Digital media and communication technology has had a profound impact on what we understand to be the nature and function of archives.  Within a few years the contemporary notion of the archive has broadened from being a static repository for historical artefacts to being reconfigured as a dynamic collection of searchable materials. The web has been instrumental in developing and popularising new paradigms as moving image and sound material has joined text and image in the repertoire of media readily available online.

This newer idea of an archive exists alongside other models such as the traditional repository preserving valuable unique artefacts and the distribution collection concerned with the exhibition of the mechanically reproduced copy.

In this changing context what are the implications for the relationship between artists and archives?

This table will consider the idea of archives as a site for artists’ use and re-use of material; as process and interface; as the ‘meta-archive’ encompassing existing models and shaping idea of archives past, present and future; and the development of a tactical approach to practice-driven archive-based research and theory.

Discuss this topic on the Temporary Host forums.

Host

Steven Ball
British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection,
Central St Martins College of Art and Design
http://www.studycollection.org.uk

Guest contributors

Vicki Bennett
People Like Us
http://www.peoplelikeus.org
For 17 years Vicki Bennett has been making CDs, radio and A/V multimedia under the name People Like Us. Her moving image work collages and recontextualises found footage into witty, surreal and occasionally dark revisions of a popular cultural past. She often uses material from online archive resources such as the Prelinger Archive. Vicki has exhibited at Tate Modern, NFT, Purcell Room, The ICA, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Sonar in Barcelona among many others and presents and produces a regular radio show on WFMU which has had over 3/4 million RealPlayer hits.

Sue Breakell
Tate Archive
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/researchservices/archive
Sue Breakell heads the Archive department in Tate Library and Archive. The Archive collects material relating to British Art since 1900, including the record of artists, galleries, art institutions and critics, as well as managing Tate's own institutional records. She has a particular interest in the relationship between art and archives and archives and memory.