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Steve Hawley

Speech Marks, 2004, DVD, 3.30min

I made my first artist's video in 1980, on half inch reel to reel tape, and have over the last 25 years a collection of works in various formats –U-Matic, Beta, D3, mini DV and now as files on a portable hard drive. I've been very careless about archiving and storage, even though I knew I should pay more attention to it. I made a half hearted attempt recently to transfer all my work to a hard drive, which only dealt with a bit of the work, as I couldn't find a D3 machine (ironically my last attempt at a digital storage solution) let alone a working half inch videotape player.

The tapes are on shelves in my studio, not exactly a climate controlled environment, and I realise I have no idea of what temperature, dust and so on will do to them, although I can guess (not to mention those apocryphal stories of master tapes wiped by travelling on the tube, and the magic power of wrapping them in tinfoil).

Looking after the early work was coloured by a view that video was a fairly disposable medium, capable of being copied and therefore democratic and uncollectible (how wrong can you be). Now I do want to preserve some key pieces, but am defeated by the technical difficulty of doing it properly. I need some help, basically.

Speech Marks, 2004, DVD, 3.30min

Steve Hawley is an artist who has been working with film and video since 1981, and his work has been shown at video festivals and broadcast worldwide since then. There has been a long preoccupation with language and image in such tapes and films as Bad Reasons, 1982, broadcast on WGBH Boston and Channel 4 TV Britain and shown at the Kitchen, New York, and in A Proposition Is A Picture, 1992.

His tape Trout Descending A Staircase, 1990, commissioned by BBC2 TV was awarded a German VideoArt prize in 1994 and in 1995 his experimental documentary on artificial languages (made with Tony Steyger) and commissioned by the Arts Council was broadcast on Channel 4 TV.

More recently his work has looked at new forms of narrative, in such works as Love Under Mercury, his first film for the cinema, which won a prize at the Ann Arbor film festival, and Amen ICA Cinema, 2002, a palindromic video which won the prize for most original video at the Vancouver Videopoem festival.

Speech Marks, 2004, was shot entirely on a mobile phone and won a special prize at the 2004 VAD Digital Arts Festival in Girona. His last piece, Similar to Nothing, was a first collaboration with artist Steve Dutton.

He can be contacted at s.hawley@mmu.ac.uk