Aspen Women Get Baked

Forty years after after Aspen hosted a week long conference of radical women, a world renown artist wants to include their images and ideas in a new installation at the Aspen Art Museum.  Simon Denny's work focuses on the deconstruction and reconstruction of post-modern cultural icons.... like GrassRoots TV!

Simon became enamored with GrassRoots' enormous community video archive, especially the rapidly deteriorating half-inch helical-scan reel-to-reel tapes from the 1970's.   Most of these tapes have not been viewed in decades, and are in desperate need of restoration, archiving, cataloging... and re-airing and web posting.   They are a remarkable time capsule of the Riot Years in Aspen and the dawn of community access television.  Simon picked one tape, based on the label alone, to restore and include in his upcoming installation at the Aspen Art Museum.

The 1972 Women's Week in Aspen was full of radical feminism, and we have no idea what might be on this one hour tape.  Could it be the infamous court-censored naked shaving video?   We sent it to the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a really great community media center in San Francisco (think GrassRoots TV on organic steroids,) to be digitally transferred.  Unfortunately, like many of the thousands of tapes in our archive, Women's Week in Aspen suffered from 'Sticky Shed Syndrome," which perhaps was one of the subjects discussed that week.  Actually, water vapor can separate the magnetic recording material from the old school urethane backing, making the tape stick to itself or tape heads and pinch rollers.

So BAVC placed the tape on the center rack at about 130 degrees for eight hours.  This should bake the water out for a while (about a month) so that they can then transfer the video to a hard drive and DVD, using one of the few half-inch reel-to reel-tape decks operating in the world .  Then the tape will, Zombie-like, return to its decomposed state.  Let's hope it works because baking twice rarely does...

More on this collaborative art project between GrassRoots TV and the Aspen Art Museum later.   If you know of someone interested in contributing to our effort to bake and restore other lost moments in Aspen history, they should contact John Masters at GrassRoots TV: masters@grassrootstv.org.