The British Film Institute’s New Online Video Archive Celebrates Memes, How-Tos, and a Head of Lettuce

Last week, the British Film Institute’s National Archive announced a new collection of some 430 online videos. The collection encompasses a whole spectrum of British-made viral video content, from cultural phenomena like Radiohead’s “Scotch Mist” online performance of In Rainbows and Liz Truss’s doomed battle with a head of lettuce to memes like dancing badgers and the immortal “Charlie Bit My Finger” clip. The collection sits in the wider context of the BFI National Archive’s remit to preserve the moving image; as the Archive’s Digital Curator Will Swinburne explains, the collection is “an attempt to capture what the world of the online moving image has brought to the wider story of filmmaking.”

A selection of pieces from the very British collection is available on the BFI’s Replay site. (If you’re outside the UK, you’ll need a VPN to access it.) Gizmodo spoke to Swinburne about Shockwave Flash, blackout curtains, and what to do if the world ends.

Gizmodo: If you’re trying to pull together an archive of internet videos, you have a pretty much infinite number of pieces from which you could choose. What sort of criteria do you use to determine whether something is culturally significant, or more generally, just something you want to include?

Will Swinburne: Our approach with film and television is often a completist kind of approach—we acquire every film that gets a cinema release in the UK, we do offer a recording of all television, but that’s not an approach you can take with the internet. So that leaves us with the need for a curatorial perspective.

We’ve tried to map out some sense of video cultures that either exist specifically online or that are in some way allowed to exist because of the internet. That might be for technical reasons, like things that use short-form, platform-based video. It could also be a more techno-utopian idea of, well, there are no gatekeepers on the internet, so people from different backgrounds can make their own web series.

So we were trying to tell a story about what the internet has given you, the viewer, like, what things existed there that didn’t exist before? That guides us to a few places, one of them being points of innovation: who first thought to do some form of serial episodic television, but online? How did they manage to do that with the technical limitations of that time?

There are also whole genres of video where you’re definitely picking one as an example—so we have a video of someone showing you how to put up a blackout curtain, and that video on its own is not very well viewed or anything like that,