Lost and Living (in) ArchivesLost and Living (in) Archives

With Annet Dekker, authors of Lost and Living (in) Archives and Piet Zwart Institute, Media Design: Experimental Publishing

Archives are collections of records that are preserved for historical, cultural and evidentiary purposes. As such, archives are considered sites of a past, places that contain traces of a collective memory of a nation, a people or group. Digital archives have transformed from stable entities into flexible systems, at times referred to with the term 'Living Archives'. In which ways has this change affected our relationship to the past? Will the erased, forgotten and neglected be redeemed, and new memories be allowed to take their place? Will the fictional versus factual mode of archiving offer the democracy that the term public domain implies, or is it merely another way for public instruments of power to operate? The various essays in _Lost and Living (in) Archives_ show that archives are not simply a recording, a reflection, or an image of an event, but that they shape the event itself and thus influence both the past, present and future.

This event will explore the messy entanglements of how documents are created and collected, how systems (dis)function and how networks of people, bots and algorithms trigger and demand transformations in the way archives are constructed and thought of. Presentations by students of the [Experimental Publishing](http://Piet Zwart Institute, Media Design: Experimental Publishing) study path at Piet Zwart Institute's Media Design Master in Rotterdam, currently focusing on the topic of the autonomous archive, will be followed by a discussion, in which particular attention will be paid to the functions and functioning of bottom-up archival approaches, community archives and autonomous archiving. Among the authors present will be Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Nicolas Maleve and Tina Bastajian.

Under the title New Archive Interpretations, Het Nieuwe Instituut launched in 2014 a series of commissions for artists, designers and researchers, under the supervision of Annet Dekker, to examine the influence and impact of the digital archive in relation to its analogue predecessor, the paper archive. The exhibition Archive Interpretations is on show at Het Nieuwe Instituut.