Performing Digital

Multiple Perspectives on a Living Archive

David Carlin, Laurene Vaughan, David Carlin, Laurene Vaughan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317082446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Digital technologies have transformed archives in every area of their form and function, and as technologies mature so does their capacity to change our understanding and experience of material and performative cultural production. There has been an exponential explosion in the production and consumption of video online and yet there is a scarcity of knowledge and cases about video and the digital archive. This book seeks to address that through the lens of the project Circus Oz Living Archive. This project provides the case study foundation for the articulation of the issues, challenges and possibilities that the design and development of digital archives afford. Drawn from eight different disciplines and professions, the authors explore what it means to embrace the possibilities of digital technologies to transform contemporary cultural institutions and their archives into new methods of performance, representation and history.

Chapter 1
Performing Digital: An Introduction

David Carlin and Laurene Vaughan

What Is or Could Be a ‘Living Archive’? How Might Archives Come to Perform in New Ways and in New Contexts? What Does the Digital Bring to the Performance of the Archive?

This book brings together discussion and analysis from diverse disciplinary perspectives, through the lens of a single digital humanities project, the Circus Oz Living Archive, to open up questions around the deployment of digital archives in the performing arts and beyond. Views from within and outside the project team address issues of the changing cultural position and utility of archives in the digital era; of how digital archives might be designed and the uses to which they might be put.

Over the past 20 years, digital technologies have transformed archives in every area of their form and function. To begin with, this transformation focused on methods of digitisation and the protocols and processes of digital information databases and documentation. But as digital technologies mature, so does their capacity to transform our understanding and experience of material and performative cultural production. Within the discourse of the digital humanities, the archive is seen to be a pivotal framework for making sense of the digitised world. With new digital technologies come new contexts and forms of collecting and viewing. The integration of the possibilities of social media with the capacities of big databases and faster processing gives rise to new ways to encounter the collections of cultural institutions. Archives no longer need to be merely visited; they are now customised to personal interests, performed through digital interfaces and visited by a public located around the globe. This is an exciting time for the archive: the digital archive challenges many of the accepted norms for interaction, public engagement and artistic development across the cultural sectors.

The Circus Oz Living Archive project provides the case study foundation for the book’s multidisciplinary articulation of the issues, challenges and possibilities that the design and development of digital archives afford. The chapters and associated texts include the perspectives of cultural institutions and artistic performers, as well as academic researchers. The project has drawn on the expertise of eight different disciplinary and professional practice domains to realise its outcomes. This spectrum of expertise includes performance studies, computer science, design, new media, digital humanities, archival studies, circus performance and creative organisational management. Connected through the narrative of the development and critique of one digital archive, the chapters of this book investigate what it means to embrace the affordances of digital technologies with the ambition to transform contemporary cultural institutions and their archives through new modes of performance and representation.

The major impediments to the creation and use of video online, and of digital video archives, have, until recently, been technical. In the last five years, as these technical issues have been addressed, there has been an exponential explosion in the presence, role and use of video online. Much has been written recently around digital archives and there is a rapidly growing interest in the field; yet there is a scarcity of knowledge available on video and the digital archive, and few case studies that exemplify the challenges and possibilities of this new domain of cultural production.

The Circus Oz Living Archive Project

The Circus Oz Living Archive project emerged organically from a conjunction of practical and theoretical interests growing alongside and in response to developing technological affordances. Founded in 1978, Circus Oz is a leading performing arts company occupying a unique place in Australian cultural life as an international pioneer of contemporary, animal-free circus. Circus Oz, like many performing arts (and indeed other) organisations around the world, has faced the question of how to preserve and make useful – ‘bring alive’ – their documented history.¹ The live performing arts are an important part of our shared cultural heritage; there is clearly, therefore, value in their histories being documented and preserved. Since the advent of video technologies in the late 1960s, it has been increasingly feasible for performing arts organisations to record their performances and rehearsals. However, until now such video collections, maintained by the companies themselves, have been largely inaccessible and inevitably prone to deterioration. The invaluable Circus Oz collection of over 800 videos, documenting in detail its performance history since 1978, is a case in point.

The initial proposition of the ‘living archive’ grew from discussions in 2007 between David Carlin and Circus Oz Artistic Director Mike Finch, which began to be teased out in a small research project led by Carlin and Jane Mullett in 2008–09 with support from the RMIT Design Research Institute. (It was no coincidence that both Carlin and Mullett had worked at Circus Oz some years previously, as a director and performer, respectively.)

The full-scale Living Archive project discussed here followed from 2010 to 2014, with the addition to the research team of performance studies scholar Peta Tait, design practitioner/scholar Laurene Vaughan, computer scientist James Thom and media practitioner/scholar Adrian Miles as chief investigators. An Australian Research Council (ARC) Industry Linkage grant allowed RMIT and La Trobe Universities to partner with Circus Oz, the Australia Council for the Arts (the national arts funding and policy organisation) and the Victorian Arts Centre Trust Performing Arts Collection (through the involvement of their Collections Manager, Patricia Stokes). Other key members of the research team included interaction designer/scholar Jeremy Yuille and Circus Oz Board member and digital innovation leader Peter Williams.

PhD researchers Reuben Stanton (an interaction designer and programmer) and Lukman Iwan (a computer scientist) were brought on board to develop the Living Archive and went on to play a crucial role in the conceptualising, design and building of the Living Archive prototypes.

The project proposal stated: ‘the distinctive Circus Oz performance aesthetic encourages a sense of shared community, of sometimes anarchic, carnivalesque participation. The Circus Oz Living Archive project seeks to investigate how this approach can be augmented through expansion into the digital networked environment.’² The declared aim of the project at the outset was to:

test and evaluate how the development and deployment of a rich media archive may catalyse the creative participation of diverse users – Circus Oz, peers, fans, scholars and the general public – in building a prototype ‘living archive’, that becomes a shared online space for creative dialogue on the history and artistic future of Circus Oz, providing a new model of digital engagement for the performing arts.³

Needless to say, the research as it unfolded revealed the many issues – theoretical, ethical, technological and practical – that needed to be addressed in pursuing this proposition. This book enables discussion and reflection upon those challenges, and the insights gleaned through wrestling with them, in the context of broader debates within and across our disciplines.

Proposing, Making and Using the Living Archive

The chapters in this book are clustered into three sections – Proposing, Making and Using – connected, a little like circus acts, by short informal ‘transitions’. These transitions are intended to reveal something of the methodological texture of the Circus Oz Living Archive project through photographs, process diagrams and user-stories from the Circus. The first transition, Methods, provides snapshots of some of the processes used to make the archive, to complement those focused upon in detail in the book chapters. These methods include the use of artefacts and prototypes; the workflow of how videos are added to the archive; a glimpse at rights and permissions issues; and evidence of how the Circus Oz community has been engaged in the project through a series of live events. The second transition, Voices from the Archive, aims to provide something of the polyvocal flavour of the Living Archive, with views of exemplary user-contributed stories and collections as well as first-person perspectives from three key members of Circus Oz (Laurel Frank, Anni Davey and Mike Finch).

The first group of chapters, Proposing, presents a set of reflections on how digital materiality changes what archives and collections can do and mean. The question of what it might mean for an archive to be ‘living’ is approached from different angles and positions, bringing in theoretical considerations of narrative, performance, affect and control.

Proposing begins with David Carlin’s reflections in Chapter 2, stepping back from immersion in the Living Archive project, upon what might be happening when ‘the archive meets the circus’. Carlin discusses how the Circus Oz case study can be viewed in the light of broader moves to rethink the form, function and control of archives with the deployment of digital technologies. He borrows from the theoretical work of media archaeologists Wolfgang Ernst and Wendy Chun on digital materiality, and in particular Chun’s concept of the ‘enduring ephemeral’,⁴ to suggest that the digital archive in the performing arts context should best be seen not as a fixed and static record, in opposition to the original live performance event, but as ‘an enduring, evolving digital event’ in its own right. He goes on to explore Ernst’s opposition between ‘telling’ and ‘counting’ so as to consider the nature of the historical telling – the ‘micro-narratives’ – proposed by the Living Archive prototype.

Following this close-up view of the Living Archive, in Chapter 3 Ross Gibson zooms out from the Circus Oz context to ask how archives can take on affordances akin to the associative flow and rhythms of human memory. Gibson is compelled by the complex interplay between affect and knowledge, between ‘flaring emotion and cooling intellection’. He argues for the power of archives as ‘stores of evidence’, not with which to reach quick and tidy conclusions but to draw out speculation, making knowledge through being ‘dubious, generative and ontologically generous’. To illustrate his argument, Gibson draws us into the unknown and imagined world of the Justice and Police Museum of Sydney. Here lies a historic police archive of many thousands of photographic negatives, haunting images connected to crime and misdemeanours. Having become decoupled over time from their anchoring metadata, the photographs in this archive are now set free, as it were, to generate associative trails and narrative inquiries, producing new perspectives on Sydney’s social history. Gibson lures us into pondering the emotive and evocative nature of archives, their power to both tell and stimulate new ideas, insights and stories. This is especially the case when the archive, now digital, becomes multiliterate and multisensory, and when artists such as Gibson deploy sound, movement and language to draw out the pulse of the past.

In Chapter 4 Adrian Miles is interested in how archives themselves are ‘policed’. He draws us away from the affective world of embodied emotion in the archive, and presents us with a critical discourse on the nature and power of archives, both digital and analogue, and on those who control, design and define them. He raises questions about the ontological grounding of archives and, drawing upon the materialist theories of Ian Bogost and the concept of ‘flat ontologies’,⁵ mounts a case that the creative value of archives lies in the ‘architecture of possible relations’ enabled through the ‘muteness’ of archival artefacts themselves. Miles applies a critical lens to the concept of the ‘living archive’, positing some essential theoretical features that would include an openness to impermanence and a capacity to inscribe and reveal traces of the archive’s ongoing transformations, losses and erasures. Thinking about archives in the online context, he discusses the shift away from the centrality of the artefact towards that of the user that has come with the rise of social media and such informal web services as YouTube and Flickr. Finally, he argues that a living archive needs to take advantage of the ‘flatness of the virtual’, to enable the widest possible web of relations to unfold into the future.

In Chapter 5 Laurene Vaughan returns us to the circus – Circus Oz – and the specific proposition embodied in its Living Archive. Vaughan approaches the discussion from the field of design theory and practice. Her chapter analyses the ‘cultural-technical’ context within which this digital archive has been designed, and thereby sets the scene for the design-oriented chapters in the following section of the book. Vaughan poses the question: how does the Living Archive transform or conform to existing practices in its context (the circus)? These include ‘practices of remembering, of sharing and of making new performances’. She reflects on the possibility of new kinds of practices, and new notions of presence and performance being made manifest through the Living Archive. Fundamental to the performing arts is the live presence of the audience at the performance; the design of the Living Archive has sought to envisage and enable a sense of presence for the ‘digital audience’ at the archival performance that unfolds on screen. Once again, inquiry into the tropes of ‘living’ and ‘liveness’ is central to this discussion.

In the book’s second section, Making, the four authors take us ‘backstage’, as it were, to consider some key conceptual and practical issues arising in the design and construction of a digital Living Archive as an experiential and computational entity.

In Chapter 6 Mitchell Whitelaw challenges us to consider the relationship between data and representation in the designing of digital archives. His argument starts from the observation that all digital representations, or mappings, of data are radically contingent, and that the choices made in representing digital collections inevitably play a powerful role in how such collections are perceived, discovered and explored by users. He presents a framework for analysing such decisions, drawing a distinction between what he calls ‘curated’ and ‘procedural’ (algorithm-driven) approaches, and discusses key examples of current practices in the cultural heritage sector. In doing so he opens up the complex questions facing cultural institutions that aim both to faithfully represent the breadth and diversity of their collections and to attract and invite users to dwell and move inside such online collections. Whitelaw’s chapter is a timely call for greater investigation of the potential for data visualisation to create richer and denser modes of display than do many existing web interfaces.

In Chapter 7 computer scientist James Thom then takes us behind the screen – or ‘under the bonnet’, if you like – to delineate the challenges faced and solutions arrived at in translating the Circus Oz Living Archive proposition into a practical ‘system architecture’, through a methodology of rapid prototyping. Thom focuses on the key issues of video content, metadata and search/retrieval paradigms and provides a detailed account of how each of these has played out in the development of this particular digital archive. Which video formats? What video types? Whence the metadata, and of what authoritative status? What objects in the database are retrievable, and how? All of these basic questions are situated within the quest for what Thom calls a ‘carnivalesque’ archive, as befits the cultural context of this circus. He outlines the formulation of the novel ‘data m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Performing Digital: An Introduction
• SECTION I: PROPOSING
• SECTION II: MAKING
• SECTION III: USING
• CODA
• Index