Wrapping up the NADD Research ResidencyWrapping up the NADD Research Residency

Taking the buttons in the collections of the International Institute of Social History as a starting point, Sara Culmann has been examining ways in which archives could be explored through play. With the aim of developing a game that could be incorporated into users’ online experiences of archives, Sara’s focus was on search portals and the digitised visual material available therein.

The outcome of Playable Archives is a scalable game prototype that can be extended to visual material from other collections as well as connected across them, designed to make use of existing data. The game is a card-based RPG that encourages interpretation and personal engagement with archival objects. Players’ motivations and actions are embedded into a shared World and guided by an individually assigned Role. Taking on this subjective position, players are invited to discuss archival objects – the Items in the game – as they negotiate their next move.

At this stage Playable Archives is a card game that will be printed and tested in the coming period. For a future iteration it could be extended to include more/other archival material and/or adapted to an online version.

With Diagrammatic Temporalities in Memory Landscapes, Maxigas has been investigating the potential of version control systems like Git for archival practices in design and digital culture. Throughout the residency period his research has been informed by conversations and collaborations with a number of organisations including the V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Software Heritage Foundation, Software Engineering Research Group (TU Delft), Varia, Het Nieuwe Instituut and LIMA.

In October Maxigas organised the event “Merge Conflicts”: Git between Workspace Surveillance and Historical Record at the hacklab []LAG(](https://laglab.org/) in Amsterdam. The event included a talk on the politics and techniques of Git, aiming to catalyse conversations around the topic and think collaboratively, in public, about the topic. The discussion yielded valuable insights into political aspects of version control systems, as well as the everyday reality of working with them.

Taking V2_ as a case study, Maxigas scraped the lab’s archive resulting in a database of all the 1060 digital artworks in their collection. He’s since been experimenting with converting this into a Git repository, storing artworks instead of changes in software source code. To share the outcomes of this branch of his project, Maxigas is making a visualisation of the V2_ archive in git format.

Maxigas’ research spanning the residency period will be compiled into a fanzine. Besides elaborating on findings from the components mentioned above, the fanzine will include a section dedicated to policy recommendations on software repositories for digital culture archives, for which Maxigas partnered up with Tancredi Di Giovanni. The publication of the fanzine will of course be accompanied with a release party! Stay tuned for dates.

Outline set out to formulate a methodology that facilitates and stimulates an active, subjective engagement with archival objects. Their exploration has been guided by the analogy to the music genre of dub, and the notion of dubbing; how to dub an object, to make it resonate beyond the walls of the organisation that holds it? With the importance of (wider) activation, engagement and dissemination for and with archives in mind, the acts of invitation and publication have been central to their research – to both, their own process and the conceived methodology.

Together with two temporary collectives and in conversation with archivists, Outline have focused their research within the institutional frameworks of International Institute of Social History and Het Nieuwe Instituut. They organised a workshop at each location, intended to experiment with forms the methodology could take. Their motivation stems from the desire to create an infrastructure through which the archival institution, its collections and its objects are continuously visited and revisited. In this process, Outline position themselves between the archival institution and the browser: as inviters, editors and publishers. The methodological framework is based on a recursive process: inviting one or several browsers into the archive through an open call format, browsing the archive, selecting objects, adding layers of relational meta-data to the selected objects, writing a multi-authored essay, publishing the findings in a quarterly periodical, inviting browsers through an open call based on the findings of the previous periodical, et cetera.

Outline are currently working on a prototype, an edition 0, of this periodical, which will be published early 2023. This edition will focus on several activist publishing practices encountered in their archival research. After this, they aim to continue their dialogue with the International Institute of Social History about the proposed cascading publishing network, with a focus on histories of communities that are often overlooked.

The NADD research residency aims to explore the potential of decentralised structures for archival practices in design and digital culture. What might we learn by archiving these domains in decentralised and distributed ways? What tensions might such approaches uncover? And what challenges do they pose? Selected residents will each develop a project that addresses an aspect of these issues. Their research will bridge material from two or more different archives. The residency runs from September to November 2022, after which the outcomes of the projects will be published – in the first instance online, in the NADD web magazine at the start of 2023.

For more information revisit the 2022 open call or announcement of the selected residents.