DDW 2024 Recap: Digital Futures of ArchivingDDW 2024 Recap: Digital Futures of Archiving

We started off the day with a keynote by Archival Consciousness, initiated by artist Mariana Lanari and graphic designer Remco van Bladel. They shared their personal methods for using a Knowledge Graph to make the Dutch design field more visible, relating to the information from the archives of NADD partners that manage collections on design and digital culture. The keynote featured examples that show the life cycle of data, such as the journey from the archives to the NADD, and to Wikidata, revealing the process of capturing, structuring, and sharing knowledge about makers and their archives within a broader digital network.

In this session, Annemartine van Kesteren and the Archive Doctors (Lonneke van Heugten and Ashna Wiegerink) led an experimental experience for participants as we moved through Strijp-S wearing headphones, collectively losing our memory of the world around us. Participants no longer knew how the world around them was created or by whom. Through a series of experiments along the walk, we imagined a future—50 years from now—where traces of designers' work have vanished or exist only as fragmented, nearly untraceable remnants.

What would we lose without access to this knowledge? Would we still comprehend the world we inhabit? The walk took us through Strijp-S to The New Block, where the presentation ‘Seeking Shelter’ served as a time capsule, revealing the importance of preserving design and digital maker archives to understand our surroundings.

During this breakout session, Sanneke Huisman and Joost Dofferhoff tabled some of the issues and questions entailed in archiving, conservation and distrubution of digital art through their experience working at LI-MA. Sanneke opened with a brief introduction of the kind of work LI-MA has been doing over the past decade as several participants were new to LI-MA's work (a write up of this history is available here). Sanneke pointed us to LI-MA's online catalogue, comprising the largest media art collection in the Netherlands, and an interesting resource to artists, researchers and students alike. This was followed by a few examples of recent projects, namely Digital Care and the exhibition 'Reboot', highlighting the meticulous, case-based, and often investigative work that the preservation of works like Dick Raaijmakers' Ideofoon I requires.

We then got a brief peak into what the archive of an internet artwork can look like. Joost posed the question: what do we need to be able to access an internet artwork in 10 year? We brainstormed together that this might include things like a server, code, a computer, documentation, any relevant datasets... a list that could go on, and would differ from work to work. Joost then presented what exactly this entailed in the case of archiving Jan Robert Leegte's Compressed Forests (2016) and Jeroen Jongeleen's Running a Circle Clockwise (2017). One element of the archiving process that we discussed in detail was conducting artist interviews. Seeing as LI-MA's funding for the upcoming four-year subsidy period has not been renewed, the question of what will happen to all this work and expertise - and with what effects - was in the room with us throughout the session.

During the breakout session “Mapping Design Networks with Linked Open Data” Hay Kranen and Bibi Bodegom guided the audience through their work for the NADD Wikidata project. They started with a general introduction about the project and the history of Wikipedia, followed by a comparison of Wikipedia with Wikidata. After this, they got to work: together with the participants they visualized a knowledge graph of their networks. Then Kranen and Bodegom delved deeper into the available data they collected in the Wikidata project and practiced creating SPARQL queries (search language to perform searches in a database). This illustrated how the data on Wikidata can be reused by the participants for other purposes. The goal of this session was to show how open data can assist in providing insight into the Dutch design field, and how it offers new opportunities for reuse.

In this session Alice Twemlow and Loma Doom (aka Femke Dekker) shared insights on how to use the sonic in relation to individual archives. They described how the sonic can be used to link across (parts) of archives (mapping) and as a form of sensory engagement. Alice opened with an introduction on her professorship at the University of Amsterdam and her research into the NAGO archive (Dutch Archive of Graphic Designers). Finding out more about how this archive came about and became institutionalized, she realized how it then also became an ideological apparatus. As an historian, Twemlow aims to intervene in these archive mechanisms of descriptions, and participates in the collective efforts to unsettle the normative assumptions. To disquiet these archives, she navigates theoretical pathways (intersectional feminist theory, decolonial theory) to start unlearning. This unlearning can be done for instance by reclaiming archival metadata. If there is no LGBTQIA+ terminology in the official way of describing archives, maybe archivists need help! For example, by expanding the vocabulary – as seen on the Homosaurus – or initiating alternative search boxes/tools such as the Feminist Search Tool.

Twemlow and Loma Doom are currently collaboratively researching the life and work of Fre Cohen, a women graphic designer who worked in the beginning of the 19th century in Amsterdam. Loma Doom shared how her first encounter with archival research was surprisingly lacking the sensorial. Instead of digging for materials and leafing through folders, most the material is accessed through search boxes and the results are often digitized works or files. While navigating the archive of IISG she came across the archive of the radio de Vrije Keyser, and dove into the sonic, listening to over 300hrs of material. During this research, she examined the tension between the artist as an activist, the artist as an archivist, and the archivist as an activist. She shared that in these positions we can implement an artistic approach to ask: what is not being heard, and what is not there? And how does/would it sound? The participants were asked to think about absences, or silences and the sounds of an archive they’ve worked with or are familiar with. It sparked a conversation and brain storm session about what archival sounds can be heard, but are maintained only if they’re listened to.