Working with an archive allows us to situate ourselves within a place’s history and connect with the community it has represented over time. This is central to my own filmmaking process, a way of imagining with the narratives of an archive. A creative practice that began with materials from my personal archive (years of iPhone photos and videos, notes, sound recordings) has since developed into deliberate collaborations with people, places, and spaces. The social and cultural landscape is changing rapidly as state and federal policies reduce funding for vital cultural institutions and infrastructure. These cuts can limit or eliminate public access to the resources communities use to understand and preserve their past and present. One local example is the Iowa City branch of the State Historical Society of Iowa, which closed in June 2026 (State Historical Society of Iowa). What does it mean to witness the restriction and centralization of one archive and take part in the caretaking of the afterlife of another, from within a vital non-profit community arts space that continues to sustain itself in this landscape? How do these shifts become opportunities to either reinforce or redefine the communities we are part of?
This summer I had the opportunity to work through the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies’ Humanities Without Walls Internship Program as a Media and Storytelling Intern at the community arts nonprofit Public Space One (PS1), continuing the work of activating the Iowa City Public Access Television (PATV) archive housed there. Having already made conscious connections with PS1 by organizing a screening event there, as well as attending PS1 events and workshops in order to engage with a creative community outside of the university, I was excited to see what I could learn about the history of Iowa City through this research. The PATV archive unfolds the life of a community defined by a shared ethos of access, media literacy, creative agency, and self-determination, through 40 years’ worth of VHS tapes, cassettes, meeting memos, photographs, and fragments. Pre-dating mass social media and internet use, PATV was Iowa City residents’ response to commercial cable television. As long-time PATV director Rene Paine described, “We teach people to make their own videos, make their own record, use their own voice” (“Real TV” 7). As one of a handful of local public, educational, and government (PEG) access channels at the time under a cable franchise agreement with present-day Mediacom, which ended in 2018 (Brennan), PATV is a testament to the enduring impact of a community’s control over the means of articulating their representation.
I began the work by going through photographs to see what patterns emerged about what and who was documented, named, and recognized. I reacquainted myself with the media technology of my youth (donated PATV equipment now part of the lending library at PS1's Media Arts Co-op) to view and digitize the print and video material that caught my attention. As anticipated, the process presented its own challenges: Photos were mislabeled or lacking identification altogether. What context I could find was fraught with scattered and biased remembering, and there was at times a complete omission of folks (who are the Black people I see in the photos?). Who was missing, who was yet to be included, and how was this reflected by/in the archive, PATV itself, and the greater Iowa City community?
PATV’s archive presented itself much in the same way that I have experienced Iowa City so far: with fragmented histories and uneven visibility reflecting patterns in historical erasure. Personal questions emerged and stayed with me about my role in relation to this history: Who was I to do this work, and what does that mean? How can I build off of the work that has already been done here? How can I build in a way that others can work from? How is becoming part of PATV’s caretaking lineage an opportunity to become part of the community infrastructure, despite my transient status as a graduate student at the University of Iowa?
This process left me wanting to work toward building relationships with community members that had made PATV what it was. As an archive with a very recent history, many of the people who shaped PATV are still present to share those stories. I am intentionally connecting with PATV community members to record their oral histories, an ongoing component of the project. The recorded oral histories include conversations with former PATV leadership and producers, as well as the current co-directors of PS1. Documenting the experiences of the people who were vital to the station's life and facilitating a self-guided space to reconnect to their memories at PATV will help bridge the physical archive and the lived experiences behind it.
I hope to continue to develop this project and uncover gaps within the PATV archive by documenting oral histories, working on a collaborative timeline, and labeling and digitizing the media. This work with the archive offers strategies to articulate the values and challenges for creating the communities that we need, a reminder of the importance of community archives in the preservation of collective histories and the building of shared futures.
Sources:
Brennan, Paul. “Iowa City’s PATV Is Merging with Public Space One.” Little Village, 18 Sept. 2019, https://littlevillagemag.com/iowa-citys-patv-is-merging-with-public-space-one/. Accessed 15 July 2026.
Public Access Television, Inc. About Us. PATV, https://www.patv.tv/about-us/. Accessed 15 July 2026.
"Real TV." Little Village, Aug. 2002, pp. 6–11, 20-23.
State Historical Society of Iowa. Iowa City Branch Updates. State Historical Society of Iowa, https://history.iowa.gov/research/collection-iowa-city. Accessed 23 July 2026.