Time: Thursday December 14, 17:00 – 18:30hrs
Location: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
Admission: Free

With: Annet Dekker & authors of Lost and Living (in) Archives & 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.

A presentation from students of the Experimental Publishing study path at the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media Design Master in Rotterdam, currently focusing on the topic of the autonomous archive, will be followed by a discussion. Particular attention will be paid to the functions and functioning of bottom-up archival approaches, community archives and autonomous archiving.