Decolonizing Digital Archives

Lucie Kolb
Lucie Kolb is a senior researcher of critical publishing and research-based learning at the Critical Media Lab at FHNW Academy of Arts and Design. Working at the intersection of art history, media studies, and artistic research, she is the editor of a number of books, including Artwork as Institution (BNL 2019), Paratexte (Diaphanes 2018), and Art Handling (JRP 2016) and the curator of exhibitions such as Reading the Library (Sitterwerk St.Gallen 2021) and Wir publizieren (Kunsthalle Bern 2020). Her first monograph Study, Not Critique (Transversal Texts 2018) dealt with the fine line between self-determined knowledge production and a commodified form of critique and examined artists’ magazines since the 1970s. She was awarded the Cité internationale des arts grant by visarte.ost in Paris (2022) and Landis & Gyr residency in London (2022). Lucie is the founding member and co-editor of the online magazine Brand-New-Life.

Selena Savić
Selena Savić is a researcher and trained architect. Her research interests revolve around the mixture of computational processes with the built environment, exploring ways to communicate communication processes. After her PhD at EPFL and a postdoc at ATTP, TU Vienna, she joined the IXDM where she is currently Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme. She edited two books (Ghosts of Transparency, 2019 and Unpleasant Design, 2013) and writes about computational modeling, feminist hacking, and posthuman networks in the context of design and architecture.

Her recently completed experimental research project Radio Explorations established nomadic identities of radio signals in a digital archive collected by a community of radio amateurs and enthusiasts. 

Flavia Caviezel
With a background in ethnography, film studies, constitutional law and documentary- essayistic video practice Flavia Caviezel is researching, teaching and publishing on border issues, ecologies, new materialism, non-linear presentation formats, methods and procedures. Transdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of artistic-scientific practice are characteristic for her work, as in the research projects RhyCycling and Times of Waste.

Residencies and study visits led her to Australia, China, Laos, Mali, the USA and different European countries.

She is currently a Principal Investigator and lecturer at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures/Critical Media Lab IXDM/CML at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, and Head of Continuing Education IXDM.
https://www.fhnw.ch/de/personen/flavia-caviezel
https://flaviacaviezel.ch

Bernhard Garnicnig
Bernhard Garnicnig is a research artist, lecturer and Ph.D. candidate. He studied Digital Art, Media and Performative Sculpture in Vienna and Rotterdam. His current work focuses on the post-digital occupation of institutionality as artistic practice, emancipatory institutional and corporate surfaces for structures of aesthetic collaboration, and earnest attempts at making paradoxical things work in time and space to see what happens. He has been working as a web developer and network technologist for the past 20 years with a focus on simple long-term digital infrastructures. He founded a collection of commissioned digital artworks at the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, an experimental digital-first institution that exists on a wireless router. He recently co-edited the book memeclassworldwide, a catalogue of work by a collective that founded a Freie Klasse for post-digital practices at an art academy in Germany. www.bernhardgustav.com

Karolina Sobecka
Karolina Sobecka is an artist and researcher whose work is centered on the relationship between environmental concerns and science and technology development. Her current projects explore the histories of ecology and their legacies in the contemporary formulations of carbon governance. Karolina’s artwork has been shown internationally, and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts and Princess Grace Foundation. She is a Ph.D researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel and a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The newly conceived program for continuing education «Decolonizing Digital Archives» assembles transdisciplinary approaches to archival issues from artistic research, art history, media studies and digital culture. In a week-long course the focus is set on the modes of digitization of collections and the discourses of decolonization. The aim is to illuminate how post-digital and decolonizing practices can support digitization efforts that meet contemporary and future complexities.

The participants will expand their knowledge on historical and contemporary practices in the arts that address decolonization, in archives and beyond. They will re-examine the terminology of their conceptions and practices in archives’ digitization (e.g. post-digital archive, object/artifact/sample/’thing’, object biography, agency etc.). In the practice-led workshop units, the participants will be supported in developing their approaches and exchange about challenges encountered in their own professional environment.

The winter workshop addresses persons involved in archival and collection contexts, in exhibiting institutions or MA/PhD candidates as well as alumni/ae from the Humanities and the Arts. For example museum professionals, management of cultural institutions, consultants of digitization companies, custodians of digital collections, collection administration, MA/PhD candidates, alumni/ae HGK.

The course aims to create a space for reflection and discussion in a network with shared interests, where the participants may address questions and projects relating to their professional environment.

Structure
Mornings: inputs by lecturers / afternoons: participant project workshop

Inputs

1. Why decolonization? / Lucie Kolb
   The idea is widespread that institutionalized knowledge and its organization have universal validity and apply to every community worldwide. We will work towards understanding these belief systems of selected archives and collections and try to find together ways to unlearn and decolonize these systems.
2. Nomadic profiles in digital archives / Selena Savić
   Arguing with Data: Practices of data classification in the context of computation and digital systems are problematized in this paper. We consider how to open these systems to alternative, unconventional, and non-essentialist forms of organization.
3. Multilocal & multivocal tracings / Flavia Caviezel
   The "object biographies" established in collections and museums will be addressed as a concept mainly of the "Global North". We discuss multivocal & multilocal forms of tracing objects or artifacts and discuss further how these biographies are currently represented in archives or could be represented alternatively.
4. Post-digital Folklore and permanent migration / Bernhard Garnicnig
   Permanent migration is an artificial term invented to discuss the confluence of efforts to decolonize and simultaneously digitize art collections. We will discuss how we imagine cultural memory institutions in their future role, which will be characterized by the restitution of objects, and at the same time the integration of narratives on robbery as well as digitization as part of their history.
5. Decarbonization as decolonization / Karolina Sobecka
   Strategies of decarbonization broaden the spectrum of the course to include issues such as the consumption of raw materials, which also affects eg. archives as digital, technical infrastructure.

Proposal of ½ page describing the project or question the participant would like to work with.

Price: 900 CHF (travel/accommodation/catering not included)

Registration fee per workshop season: CHF 40.

Prices in case of further course bookings (see all offers of all institutes) 
2 weeks: CHF 1,700
3 weeks: CHF 2,400
4 weeks: CHF 3,000.
5 weeks: CHF 3,500

Discount students: 20% discount with a valid student card.
Discount for self-employed possible by arrangement.