Photos by Billie Winter.

Libby Hopfauf and Annalise Nicholson are in a race against time, and against tape.

It’s a spring afternoon, and we’re sitting in the office of the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS), a narrow rectangular room at City Hall. Old audiovisual technology is stacked to the high ceiling. In the corner by the door, there’s a reel-to-reel dictaphone for listening to old Seattle City Hall meetings. There’s a gray behemoth with reels the size of serving plates made for sports instant replays. On the floor sits a cardboard box of cassettes, oral histories from the Wing Luke Museum recorded in the mid ’90s. Nicholson pulls a yellow-shelled Memorex cassette from the box and asks if I remembered them.

MIPoPS works mostly with organizations that don’t have the money or know-how to preserve their own magnetic media. It’s urgent work. Tapes are rapidly degrading. The machines that play tapes are breaking down, and for the most obscure formats, replacement parts and repairmen are in short supply. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia has sounded the alarm. Magnetic tape not digitized by the end of this year may be lost forever.

And now the money problem has become even more dire. MIPoPS and the handful of other organizations preserving this visual history while it is physically possible depend on federal funding that no longer exists.

Half of MIPoPS’ budget came from the collapsing National Endowment for the Humanities, gutted while Hopfauf was filling out an application for next year. MIPoPS considered local funders, but quickly discovered many of them also got their money from the federal government. What looked like a vast network of plumbing all drew from the same water source, now dry. MIPoPS is not totally broke—about a quarter of its budget comes from the county—but they can only hope they’ll be here this time next year.

“We’re trying to figure that out right now,” Hopfauf says. “I guess we could find a magic rich person.”“That’s the only place money lives anymore, apparently,” Nicholson says.

Indifferent to our money problems, magnetic tapes will molder. Tape was designed to be cheap, not to outlast the pyramids. It could endure repeated plays and re-recording to a point, but these flimsy, magnetically coated strips of plastic are not long for this world.

A tape sitting in a hot and humid attic may develop sticky-shed syndrome, a breakdown of chemical bonds that causes the coating to slip off when the tape is played, gumming up the machine with black goo. Dry tapes flake off like sunburned skin. There are temporary solutions. Archivists “bake” sticky tapes in a commercial food dehydrator, and massage the brittle surface of dry tapes with a cleaning pad in denatured alcohol. But degraded tapes stay degraded. Even magnetic tapes still in their shrink wrap aren’t safe. The plastics are breaking down, leaching gases and acids.

Nicholson pops a U-matic tape—an older, higher-fidelity precursor to VHS—into its player. On the bubble screen, two doctors stand at the foot of a hospital bed before vanishing into a scribble of static. Hopfauf opens the deck and shines a flashlight in.

“Those are getting clogged and can’t read the information,” Hopfauf says, pointing to the play heads. Evidence littered the innards like tiny black scales. “The tape is shedding, like sloughing off. The first time I opened one of these, I thought it was cat hair.”

As tapes age, they grow harder to preserve. Part of a collection from the University of Washington, this tape had no picture when Nicholson started cleaning. To convert it, she had to clean the tape four times and then digitally stitch together the best takes into one video. Each cleaning takes about 20 minutes. Since starting this work in 2015, MIPoPS has preserved 12,000 hours of footage.

Manufacturers’ short-sightedness didn’t stop people from filming. In the ’70s and ’80s, tape became the affordable medium of the people. Putting the power of playback into the hands of the average person was revolutionary. Family rituals—weddings, births, and bar mitzvahs—were watched instead of flipped through in a photo album.

With tape, independent filmmakers made movies on the cheap. Community theaters filmed performances. Oral histories were captured. Tribal languages were preserved. Activists filmed their own actions. History was caught on camera from more angles and perspectives than ever before, much of it from everyday people and marginalized groups. No question, we’ll lose a lot of this to time, and it will thin the historical record.

The federal government’s crusade is not helping. Tim Lake is the director of media preservation at BAVC Media, but went half-time after it lost a $100,000 federal grant. BAVC was working through a massive collection of songs and traditions from Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota until it also lost funding.

“So now I’m packaging up that whole project to send back to them, which is not digitized at all, so you can see how this all reverberates.”

On April 2, the Community Archiving Workshop received a memo from a nondescript non-government email address, revoking its $150,000 grant from the NEH. In a rebuttal, co-founder Moriah Ulinskas reminded the government that, according to their own contract, the only official communications came through a federal portal. But she knew it wouldn’t matter. The feds had probably fired whoever’s job it was to read her email.

The day before, Ulinskas had flown back from Paris, where she’d walked past France’s National Archive, the largest in the world. It got her thinking about how the US has farmed out essential government services to a network of nonprofits. “This is everything from, social services for children to libraries,” she said. “It’s like, instead of having the sort of long reach of the government and having robust systems, this country doesn’t preserve its own archives!”

Siobhan C. Hagan’s mostly volunteer Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) in Baltimore never had the time for the lengthy federal grant process, so they’re better off than most right now. The entire field of moving image archiving depends on grants, Hagan says, and no one knows who will foot the bill. The only philanthropist organization that’s taken a keen interest is the Mellon Foundation, and they can’t support everyone. (Though at the end of April, Mellon announced $15 million for state humanities councils across the country, so Mellon can do a lot.)

The financials are dour, but archivists lit up when I asked about the stuff they’ve saved. Tim Lake at BAVC wouldn’t name a favorite, but an early film from South Korean filmmaker Nam June Paik, the father of video art, came to mind. So did a project on a now-extinct sign language from Trinidad and Tobago.

The bulk of MARMIA’s collection is from Baltimore’s WJZ-TV. An hour-long investigative report on blockbusting they found and digitized was incorporated into a segment on housing discrimination that aired on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. But even the hours of local TV commercials they’ve catalogued can tell you about a time and place.

And what is the government doing with these savings? Nothing—the NEH has mostly dissolved—or bullshit. What’s left of the department announced last month they’d spend some of the money on a Trump vanity project, the so-called Garden of American Heroes. Trump first proposed the garden in the midst of his catastrophic bungling of COVID, imagining life-sized statues of presidents, athletes, movie stars, Walmart founder Sam Walton and, funnily enough, Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled the Nazis and wrote the literal book on totalitarians, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

It’s a fitting symbol for the Trump project, whisking Americans back to an imagined, prosperous past, as if with a magic wand. In place of actual history, actual, living culture, we get a meaningless statue. Statues can wait, these tapes can’t.