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Abstract
The interview by Federica Goffi with curator and researcher Annet Dekker focused on the archival futures of born digital media. Dekker discussed her 2014–2016 collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), through the speculative project: New Archive Interpretations, which probed into the digital archive as a system of how processes and individuals influence what can and cannot be seen, accessed, distributed, and re-used. Dekker discussed topics such as the dynamic and stable nature of physical and digital archives; the interdependence between born digital media and software and its impact on conservation; the relation between co-production and authorship; and the vital curatorial questions regarding inclusion/exclusion, omission/promotion of materials. Dekker warns about dark archives and the complexity of technical infrastructures and metadata reflecting ideological constructs and socio-cultural views. The interview questioned whether living digital archives can blur the line between the projective dimension of materials and retrospective conservation.
Notes
1. The interview took place on Zoom on October 19, 2020. For a definition of born digital media, see Annet Dekker, Archive 2020. Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2010), 3. Annet Dekker, ed., Lost and Living (in) Archives: Collectively Shaping New Memories (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017).
2. http://nimk.nl/eng/ (accessed October 25, 2020).
3. Annet Dekker, Collecting and Conserving Net Art. Moving Beyond Conventional Methods (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 19–33.
4. https://jaap-bakema-study-centre.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/activities/between-paper-and-pixels-transmedial-traffic-architectural-drawing-0 (accessed September 4, 2020). During a pop-up exhibit at the Jaap Bakema Center, which was part of the symposium events, curator Mulder discussed strategies to archive digital media.
5. https://hetnieuweinstituut.nl (accessed September 4, 2020).
6. Behrang Mousavi, Hetty Berens, Ole Bouman, Suzanne Mulder and Ellen Smit, Dutch Architecture in 250 Highlights: Preserved by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (Rotterdam: NAI, 2012).
7. https://www.mvrdv.nl/news/423/born-digital-mvrdv-donates-early-archive-to-het-nieuwe-instituuto; https://collectie.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/report-thursday-night-archives-mvrdv-and-zaha-hadid-architects (accessed September 4, 2020).
8. https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/new-archive-interpretations (accessed September 4, 2020).
9. https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/1-richard-vijgen (accessed December 25, 2020).
10. https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/3-erica-scourti (accessed October 28, 2020). See also: http://ericascourti.com (accessed January 19, 2021).
11. https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/4-george-oates (accessed October 29, 2020).
12. https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/5-what-remains/need-archive (accessed December 27, 2020).
13. https://archiefinterpretaties.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/introduction (accessed September 4, 2020).
14. Susan Piedmont-Palladino, ed., Tools of the Imagination. Drawing Tools and Technologies from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2007). Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawings: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 117–127.
15. Flash will be discontinued on December 31, 2020. https://www.adobe.com/ca/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html (accessed October 24, 2020).
16. Dekker, Collecting and Conserving Net Art.
17. Regarding authorship and collaborative design processes in architecture see Mario Carpo, “Digital Darwinism: Mass Collaboration, Form-Finding, and The Dissolution of Authorship,” Log 26 (Fall 2012): 97–105.
18. Antoine Picon, “From Authorship to Ownership: A Historical Perspective,” AD, Digital Property: Open Source Architecture 86, no. 5 (2016): 36–41.
19. See Annet Dekker, “Location, Location, Location!” in Olia Lialina Net Artist, ed. Valérie Perrin Bourogne (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2020), 95–115.
20. Dekker, Collecting and Conserving Net Art, 21–24, 95 note 9.
21. Federica Goffi, “Fabrication Sites and Sites of Knowledge Construction: Translations and Dislocations of Architectural Media at the Fabric of St. Peter’s, the Vatican,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2018): 325–338.
22. John Harris, “Storehouses of Knowledge: The Origins of the Contemporary Architectural Museum,” in Canadian Centre for Architecture, Building and Gardens, ed. Larry Richards (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1989), 15–32.
23. See the research project titled “The Critical Visitor. The Heritage Sector at a Crossroads: The way of Intersectionality,” (2020–2025): https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/humanities/critical-visitor (accessed December 27, 2020). See also: Charles Jeurgens and Michael Karabinos, “Paradoxes of Curating Colonial Memory,” Archival Science 20 (2020): 199–220.
24. The HNI collection consists of around 4.5 million documents. About 140.000 documents can be found online in the search portal. In 2018 HNI received financial funding (11 million Euros for four years) from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to increase the current digitisation and accessibility of the archival collections. https://hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/press-releases/ministry-education-culture-and-science-invests-11-million-euros-architectural (accessed December 27, 2020).
25. Hypermnesia is a medical condition, and people affected by it have difficulties making decisions. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070329092022.htm (accessed December 26, 2020). Regarding the drive to the conservation of memories see Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19–20.
26. Dawn E. Holmes, Big Data. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
27. Annet Dekker, “Between Light and Dark Archiving,” in Digital Art Through the Looking Glass: New Strategies for Archiving, Collecting and Preserving in Digital Humanities, eds. Oliver Grau, Janina Hoth and Eveline Wandl-Vogt (Krems a.d. Donau: Edition Donau-Universität, 2019), 133–144.
28. Ioannis Poulios, “Moving Beyond a Values-Based Approach to Heritage Conservation,” Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 12, no. 2 (May 2010): 175.
29. Dekker, Collecting and Conserving Net Art, 14, 71–98.
30. Caitlin Desilvey, Curated Decay. Heritage Beyond Saving (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 1–21.
31. Sarah Mervosh, Simon Romero and Lucy Tompkins, “Reconsidering the Past, One Statue at the Time,” The New York Times, June 16, 2020.
32. Bruno Latour, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
33. Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place? (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1972), 53.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Federica Goffi
Federica Goffi is a Professor of Architecture, Interim Director and Co-Chair of the PhD and MAS program in architecture at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhD from Virginia Tech in Architecture and Design Research. She published book chapters and journal articles on the threefold nature of time-weather-tempo. Her book, Time Matter[s]: Invention and Re-imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s in the Vatican, was published by Ashgate in 2013. She edited Marco Frascari’s Dream House: A Theory of Imagination (Routledge 2017); InterVIEWS: Insights and Introspection in Doctoral Research in Architecture (Routledge 2019), and co-edited Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity (Routledge 2019). She holds a Dottore in Architettura from the University of Genoa, Italy. She is a licensed architect in her native country, Italy.
Annet Dekker
Annet Dekker is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies: Archival and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Center for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She is an independent curator and has published in numerous collections and journals and is the editor of several volumes, among others, Curating Digital Art. From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-Curating (2021) and Lost and Living [in] Archives. Collectively Shaping New Memories (2017). Her monograph, Collecting and Conserving Net Art (2018) is a seminal work in the field of digital art conservation.