 So just make sure they're extra strong when you buy them. Community video originated largely in the 1970s when artivists, activists and community groups, largely misrepresented groups started to take up this new technology to represent their own experiences and they were sort of participants in front of and behind the camera and that's what was very specific about this approach to filmmaking. Interest in AIDS Actors video kind of was drawing this line between the early work I was looking at of community video in the early 1970s and through to the 1980s where misrepresented or underrepresented groups were able to use newly available video technology to kind of make their own videos to occupy the position of filmmaking but also a subject and I think with the AIDS Actors video research I've been doing through the Paul Mellon scholarship I've been able to sort of draw a line between the way in which those videos were made but also the way in which they were treated once they were finished. Representation of the experience of people with AIDS on television was really kind of marshaled by television. Not necessarily people impacted or living that experience and so there's a real discrepancy about what was being seen and then what was being made perhaps as well. I was invited to give a talk at Tate Liverpool part of the Keith Herring conference and they asked if I could talk about the in relationship to AIDS Actors video and that was when I made this kind of naive assumption that there must be an AIDS Actors video archive in the UK because there's this big one in New York but when it came to look for that work I couldn't find it. Since commencing this research I've now located 18 AIDS Actors videos in the UK made between 1983 and 1993 and I hope to make as many of these as available as possible through the London Community Video Archive. For me whenever I think about archiving this work or digitising it I'm always thinking about how it can then be shown. I think with the history of community video screening was always built into the production process you never really press record without thinking if it's going to be for who the audience is and I think similarly with the London Community Video Archive for us we're always thinking about how do we build the audience for this and what is the audience for this and since doing this start in this research it's been interesting how many people have been interested in seeing this work partly because it's a large part of queer history that isn't really that recognised and that represented and partly because the these approaches to filmmaking still feel really relevant and a lot of these videos still look like they could have been made yesterday, the way that the camera moves in a direct action protest, the way that someone who's experiencing the same thing as the person in front of the camera can then can ask the right questions or inhabit that experience and be sensitive to it. These things all still feel really relevant when you're making these kind of works. For me it's really important that anything engaged in histories of activism needs to continue to be engaged in the present moments of activism. I don't want this just to be archival work, you know, looked back on. I want it to feel relevant and useful. I always think of this idea of urgency and intimacy. There was an urgency to it that was about the moment, about representing this moment so there wasn't a lot of thought necessarily in this idea of the longevity of it. It was about responding to a moment and I think you see that in the work and the urgency kind of is I guess represented in the way the videos look and the feel of it which is often a bit rough around the edges, a bit looser in the editing. There's a pace to it that feels like there was a necessity to it in that moment because it was about saving lives.