Our search for blogs that take our interest continued this month, and the group found the following favourites. The bioscope blog provides detailed news and information on all aspects of early and silent cinema, including pre-cinema techniques. Luke McKernan recently launched his British Library Moving Image Blog, which replaces his popular and now missed Screen Research site. All the best, Luke. And as a literal echo to our own project, looking at the places we put the dead, cemeteryscapes is a blog about 'the material and visual culture of cemeteries in the past, present and future.'
Dead media, it seems, sometimes struggles to stay alive against the odds. The BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped project shows the incredible efforts made to save Britain's audiovisual heritage. Discovering of a battered old video, they attempted to save the only surviving copy of Pink Floyd’s debut on Top of the Pops. Wired.co.uk, meanwhile, reported on the upcoming auction of a Giroux 1839 Daguerreotype camera. Does the oldest extant camera still work, we wonder?
On the exhibition front, Christian Boltanski raises questions of memory, monuments and death in his exhibition entitled Personnes, part of Monumenta 2010 at the Nef du Grand Palais in Paris, on show until 21 February. Meanwhile, photographer William Eggleston shows interest in dead objects in his exhibition 21st Century, held at Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
Finally, group members highlighted a number of important campaigns. Bristol's Cube Microplex launched an appeal for help and donations for their Haiti Kids Kino Project. Henry Jenkins's blog reported on the threatened closure of the University of Iowa Cinema Studies PhD Programme. The Autopsies Group is also very concerned about cuts to UK Universities, and no doubt there will be more on this soon.
Digest compiled by Jacob Paskins from material posted by members of the Autopsies Group to the Twitter feed.