Selections from the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection

This program celebrates the completion of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Theatre on Film and Tape Archive’s multi-year effort to make publicly available over 1,500 rarely seen performance and rehearsal recordings and video art pieces representing the 40-year career of artist Robert Wilson.The majority of Robert Wilson’s works have been executed on the stage, and performance is, in its nature, ephemeral. Moving image and sound media have been employed as devices that may be rudimentary in form, sometimes are fragmentary, and often have seriously deteriorated. What that has meant in terms of the preservation of Robert Wilson’s work is that not only have we confronted the ephemerality of performance but also the fleeting materiality of audio/visual media itself.
Certified Archivist and Moving Image Preservationist Sarah Ziebell holds an MLIS in Archival Enterprise with a Postgraduate Endorsement of Specialization in Media Asset Management from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently works as a Moving Image Preservation Specialist for New York University Libraries and teaches in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. From 2004 to 2006, Ms. Ziebell served as the Project Coordinator for the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection within the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She has also worked with the archival collections of the Pacific Film Archive of the University of California at Berkeley, the American Museum of the Moving Image, Industrial Light + Magic, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin. Ms. Ziebell is one of the Board of Directors of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and Independent Media Arts Preservation and is a member of the Steering Committee of Moving Image Collections (MIC), an AMIA-Library of Congress initiative.
This event is co-sponsored by the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Theatre on Film and Tape Archive.