1st International Symposium: Media Libraries and Archives for the 21st Century

Mela Dávila, Head of the Media library at MACBA-Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona, quoted the fact that “the museum and the archive are two sides of the same coin”. The collection and the archive are conceived as a continuum. Neither the archive nor the collection has fixed edges. In this regard, archives cannot limit their role to passive conservation, but must actively engage in creating documentation. Mela Dávila explained that MACBA is particularly active in this regard, particularly since its archive contains documentation originating from the 1950s onwards, a period that coincides with the dematerialisation of the artistic object, in which often the only element of a work that can be conserved is the document.

Concha Tejedor, Director of Documentation and Photographic Collections at Agencia EFE (Madrid) began by saying that archives were not considered interesting until they started to be financially profitable. When archives are digitalized and catalogued, she went on; they can be reused as collections. As an example, she presented a slide show of a gallery of photos from the EFE archive that match the key word “kiss”. This simple use is an example of an archive’s potential to generate new content when the documents it contains are reused in ways that go beyond the original intended purpose.

File versus collection. The second day of the symposium started with a session that examined the strategies of museums in relation to documentation of their collections.

Jaime López, Head of the Media library at Casa Árabe (Madrid), presented Casa Árabe, an international institute from the Muslim world and Arabic culture. The principal mission of the centre, which is a pioneer project in Spain, is to show the other face of the Arabic world, Jaime López explained. The archive uses MARC 21 cataloguing standards, the metadata properties set out in the Dublin Core project and the Unicode UTF-8 character coding format.

Antonio Santamariana, representing Rosario López de Prado, Head of the Documentation Service at the Filmoteca Española (Madrid), described the numerous collections held at Filmoteca. Filmoteca Española was created in 1953, and since 1956 it has been a member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). It is currently facing the same problems that are affecting many other archives, with the added complexity of the long history of film (in comparison to that of video and media art) and its wide range of different media and taxonomies.

Carme Farrás, Head of the Mediateca CaixaForum Barcelona, Fundación “La Caixa”, Barcelona, presented this media art project that is physically integrated into the Mediateca building. The Mediateca is a pioneering media library created in 1994 for multimedia and audiovisual art. From 1994 to 2002 began its video art collection with a collection of documents in different analogue formats: vinyl records, cds, videos, etc. In 2002 it embarked on the digitalisation of the video art collection. In 2009 it dropped the more generic material and focused on media art and digital culture: photography, film, video, music and technology and the Internet. The Mediateca is divided into three sections: a video archive, a documentation area and the web site.

Antoni Mercader, Co-coordinator of GAMA-Gateway to Archives of Media Art explained that GAMA involving 19 institutions that work together to articulate eight archives. The objective of the platform is to offer multilingual access to content that covers 55% of the media art that can be found in Europe’s cultural archives and distributors. In the future, it aspires to expand its scope and become the key reference portal for all European media art archives. Users can view preliminary displays of works of video art and experimental film, as well as performances, installations and documentaries from festivals such as Ars Electronica.

Jesús Carillo, Director of Cultural Programs at Museo Nacional y Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, began by saying that the traditional logic of the museum is in crisis, and goes against the logic of the archive. Museums are now confronting a mutation of meaning in their collections. Documents take on importance, collections become archives. Jesús Carrillo proposed a series of principles that should guide museums in the age of archives: What should be archived?, ownership, access and activation.

Jane Burton, Head of Content and Creative Director of the TATE Media presented the resources developed by her department to document the museum’s exhibitions and activities. One of their projects is TATEshots, a podcast channel containing documentaries about the artists and exhibitions in a format that can be viewed online or downloaded to portable devices like iPods or iPhones. As Jane Burton said, this material must be offered in a way that makes it available “always, for everybody, and for free.” They have also created a YouTube channel, which is an ideal platform because users go to it directly seeking short audiovisual content.

Case Studies. In the fourth and final session of the day, there have been several cases of media libraries and organizations based entirely or partially in Spain.

Pilar García, Exhibition Curator, MUAC-Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, began by describing the facilities of the centre. Officially opened in 2008, it has Mexico’s most important contemporary art collection and forms part of the UNAM. The majority of the museum’s visitors are students (74%), who are the target audience for its curatorial programs – temporary exhibitions that are made up of works from the permanent collection. The MUAC media library sees its archives as university heritage, and as such they are immutable and dedicated to research. One of the essential roles of the media library is to provide access, to favour consultation of the holdings, and to allow for other ways of studying them.

Secundino González, Head of the Media library at Universidad de Oviedo, raised some of the problems shared by all archives, such as the custody of information or the selection of the documents to be archived. Technology allows anything to be stored, he said, pointing out that while storage capacity is constantly increasing, the problem is locating the data inside the archive. Thus, the ideal is to work towards creating a single digital archive, shared with other organisations. The media library is a pioneer Net archive initiative in the sphere of universities. Its focus is on becoming a centre for resources for the university community, and later for society in general.

Rui Guerra, V2-Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, talked about the process of integrating the institute’s two web sites into one. In the previous system, information had a life cycle that took it from the main web site to the archive, which meant that current activities were shown in the first and past activities in the second. An interesting aspect of the new web site is its connection to other sites on the Net. As Rui Guerra said, “web sites are no longer islands, but nodes connected to networks.” In keeping with this, a fundamental aspect of the new website design involved working with the file sharing allowed by the API of the main social networking sites.

Tools and technical processes. The sixth and final session of the symposium was attended by professionals from different cultural institutions have discussed the technical processes that develop in their respective files.

Marcos García presented Medialab-Prado, Madrid a program run by the Madrid City Council’s Department of the Arts, which started out in 2000 at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque. In relation to the activities carried out by Medialab-Prado, Marcos García sees the web site as a projection of the building as far as the archives are interconnected. As a production and research laboratory that focuses on face to face meetings and knowledge sharing, Medialab-Prado makes it a priority to develop an accessible archive. Since 2008, it has worked towards collaborating with other Madrid institutions in the creation of a common archive.

Gustavo Valera, Head Technician at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, presented LABoral’s intranet. A full archive has been created with a CRM database based on FileMaker that makes it possible to manage the media library as well as the day-to-day processes of the staff in the centre’s departments. Gustavo Valera explained that the unified database saves time and speeds up procedures.

To conclude this first symposium Mike Stubbs, director of FACT-Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, took the floor and proposed that this symposium be seen as more than a meeting. A proposal for a Summit Charte by Mike Stubbs.

Benjamin Weil, Chief curator of LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón) moderated this panel. He kicked off by talking about our environment as a constellation of data, in which hierarchies become blurred. As such, he continued, one of the challenges we face is how to contextualise this data.

Pau Alsina, Lecturer in the Arts and Humanities Department, UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona moderated this panel and presented an overview of the context in which media libraries and archives carry out their work. Talking about the access to culture that ICTs make possible, Pau Alsina discussed the case of the UOC, which has established itself as a totally virtual university since 1994, and which adopts new technologies with natural ease. In regards to teaching at the UOC, he expressed the need to create archives, media libraries and forms of storage that can offer access to knowledge. The very use of terms like “Information Society” and “Network Society” reveal the fundamental role of information in our society.

Yves Bernard, Director of iMAL-Centre for digital Cultures and Technology, Brussels moderated this panel, which began with a presentation of the work carried out at iMAL, a centre that started out as a laboratory (interactive Media Art Laboratory) in 1999. The institution that he represents keeps its archives online, and also keeps much of its content on popular sites like Flickr, a strategy that allows them to save money and, in theory, preserve their archives even if iMAL were to disappear. The role of a digital archive is to provide public access to works and related documentation, and it is currently possible to upload this content on the Internet with a quality that is similar to the original. This data is also accessible, indexable, and allows the public to post comments. So, why a physical infrastructure?. The 21st century archive is an online collection of hypermedia archives.

Patricia Sloane, Consultant of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, introduce the relationships between cybernetic Latin American art and conceptual art. Nowadays, stated Patricia Sloane, Mexico has an “ambiguous affaire” with modernity, always on the point of happening, and never accomplished. In the seventies, artists had to be their own historians and archivists. The involvement of the museistic institution is unavoidably essential in order to achieve the implementation of artistic practice, link the past and the present. The MUAC – Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo was created in this context of a lack of history.

Alain Depocas, Director of the Fondation Daniel Langlois, Canada, presented the history of the foundation, created in 1999 and dedicated to the conservation, research and cataloguing of media art through various projects. Its priorities include documentation of the context of production and of the contemporary media art scene, and the historical context of contemporary media art from the late fifties to the present. Its collections and archives include records of the pioneers of media art, such as a collection of more than 500 documents relating to “Experiments in Art and Technology”, text and video documentation on the historic project “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” or the video art collection of Steina and Woody Vasulka.

Preservation of media art. Archives and media libraries. The third session of the day focused on the needs of conservation and preservation of media art works that began to take place in the last three decades and are now particularly at risk, as in the case of works published in the 90s in electronic formats.

Alessandro Ludovico, Editor in chief of the magazine Neural (Bari), pointed out that one of the problems raised by the World Wide Web is that it tends to focus on its own history. He talked about the task of digitalizing print resources, which would provide file sharing networks with the information contained in millions of books that are not currently available. Most of the material we can find online focuses on the last two decades, which is a very narrow time band of the history of culture. He went on to explain the creation process of the Neural magazine digital archive, which currently includes a hundred documents and may include the 2000 documents in its archive within a year.

Production and selection of content. What to keep?. The second session of the symposium has treated about the selection of content in digital files and access and dissemination.

Heiner Holtappels, Director of Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/ Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, talked about the work carried out by the institute, which has worked in the field of video art conservation since the 1970s. He pointed out the importance of the choice of format for the conservation of electronic archives: since 1989, the institute has used digital betacam to conserve video tapes, because it is the only format that does not entail a loss of information. Another aspect to be taken into account is the different versions of a single work that can be conserved in an archive. He also mentioned the need to keep a record of the conditions in which a work was originally exhibited, based on a questionnaire that includes questions on all possible aspects relating to the context of the work.

Theresa Schubert-Minski, Coordinator of the Ars Electronica Archive (Linz), brought this session to an end by talking about the Ars Electronica festival archive. Ars Electronica set up its own museum in 1996 and started to document the festival. In 2004, it compiled and archived all the material of the other institutions. The priorities for conservation include the digitalisation of archives and the creation of a database that will offer a detailed description of the context and relationships between documents, which is why Theresa Schubert-Minski believes that it will be essential to use metadata.

Beryl Graham, Co-editor of CRUMB-Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, Sunderland, presented her research platform on media art curatorial processes, and the book “Rethinking Curating", which she co-wrote with Sarah Cook, and has recently been published by MIT Press. He presented a series of documentation and conservation projects, such as PAD.MA (Public Access Digital Media Archive), an online video archive that includes comments by authors and users and can be consulted in full, allowing users to watch or download the videos for non-commercial purposes. Another open collaboration project is The Bold Street Project, with blog posts, comments, photos, videos and other documents provided by a local community, although there was no intention to create a permanent or structured archive from this material. A third example mentioned by Beryl Graham was the program by Graham Harwood, Uncomfortable Proximity (2000), a personal reformulation of the content of the TATE website.

Alex Adriaansens, Director of the V2-Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam was the moderator of this second session. He kicked off the session with a reflection on our notion of time and a reminder that the concept of archives leads us to think about related aspects like memory and history. Our experience and perception of time is not an objective phenomenon, said Alex Adriaansens. Archives are a reflection of the notion of time, given that our notion of the past and the future will depend on how we organize information. Today, archives are not just individual data, but also the relationships between these data – metadata that create order and a hierarchy. Alex Adriaansens then went on to say that we constantly live within archives: the human body is a genetic archive; language is an archive of meanings; the subconscious is an archive of profound and moving experiences.

Pau Alsina, Lecturer in the Arts and Humanities Department, UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona moderated this panel and presented an overview of the context in which media libraries and archives carry out their work. Talking about the access to culture that ICTs make possible, Pau Alsina discussed the case of the UOC, which has established itself as a totally virtual university since 1994, and which adopts new technologies with natural ease. In regards to teaching at the UOC, he expressed the need to create archives, media libraries and forms of storage that can offer access to knowledge. The very use of terms like “Information Society” and “Network Society” reveal the fundamental role of information in our society.

Mike Stubbs, Director and Chief Executive of FACT-FOUNDATION FOR ART AND CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY, London, emphasized the importance of securing financing for documentation and conservation processes. He pointed out that in the current world economic crisis, it is essential to find viable economic models that make it possible to continue the activities of media libraries and archives, because if these activities were to stop, an important part of the history of contemporary art could be lost. He briefly described the history of FACT as a centre that began as a catalyst for the urban regeneration of Liverpool, a city that has reinvented itself in recent years, and was European Cultural Capital in 2008.

Attila Marton, member of the Information Systems and Innovation Group at the Management Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, presented a research paper called “Theory of Digital Objects,” which appeared published in the magazine First Monday in June 2010. He summarised the problems and issues posed by the conservation of digital heritage with the phrase “from the ephemeral to the persistent”. The challenge of conservation is to transform digital objects into forms that persist. He identified the following attributes of digital objects: editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness.

Margaret Smith, physical Sciences librarian at New York University and consulting archivist for UbuWeb, explained the characteristics of UbuWeb, a site that is known for its work in recovering audiovisual archives of 20th century avant-garde art and making it publicly available on the Internet. UbuWeb was created by Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996 as an archive of visual, concrete and sound poetry, and later began adding films and other text and sound archives. Given the limited access to much material from the avant-garde movements, the UbuWeb team decided to make this content available to Internet users under a principle of “gift economy”, without charging for it and avoiding any kind of commercial format. Without a budget of any kind, UbuWeb operates thanks to collaborations with different centres and companies, and remains outside of the institutional and academic spheres. Most of the material published is obtained without permission (Margaret Smitt said that “Ubu behaves as though copyright did not exist”).

Access to contemporary culture and creation through media libraries and archives. The first session of the symposium focused on access to information in the context of network society. Technological innovations provide new opportunities for the preservation and archiving of cultural heritage, and therefore can generate new forms of access to knowledge.