An Essay by Penny McCann, Former Director of SAW Video
“[The] Mediatheque was the first large-scale video art repository in Canada. Predating YouTube by two years, and reaching 4 terabytes of content, the Mediatheque is an important project at the intersection of independent video art, the internet studies, and archival theory.” – Mél Hogan, Crashing the Archive/Archiving the Crash, Video Vortex Reader II, 2010 (1)
The Mediatheque was a crazy, messy, beautiful thing … and still is. The part I played in the Mediatheque was not its creation – that was the brainchild of Kevin Morris, my predecessor, amongst others. It turns out my role in the Mediatheque would be to save it.
When I stepped into my position as Director of SAW Video in early 2004, the Mediatheque was virtually complete and about to be launched. Funded by the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts, SAW Video’s Independents Online media art streaming project (a.k.a. the Mediatheque) was created in 2003 with the aim of fostering an online community of media artists through streaming full-length films and videos. To solicit work, SAW Video put out an open call to artists in the Ottawa-Gatineau region as well as to media art centres from across the country. A fee of $200 per work was paid for streaming rights for three years, totalling an astounding $100,000 in artist fees. I recall the headlong rush by local media artists to get their work on the site … and be paid for it! SAW Video’s goal was to acquire 500 works and, by the time of launch, an impressive 486 films and videos were included in the database.
When the contracts expired in 2006, under my direction, Mediatheque became a permanent online digital archive that offered a service to SAW Video members who could add up to 3 works a year if they chose. Artists whose work was already on the site were given the option to continue streaming them indefinitely. As online streaming was a rare thing then, not surprisingly the majority of artists stayed, resulting in almost 300 works of the original 486 remaining on the site.
Something that’s less known about the Mediatheque is that the whole thing collapsed in 2009 when the server hosting the archive crashed, resulting in the complete failure of the backend database. Hosting was generously sponsored by a local company whose server was located in Texas. Because of the size of the database, there was no backup (2). At that point, SAW Video elected to revamp the now technologically outdated Mediatheque into a newly redesigned website for the centre, with updated web streaming technology and a new aesthetic. After a two year down period, it was relaunched in 2011 and has been chugging along ever since.
Now, 23 years later, the Mediatheque is in many ways a relic of the past, with low rez videos and very few made after 2003. For some, that may make it irrelevant, for me, that’s its charm. Some of the work, like Chris Mullington’s Teleculture, the Teleculture (1982), is a seminal work that hearkens back to the early days of video production in Ottawa. The ten videos by Rob Thompson represents the oeuvre of a dearly loved and now departed member of the centre. Most are analogue video works and this may be the only place to see them.
As I said, it’s crazy, messy and beautiful. Vive la Médiathèque!
(1) Article drawn from Mélanie Hogan’s doctoral thesis titled Crashing the Archive: A Research-Creation Intervention into the SAW Video Mediatheque.
(2) For more info on the crash of the Mediatheque, check out Artengine’s blog post about Video Cache, a curated program co-presented by SAW Video and GIV and presented in Montreal in 2009.
Throughout July 2026, visitors could visit the DARC Microcinema to watch a curated collection of short films handpicked by our staff for our 45th Anniversary Exhibition.
