An organisation like the Cube Cinema has a different approach to its cinema based technlogicical apparatus than would normally be expected in an 'Arts Centre or Media Centre'.

In the Cube the general principle of technical delivery is inverted and the Artists that run the various programmes, events, productions and activities become actors in defining and shaping what technology is for and how it is used.

Its important to see the Artist as central in this inversion and the Cube has been founded and developed as an Artist run enterpise.

If this location and role of the Artist is lost then technology merely becomes whatever is defined by 'users' or 'the market' or even the 'industry' and technicians will be reduced to having to 'provide' a service that others make decisions on.

To this end, this policy defines that AS MANY AS POSSIBLE AND WHEREVER POSSIBLE formats and devices and technologies are preserved and employed, abandoning ideas of redundancy and obsolescence as causing the decline and limitation of creative choices.

The plan is to try and encourage creativity in technical roles and systems and not merely 'implement' some other superior's (and usually non-technical) demands.

In moving image presentation this becomes a project in itself demanding an open approach to old, unreliable and difficult apparatus such as VHS tape or 16mm film. The case of film or celluloid now is especially pertinent as we see a mass migraton to digital carriers, largely force marched by US profit orientated interests.

The loss and decline of historic formats and cultures is a weakening of the character of the Cube Cinema and what it proposes is and can be culture and art.

Its really important to have a clear position on technologies and their systems and cultures. It is coterminant with our position on IT and computer systems that our approach is broadly DIY and 'independence' in this affords us a greater range of choices both commercial and practical.

Many people; perhaps the wider and popular society and despite theories of sociological effect on technology, actaully dont have a strong enough effect on shaping technology to counterbalance the force of progress driven by profit. Progress can be measured within the agreements of the system one has signed up for, eg ' the moving image' and how DVD was progress from VHS only as long as the artifacts of difference are largely unconscious, that is not scrutinised under a comprehensive set of uses, aesthetics, material processes, artistic and commercial networks.

The truth for Film or Celluloid is that is has been subjected to a massive and far reaching and sociologically profound and in depth analysis under all the above sets and more over a long and extended period of time which both indexes huge human and industrial change but also political changes, changes in its own technology and most importantly layer after layer of cultural and artistic social formation

(from the internal Cube wiki)