Archiving Emerging Cultural Heritage
The aim of this brief report is to summarise the outputs of the CC Open Culture Platform Working Group (WG) focused on Archiving Emerging Cultural Heritage. In simple terms our working group hosted a series of interviews with cultural organisations and produced a co-created zine which is available to download and will be available at CC Events during 2023.
Introduction:
Most open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) work has been focused on big institutions and traditional heritage, with little know-how and support available for smaller organisations and their contemporary archiving and documenting needs. On the other hand, traditional and bigger heritage institutions can largely benefit from connecting to and collaborating with smaller organisations and private collections. In the digital culture of the future and the growing digitisation of existing cultural heritage, one of the main challenges will be the amount of heritage within the vast digital realm, which will be impossible for big institutions to handle without cooperating with other players in the field of digital cultural heritage. The societal pluriformity and multivocal approaches to archiving and storytelling make our world more diverse, democratic but lack of uniformity has an impact on access and accessibility across context.
Our goals in the working group were to:
- highlight a variety of contemporary organisations and their archiving practices, innovations, and needs,
- create a resource for anyone interested in contemporary archiving to explore and gain insight and knowledge from.
Interviews:
Our interview series ambitiously intended to highlight five specific organisations. But we managed to connect with two very innovative and fitting organisations that made the effort to share their insights and experiences with the WG about archiving emerging and new media.
The Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) is a contemporary art archive which focuses on innovating many aspects of the archiving process including accessibility, community engagement, and participation in the archiving as a shared history. We had the pleasure of talking to Hailey Loman and Dianne Weinthal about their experiences setting up the archive, what makes their organisation stand out, and how the community is engaged in the space. The physical archive is an open-to-the-public collection of predominantly art and ephemera from the art world in Los Angeles. The community participates in the archive through community events like exhibitions and is invited to contribute their materials to the collection As a community archive, the organisation is committed to eliminating barriers to entry both for those interested in having their material archived as well as those interested in learning from the material that is collected. We reached out to LACA because they were recently mentioned as receiving a multi-year collection from a festival series in the United States, Common Field. In the interview we discussed:
- What does the archive consist of and what considerations do you make with acquisitions?
- What is cultural heritage to the community?
- How does the archive relate to the public and who does that include?
- Archives as part of the commons
- The choice to make a physical archive very public, but a digital accessible archive without public use licenses.
Iminente is a contemporary art and music festival. Over the course of almost ten years the festival has moved to five cities around the world. The festival focuses on urban culture, arts, music, and community activism in the festival production. The program combines a visual arts component with music, cuisine, and community building. The festival archive exists in multiple formats; digitally within the organisation, physically within the temporarily-occupied spaces, and with each the participants which they call their living archive. The organisers see the archive of the festival as alive because the experience can only be harvested and shared by the people who participated and any documentation can only offer a fragmented and distant view. Since the festival usually occupies spaces that are ‘abandoned’ the street and visual arts in the spaces remain there ephemerally until further intervention changes the situation. In the interview we discussed:
- What the archive consists of and how it is managed,
- How the public can engage with the archive,
- The future ambitions of the program and a digital archive,
- How the ephemerality of the festival is preserved
Along with the interviews the WG organised an open call to co-create a zine about new media archiving. The open call ran from August to September and resulted in 9 content submissions from archives and individuals around the world. The print edition will be available during 2023 at events where CC is present including at the 2023 CC Global Summit. The digital download is available here:
Our conclusion from this project is that archival work is an evolving field. Best practices are still being distilled and some are gathered here in the interviews and conversations and in the co-created zine. But how new and contemporary forms of media are archived and preserved is still very fluid and will continue to change as the technologies and opinions change. Events such as festivals or exhibitions can for example create a multitude of media that is preserved in various ways and therefore requires various forms of accessibility.
Co-leads
Connor Benedict and Abdul Dube
Special thanks to all the members of the working group throughout the year, the CC Open Culture community for their engagement and participation, and the CC Open Culture Platform for support and guidance.
