Sharing Approaches to Archive Access and Activation: Audience Outreach, Rights and Technical Issues

Session 1 - Spaces of (Informal) Education, Visibility of Marginalized Communities and Artistic Research

This session highlights initiatives which are making experimental, subversive and „marginalized“ audiovisual practices of the past visible and accessible while engaging new audiences or inspiring artistic creation. 

Sinema Transtopia (Berlin) by the bi’bak collective (guest: artistic co-director Malve Lippmann) redefines the cinema as a transnational space for social discourse, exchange and solidarity. „Please Rewind“, an early project, explored German-Turkish film and video culture in Berlin and the role it played in shaping diasporic, post-migrant identities. Through workshops and symposia, Sinema Transtopia investigates transnational archival politics through the lens of post-colonialism and how to make archiving inclusive of migrant and marginalized viewpoints (such as feminist or queer). Sinema also offers a variety of educational activities for school children, students and adults and has launched a fellowship for film educators from diverse backgrounds.

With the collection of pioneering video artists Steina & Woody Vasulka as a point of departure, Vašulka Kitchen Brno (guest: Jennifer Helia DeFelice) is dedicated to presenting (new) media art. VKB has developed educational programs for children and families, kindergartens and schools, universities and adults which promote media literacy and self-creation using current and vintage technologies. Vašulka Kitchen Brno also supports scholarly and artistic research as well as the creation of new media art works with a residency program.

The performance collective D’epog (Brno) is a platform for contemporary experimental stage work. The company’s activities are of laboratory nature and their work often transcends artistic disciplines. Their commissioned intervention into the EastUnBloc exhibition, BYE BYE MY EYE: Confirmed. Understood. Over and out, was developed in collaboration with experimental filmmakers Marie and Petr Šprincl and sound designer, producer, DJ, and composer Mojmír Měchura.  Lucia Repašská of D’epog will discuss how this live cinema experience explores the principles of chance, unrepeatability, and radical expressivity, with retrofuturist and media archaeological elements. 

Flóra Barkóczi (Central European Research Institute for Art History) examines the MetaForum conferences in Budapest  (1994–1996, 2024) as a key site of cultural transfer in the post-socialist context, where emerging digital technologies and media theory met local artistic practices. She will investigate how far MetaForum enabled meaningful knowledge exchange and whether it succeeded in integrating regional voices into the international discourse.  

30+ year-old moving image works have seen conversion from film to tape and then digitization as various formats: DVD, mp4 and DCP. Conserving interactive digital, browser-native works has been more challenging, as transferring and migrating code is more complex than digitizing film or video. Furthermore, the disppearance of online platforms and finite server hosting contracts has stranded some net art works in the realm of 404, unless the Wayback Machine crawl or initiatives like Rhizome have salvaged at least some screenshots if not the full functionalty. Another issue is copyright. 

Paul Klimpel of the digital rights NGO iRights.info will provide an overview of rights models. How can rights claims of artists, estates, galleries, commercial and non-commercial distributors, collections etc. be untangled so works can be sustainably accessible on site and also online? What solutions could copyleft models like Creative Commons or CC2r provide?

As a case study, Jennifer Helia DeFelice of Vašulka Kitchen Brno will discuss the presentation of Steina Vašulka’s evolving and multi iteration work Violin Power within a rights framework that was conceived for static intellectual property.

Anna Schäffler will present Art Doc Archive, a prototype for distributed self-documentation of Berlin’s cultural scene, addressing the largely unarchived web-based traces produced by artists and cultural workers since the 1990s. Developed in 2022/23 with support from the Berlin Senate, the project brings together web archiving, data parsing, and visualization to explore new ways of collectively preserving and reclaiming cultural memory.