February 22nd, 2023

We had the great joy to attend the Archives Crawl at Media Burn. One of our partner members, MB was created to reflect the ideals of the Guerilla Television movement of the 1970s, when portable video cameras mobilized a new generation of documentarians, artists, activists, and journalists to bypass the film and TV industries in order to tell their own stories and the stories of their community.

Media Burn – the archive – was founded in that same spirit of irreverence toward the media industry. It provides a home for the videomakers who provide an alternative to the mainstream of commercial media – fiercely independent voices, outsiders, and ordinary people. Media Burn features the extraordinary work of globally renowned artists and videomakers but also that of community members, students, and activists taking cameras into the streets to chronicle the people and the places most important to them.

The videos in the collection have been watched by people around the world more than 20 million times. They have been written about in dozens of books and articles. Our footage has been featured in Oscar-nominated films and Emmy-nominated TV shows. It’s been taught in hundreds of classrooms and cited by researchers in a huge range of fields: film, TV, and art, but also sociology, architecture, urban studies, political science, medical history, technological history, ethnography, and more.