Archive & Memory
Thematic Project Trimester 2
Lead by Annet Dekker

An archive is a collection of documents and records, such as letters, official papers, photographs, recorded material, or computer files that is preserved for historical purposes. As such, an archive is considered a site of the past, a place that contains traces of a collective memory of a nation, a people or a social group. Artists have always shown an interest in archives, either as inspiration for their own work, or to use and re-appropriate material. An archive has therefore become a site of reproduction. Although often not recognised as archives, commercial sites like YouTube and Facebook are examples of this: documents are posted and reposted all the time in these environments. Previously regarded as tedious repositories of the past, with the additional stereotype of archivists as spinsters who were picky, hardworking, standoffish, and, by most accounts, pitiable enforcers of orders and structures, today the image of archives is changing. They are becoming exciting places where one can adapt and appropriate through processes of cut-and-paste.

An archive was once a place to preserve the past, to build legacies as well as to remember and recognise the roots from which to grow. However, as Michel Foucault reminds us, memories and archives do not survive by chance but are constructed to serve structures of power. Thus, the shape of an archive constrains and enables the content it encloses, and the technical methods for building and supporting an archive produces the document for collection. After all, the word ‘archive’ is derived from the Greek arkhē, which means government or order, origin and first place. However, digital technologies have changed and altered the status and meaning of an archive. The creation of documents and their aggregation into all sorts of different – especially online – archives has become part of everyday life. Archives are now being collectively built. As Arjun Appadurai asserts in his text Archive and Aspiration, ‘we should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Rather than being the tomb of the trace, the archive, is more frequently the product of the anticipation of collective memory.’

It could be argued that whether the archive is composed of print, photographs, film and/or digital media, the technologies used to organise, search and share documents have taken over the purview of a state, with the crowd acting as the control mechanism. Digital archives have changed from a stable entity into flexible systems, referred to with the popular term ‘Living Archives’. But in which ways do these changes affect our relationship to the past, present and future? What are the implications for this mode of forgetting, for memories, as well as for what is suppressed? Will the erased, forgotten and neglected be redeemed, and new social memories be allowed? Will the fictional versus factual mode of archiving offer the democracy that the public domain implies, or is it another way for public instruments of power to operate?

These and other questions will be addressed and discussed from the perspective of both lens-based and networked media, by looking at different topics that relate to archive and memory, from database to narrative, time, and the glitch, and through the works of (among others) Johan Grimonprez, Chris Marker, Geoffrey Bowker, Lynn Hershmann, Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, Rosa Menkman, Graham Harwood, Thomson & Craighead, David Lowenthal, Etoy, Walter Benjamin. There will be additional visits to Beeld & Geluid (home of the National Broadcasting Archives and owner of unique audio-visual collections), Hilversum; Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam; and Netherlands Media Art Institute (an institute dedicated to video and media art), Amsterdam.

Annet Dekker is independent curator and researcher. Subjects of interest are the influence of technology, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. Currently she works as webcurator for SKOR, as researcher on the project ”Born Digital art in Dutch art collections” for SBMK, VP, NIMk and DEN, as lecturer at Piet Zwart Academy for the thematic project “Archive & Memory” and new media theory at Rietveld Academy. In 2009 she initiated aaaan.net with Annette Wolfsberger. At the moment they organise the Artist in Residence programme at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam and they produced Funware, an international touring exhibition in 2010 and 2011 about fun in software (curated by Olga Goriunova). Since 2008 she is writing a PhD on strategies for documenting net art at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, under supervision of Matthew Fuller. Read more here: http://aaaan.net

Networked Media Sampler
Trimester 1 September – December 2011
Programmed by Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh and Renee Turner

Thematic Project Description
Historically the “embroidery sampler” was a piece of fabric used to practice one’s skills and record favorite patterns to be shared with others. Rather than a cohesive design, its surface was embellished with “samples” or small embroidered demonstrations of embellished letters from the alphabet and decorative stitchery, which were intended to show the proficiency of the maker and uniqueness of the handcrafted designs.

As a thematic project, the Networked Media Sampler takes this model as its starting point. Rather than a singular theme, it is a collection composed of a series of workshops, talks and presentations. Each element in the series is intended to highlight key areas of interest within networked culture and open source media practices. Through hands-on explorations and theoretical enquiry, the Networked Media Sampler will look at the contrast between closed and open systems. It will examine the limitations of the contemporary idea of the “Web”, social media, and the so-called “Open Web”. Next to this the project will look at models of network topologies and protocols, play with DIY approaches to building your own tools, and explore the dynamics of peer-to-peer exchange.

Keeping with the tradition of the sampler, this thematic project is a means of testing the surface of a very rich and complex tapestry whose texture is constituted through intertwining threads, nodes and rhizomatic turns.

Guests
Seda Guerses is a researcher working in the group COSIC/ESAT at the Department of Electrical Engineering in K. U. Leuven, Belgium. Her topics of interest include privacy technologies, participatory design, feminist critique of computer science, and online social networks. She has a keen interest in the subject of anonymity in technical as well as cultural contexts, the spectrum being anywhere between anonymous communications and anonymous folk songs. Beyond her academic work, she also collaborates with artistic initiatives including Constant vzw, Bootlab, De-center, ESC in Brussels, Graz and Berlin.

Nicolas Malevé (BE/ES) is an artist, software programmer and data activist who lives between Brussels and Barcelona. He develops multimedia projects and web applications for and with cultural organisations. His current research is focused on cartography, information structures, metadata and the means to visually represent them.

Since 1998 Nicolas collaborates with Constant, a non-profit association, based and active in Brussels since 1997 in the fields of feminism, copyright alternatives and working through networks. Constant develops radio, electronic music and database projects by means of migrating from cultural work to work places and back again.

<stdin> (FR/BE) is a graphic and media design studio, mixing visual design and programming for print and non-print design. They believe that programs make design, and programs are designed. Their projects are not only shaped by the tools they use, but ultimately their tools are shaped through their practice. <stdin> has a special interest in processes, education, theory and free software philosophy. They also collaborate on a regular basis with deValence and are part of Open Source Publishing. OSP (Open Source Publishing) is a graphic design collective that uses only Free, Libre and Open Source Software. <stdin> is Stephanie Vilayphiou and Alexandre Leray.

Marc Garrett (UK) is a net artist, media artist, curator, writer, street artist, activist, educationalist and musician. Emerging in the late 80’s from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics. Using unofficial, experimental platforms such as the streets, pirate radio such as the locally popular ‘Savage Yet Tender’ alternative broadcasting 1980’s group, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties, was co-sysop (systems operator) for a while with Heath Bunting on Cybercafe BBS, dedicated to arts, technology and hacking.

Co-director and co-founder, with artist Ruth Catlow of the net arts collectives and communities- Furtherfield, Netbehaviour, also cofounder and co-curator/director of the gallery space called HTTP Gallery in London, UK. Currently involved in co-running, collaborating with many others on Node.London. Also co-curating various contemporary Media Arts exhibitions, nationally and internationally such as Game/play a touring exhibition.

Ruth Catlow (UK) is Head at Writtle School of Design. She is an artist, educator and co-founder and co-director of Furtherfield.org [6], a grass roots media arts organisation and its gallery HTTP Gallery in North London. She works at the intersection of art, technology and social change with artists, curators, musicians, programmers, writers, activists and thinkers from around the world. At Furtherfield she is currently developing the artistic programme and organisational infrastructure with a focus on Media Art Ecologies, aspiring to engender shared visions and infrastructures for other possible worlds.

She regularly contributes to publications, books and conferences and has participated in exhibitions at CCA, Glasgow, The Baltic, Gateshead, Limehouse Town Hall, London as well as galleries in Zagreb, Madrid and Detroit and has work featured on the Rhizome Artbase and The Digital Kitchen. She was a recipient of a 2003 Low-fi Net Art Commission. She is adviser to Tiltfactor an independent games production lab that focuses on critical play.

Collaboration, participation, learning and exchange are central to Ruth’s artistic practice and she is an experienced producer and commissioner of co-devised, participatory artworks that utilise social technologies and has developed Furtherfield.org’s Participation and Learning programme, working in diverse community and educational contexts. She has worked in Higher Education for over 15 years. In recent years she worked as part of a team at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication to develop pedagogically-led approaches to developing and exploiting new emergent technologies and tools (e.g. social software, pervasive computing) in anticipation of shifts in future professional life within sustainable communities of practice.

Linda Hilfling is a Danish artist who makes problematic various claims of participation and free access professed in the burgeoning landscape of “social media”. Attentive to the latent forms of organization implicit in such networks (codes, organization and law), Hilfings’ investigations uncover gaps between the theory and practice of these structures.

Audrey Samson is a Rotterdam based media designer, artist and researcher. She manages the Digital Art Lab at the CKC culture/arts center (Zoetermeer, NL). She teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, NL). She completed a BFA Major in Design Art from Concordia University in 2002 (Montreal, Canada), and a M.A. in Media Design from the Piet Zwart Institute in 2007 (Rotterdam, NL). Her research/practice focuses on: rethinking interfaces, the use of online media for mourning purposes, the concept of finality in reproducible media, women’s relationship to technology, the affordances of the internet medium in telematic performance, working from the products of planned obsolescence, and re-assembling objects to endow them with new functionalities. Audrey is co-founder of the Roger 10-4 project together with Sabrina Basten. She is part of the Genderchangers (gender & FLOSS) network and the Aether9 telematic performance group.

Eric Schrijver (Amsterdam, 1984) is a designer, theatre maker and author. He proposes artists and designers to get intimate with their toolset. He has lectured at the Libre Graphics Conference and written for Libre Graphics magazine.

Wendy Van Wynsberghe is a member of Constant vzw – a non-profit organisation for art and new media, based in Brussels, highly active in the field of open source, feminism and alternatives for copyright – from 2000 she started volunteering on regular basis for Constant, since 2004 she works for the organization as a core member, partly responsible for production, hard and software, audio archiving, and as a activator of the workshop network Linux & audio in collaboration with Radio Campus, Radio Panik, Radio Air Libre, collectifs.net, BxLug. She is also involved in a partnership that organizes open hardware workshops, called Ellentriek, together with De Pianofabriek and Ladda.

Walter Langelaar is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Rotterdam. He is one of the founding members of Moddr and runs Worm’s media lab. Next to these activities he is currently working in the field of post-interactive sculpture, he deploys dedicated machines into a variety of gallery, festival and party circuits. His working interests include open source game engines, bot AI and neural networks, and “strange loops” through virtual and physical realities. He works with a wide variety of media including computer games, hacked electronic devices, software, video, sculpture and performance.