Lunchtime Talk: Chronically Online: Archiving and Activating Online Moving Image for Audiences

The internet is the world’s largest archive, and yet the preservation of the videos that live there is extremely precarious.

In 2024, the BFI National Archive embarked on ‘Our Screen Heritage’, an accelerated acquisition programme to preserve hundreds of online moving image works. Over the past year, they have partnered with The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend (CNFW) on ‘Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet’, to engage audiences with this material – working with cinemas across the UK to curate bespoke programmes of online video for the big screen.

Join CNFW for a screening of early internet video and a discussion about what it means to preserve online moving image and to screen it in cinemas, what ‘restoration’ and ‘preservation’ might mean in the context of online video, and the strange and unexpected journey of rights acquisition for these videos.

They’ll be joined by Will Swinburne, Curator at the BFI National Archive, and special guest Paul Weedon (the viral video star who once said “I can’t believe you’ve done this”), whose video was preserved in the BFI National Archive through the Our Screen Heritage project.

This event is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.