The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL

The Curious Case of the Right to be Forgotten

This paper considers the so-called 'right to be forgotten', in the context of the 2014 decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the case of Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD), Mario Costeja González. It also considers the 'right of erasure' contained in the current EU Data Protection Directive, as well as the proposal for a new right of erasure to be included in the new EU data protection framework. The paper proposes a particular way of understanding the right to be forgotten and suggests a broad definition of it. It examines claims that the ECJ's decision in Google 'invented' a right to be forgotten. It also considers whether individuals have a right to be forgotten under the current EU Directive, and whether they will have such a right when the new data protection regulation becomes law. More generally, the paper considers whether a right to be forgotten has been recognised as an aspect of a broader right to privacy, and whether the Google decision moves us closer to an understanding of privacy as the right to an appropriate flow of information, in line with Nissenbaum's framework of contextual integrity

The Strategy of Using Social Networks in the Arab Archives

This study analyzes the use of social networks in the Arab national archives, the availability of a strategy for their use (objectives, content), and the numbers and specialization of staff managing and updating the archives’ content on social networks. It also examines which social platforms are used by archives, the number of their participants and followers, and to what extent the content of archives’ social platforms is archived. The study included twelve Arab national archives, as well as examples of foreign archives, to understand their strategy for using social networks. The study found that Arab national archives do not have a specific and declared strategy on the archive’s website or its social media platforms for the use of social networks. Only 54.5 percent of Arab National Archives use social networks; the number of social media platforms used by these twelve Arab national archives is seven platforms compared to eighteen social media platforms used by five foreign national archives. It also found that the most commonly used social media platforms in the Arab national archives are Facebook at 100 percent, YouTube at 50 percent, Twitter at 33.3 percent, LinkedIn at 16.7 percent, Instagram at 8.3 percent, and Google + at 8.3 percent, and that some of the national Aachives have not updated their content on social platforms for two years or more. Among the most important suggestions of the study is the need to develop a social media strategy in the Arab national archives, to diversify the archival content published and shared on social media, and to create a social media team responsible for planning and implementing the archives’ social media strategy

Material Synthesis: Negotiating experience with digital media

A DVD of six digital film works accompanying the thesis is available with the print copy of this thesis, held at the University of Waikato Library.Given the accessibility of media devices available to us today and utilising van Leeuwen's concept of inscription and synthesis as a guide, this thesis explores the practice of re-presenting a domestic material object, the Croxley Recipe Book, into digital media. Driven by a creative practice research method, but also utilising materiality, digital storytelling practices and modality as important conceptual frames, this project was fundamentally experimental in nature. A materiality-framed content analysis, interpreted through cultural analysis, initially unraveled some of the cookbook's significance and contextualised it within a particular time of New Zealand's cultural history. Through the expressive and anecdotal practice of digital storytelling the cookbook's significance was further negotiated, especially as the material book was engaged with through the affective and experiential digital medium of moving-image. A total of six digital film works were created on an accompanying DVD, each of which represents some of the cookbook's significance but approached through different representational strategies. The Croxley Recipe Book Archive Film and Pav. Bakin' with Mark are archival documentaries, while Pav is more expressive and aligned with the digital storytelling form. Spinning Yarns and Tall Tales, a film essay, engages and reflects with the multiple processes and trajectories of the project, while Extras and The Creative Process Journal demonstrate the emergent nature of the research. The written thesis discusses the emergent nature of the research process and justifies the conceptual underpinning of the research

Immediation (Cultures of Immediacy):Liveness and immediacy in creative and everyday media praxis

La pràctica dels mitjans del segle xxi es caracteritza cada vegada més per l'emergent principi cultural, condició o cultura «de la immediatesa». Aquest procés, resumit en anglès sota el terme immediation (‘immediació’), suggereix el tancament d'un «buit» espaciotemporal entre les agències i els mitjans implicats i té com resultat una interacció complexa entre qüestions socials, de seguretat, científiques i econòmiques. L’interès creixent per a aquesta immediació en confirma l’estatus de nou, i subestimat, paradigma de les arts, les ciències i les humanitats, que requereix una recerca de les cultures de la immediatesa centrada en el futur. No obstant això, en els discursos acadèmic i popular, l'interès rau a documentar o bé els reptes (socials) o bé les solucions (tècniques). Aquest estudi pretén abordar aquest desequilibri i respondre a la necessitat urgent d'una comprensió sistemàtica de les principals formes d'aparició d'aquesta immediació: 1) les produccions actuals amb sistemes de circuit tancat a tot el món, i 2) les pràctiques de transmissió en directe. Es proposa una combinació innovadora de perspectives i mètodes interdisciplinaris per tractar les opcions disponibles i incrementar i enriquir la comprensió del potencial de la immediació per així impulsar-ne la immensa varietat d'aplicacions socials. Així concebuda, la recerca futura de la immediació i la retransmissió en directe promet, en concret, respondre qüestions sobre: 1) les repercussions concretes de les produccions creatives realitzades amb sistemes de circuit tancat sobre l'emergent «domesticació» de la retransmissió en directe, i 2) les mesures reals necessàries que cal prendre dins de la recerca emergent de la retransmissió en directe per avaluar la R+D més innovadora en un futur pròxim

Processpatching: defining new methods in aRt&D

In the context of a rapidly changing domain of contemporary electronic art practice- where the speed of technological innovation and the topicality of art 'process as research' methods are both under constant revision- the process of collaboration between art, computer science and engineering is an important addition to existing 'R&D'. Scholarly as well as practical exploration of artistic methods, viewed in relation to the field of new technology, can be seen to enable and foster innovation in both the conceptualisation and practice of the electronic arts. At the same time, citing new media art in the context of technological innovation brings a mix of scientific and engineering issues to the fore and thereby demands an extended functionality that may lead to R&D, as technology attempts to take account of aesthetic and social considerations in its re-development. This new field of new media or electronic art R&D is different from research and development aimed at practical applications of new technologies as we see them in everyday life. A next step for Research and Development in Art (aRt&D) is a formalisation of the associated work methods, as an essential ingredient for interdisciplinary collaboration. This study investigates how electronic art patches together processes and methods from the arts, engineering and computer science environments. It provides a framework describing the electronic art methods to improve collaboration by informing others about one's artistic research and development approach. This investigation is positioned in the electronic art laboratory where new alliances with other disciplines are established. It provides information about the practical and theoretical aspects of the research and development processes of artists. The investigation addresses fundamental questions about the 'research and development methods' (discussed and defined at length in these pages), of artists who are involved in interdisciplinary collaborations amongst and between the fields of Art, Computer Science, and Engineering. The breadth of the fields studied necessarily forced a tight focus on specific issues in the literature, addressed herein through a series of focused case studies which demonstrate the points of synergy and divergence between the fields of artistic research and development, in a wider art&D' context. The artistic methods proposed in this research include references from a broad set of fields (e. g. Technology, Media Arts, Theatre and Performance, Systems Theories, the Humanities, and Design Practice) relevant to and intrinsically intertwined with this project and its placement in an interdisciplinary knowledge domain. The aRt&D Matrix provides a complete overview of the observed research and development methods in electronic arts, including references to related disciplines and methods from other fields. The new Matrix developed and offered in this thesis also provides an instrument for analysing the interdisciplinary collaboration process that exclusively reflects the information we need for the overview of the team constellation. The tool is used to inform the collaborators about the backgrounds of the other participants and thus about the expected methods and approaches. It provides a map of the bodies of knowledge and expertise represented in any given cross-disciplinary team, and thus aims to lay the groundwork for a future aRt&D framework of use to future scholars and practitioners alike

Finding lost relations: identifying our ephemera files

Art ephemera are an evocative resource that can document innovative art and convey diverse histories. This article looks at the relationship between such ephemera and contemporary art practices, and at the relative values given to ephemera by artists, curators and librarians and, in this context, considers integrated catalogues and online guides as methods of re-contextualising art ephemera in the library. Recent collaborative initiatives, and projects that identify and locate artists’ files are reviewed and three themes are identified: the biographical approach, interfaces for distributed catalogues and the integration of art and its documentation