:06:14,707 --> 00:06:22,081 I think to me the abundance of authors and the abundance of voices is much more central. 73 00:06:22,749 --> 00:06:26,452 You know all over the place there's these amazing stories about people, 74 00:06:26,452 --> 00:06:29,455 making new work without permission and using the net as 75 00:06:29,455 --> 00:06:31,124 this amazing distribution system. 76 00:06:31,124 --> 00:06:35,795 I made this fairly rarified experimental feature film, 77 00:06:35,828 --> 00:06:40,133 put it online and got into the Rotterdam film festival, got reviewed in the New York Times. 78 00:06:40,133 --> 00:06:44,771 I'm fundable now to make more work in ways that I wasn't before, 79 00:06:45,405 --> 00:06:50,643 and I'm not even the most... I'm one of a million examples. 80 00:06:50,977 --> 00:06:55,848 What interests me is the fact that the world is bifurcated 81 00:06:55,848 --> 00:06:59,919 between people who believe that they can do that and know they can and often do it, 82 00:06:59,952 --> 00:07:01,421 that see it as an opportunity, 83 00:07:01,854 --> 00:07:06,392 And then the other group who's often older, more established, 84 00:07:06,392 --> 00:07:08,294 who's completely threatened by that. 85 00:07:08,327 --> 00:07:10,897 So the world of documentary film is very interesting. 86 00:07:10,963 --> 00:07:14,700 Documentary film makers have always been interested in getting their work presented 87 00:07:14,700 --> 00:07:16,602 behind the red velvet curtain. 88 00:07:16,669 --> 00:07:24,410 PBS, Prime Time, HBO, Theatrical, Channel 4 UK. 89 00:07:24,577 --> 00:07:30,082 There has always been this interest in the best possible presentation for your film, 90 00:07:30,082 --> 00:07:35,021 and that system can only absorb a small number of works at anyone time. 91 00:07:35,021 --> 00:07:40,760 And a lot of people from that group who have great talent and great abilities 92 00:07:40,760 --> 00:07:46,899 to do wonderful work don't want to make online work, for them the web is for lower life forms 93 00:07:46,899 --> 00:07:49,068 or for people who are just getting established. 94 00:07:49,368 --> 00:07:55,942 And what I'd be very concerned about is trying to get these people won over to this much more 95 00:07:55,942 --> 00:07:59,879 open system - it means they have to compete, it means they lose privilege, 96 00:07:59,912 --> 00:08:03,216 they lose that sort of handicap they already have. 97 00:08:03,783 --> 00:08:08,488 But that to me is a big problem, that there are people who basically 98 00:08:08,488 --> 00:08:12,225 don't want to pick up these great tools that are there. 99 00:08:12,391 --> 00:08:17,730 We need to also move away from a query driven internet 100 00:08:17,730 --> 00:08:23,402 where you have a search engine and you fill the box with something that you think you want, 101 00:08:23,402 --> 00:08:27,773 you put your intention in the box, and then something comes back to you. 102 00:08:27,773 --> 00:08:30,843 We need to be able to surprise people. 103 00:08:30,843 --> 00:08:34,247 This was great about the early net and the ???C 104 00:08:34,247 --> 00:08:39,285 and the what's new and the what's cool-buttons, you'd be surprised. 105 00:08:39,285 --> 00:08:44,824 So in Google you have the I'm feeling lucky- button but you don't have the surprise me-button 106 00:08:46,492 --> 00:08:49,362 Serendipity, discovery surprise - 107 00:08:49,362 --> 00:08:54,934 very, very powerful functions psychologically - again, endangered species. 108 00:08:55,001 --> 00:09:01,574 This library which my partner Megan and I built is about serendipity. 109 00:09:01,574 --> 00:09:04,877 It has an idiosyncratic taxonomy that Megan designed, the idea's that you go to 110 00:09:04,911 --> 00:09:09,382 an area of interest and then you become surprised. 111 00:09:09,382 --> 00:09:12,184 We don have a catalogue, we're not query based, 112 00:09:12,151 --> 00:09:16,122 we're not the typical library where the first thing you see when you walk in the atrium 113 00:09:16,122 --> 00:09:20,993 is a computer asking you to formulate a query and then it tells you where to find a book. 114 00:09:21,027 --> 00:09:23,095 We don't believe in that. 115 00:09:23,095 --> 00:09:29,702 We believe in letting people look at the books and be surprised so 116 00:09:29,702 --> 00:09:36,008 a writer recently said about us that we want people to find what they're not looking for. 117 00:09:36,008 --> 00:09:46,218 This is getting to be hard to do online bb because things are all query based. 118 00:09:41,414 --> 00:09:46,252 You could do wonderful things with databases especially when they're very, very large 119 00:09:46,452 --> 00:09:54,293 mass databases but just like science is science, medicine, education 120 00:09:54,293 --> 00:09:58,230 and the criminal justice system are trying to breed out the unusual 121 00:09:58,230 --> 00:10:01,367 and shift us in the direction of a monoculture. 122 00:10:01,367 --> 00:10:08,708 In a lot of ways this is what a query based interface do in terms of knowledge. 123 00:10:08,708 --> 00:10:13,245 How are we going to be surprised? How are we going to be exposed to new things? 124 00:10:13,879 --> 00:10:15,781 I think we really need to keep that alive.