[T]he work cannot fail to express Force which underlies it all. --Stephen Beck (1) In Outside Archive: World in Fragments, Lucy Reynolds demonstrates how in found footage work of Bruce Conner, Morgan Fisher, Peter Tscherkassky, and others, film frame becomes, in essence, an archive: manifestation only of [the history of] cinema, but of fractured rhythms of industry and incoherent images of history itself. (2) Similarly, Hal Foster, in his illuminating study of contemporary archival art, sees archival artist as someone who seek[s] to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. archival artist, Foster goes on to say, not only draws on ... archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. (3) However, as this essay seeks to reveal, artists do necessarily have to use recycled materials in order for their work to acquire rich, archival meaning. For instance, Brice Howard, one of first theoreticians of videographic image and director of National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET), conceptualized video art produced under NCET's auspices between 1967 and 1975 as live (most NCET video was unedited and produced in real-time) processes of archivization. work produced at NCET--a San-Francisco-based creative community in which artists from a wide variety of disciplines (electronic music, poetry, and dance, just to name a few) collaborated in order to explore artistic potential of video--demonstrated and documented shifting methods of video practice for sake of formal elaboration and social edification. (Public television was NCET's most reliable exhibition site). (4) Warner Jepson, an electronic musician who participated in NCET project, reminisced: [NCET] was a space for experimenting with new video technology to see what video cameras and monitors could do. (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] works made during video art's seedbed stages at NCET were heuristic exercises with new ideas, techniques, and finished work became scientific proof for a machine's functionality, a medium's specificity, and an artist's proficiency with means of production. NCET artists saw their videos as storage vessels that refer to past experiments with particular appartuses. These videographers played role of artist-archivist as they performed and preserved their personal contributions to video poetics. (6) Their formally adventurous works, recorded in real-time with cutting-edge broadcast technologies, were, as Howard envisioned, records of inventive artistic processes. Now, we may be able to visualize process. Electronic flow introduces us to this possibility, Howard once mused. (7) To watch an NCET video is to witness an archive in process of becoming. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Howard's use of word is telling. It reveals how one of NCET's chief aspirations was to capture spontaneous moments of artistic inspiration. This documentary quality of NCET video resonates intriguingly with James Lastra's observations on technological developments in early sound recording. The possibility of preserving and repeating previously evanescent and singular, writes Lastra, emerged as one of most persistent themes associated with all manner of representational technologies. preservational capabilities of recording technology, Lastra continues, present us with opportunity to understand how tropes of writing [like Howard's record analogy] ... served to negotiate institutional relationships to a new technological capacity. (8) As well as accentuating video's ability to catch fleeting sensory phenomena, NCET's extemporaneous approach to moving-image processing enjoyed remarkable, spectacular appeal. Live NCET video afforded audiences with what Mary Anne Doane has called the lure of singular instant, (9) thrilling sensation that coincides with witnessing inimitable occur. …