Mediated Democracy
August 24, 2005, Danish Architecture Center, Strandgade 27B, DK-1401 Copenhagen
Participation is free. Registration is required no later than August 15, aykj@hum.ku.dk
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Abstract
Dag Petersson: From image archive to interarchive: kulturatlas.dk and the digital archive as information marketplace
The presentation will describe and problematize the web-interface developed for the future archive site kulturatlas.dk. This digital interface breaks with existing archive and library order in that it encourages the public to take part in the identification and registration of digitized historical materials – primarily photographs from the twentieth century. Not only does such a democratization of national history place new demands on the organization of the image archive, but it also challenges the traditional distinction between user and institution. By adopting gamelike features in order to guide the user through the archive’s interactive history, and especially by encouraging information input from layman to archive, the site turns the traditional archive into a marketplace. What does that transition mean politically and culturally? Naming the result an interarchive, I deliberately quote the title of an extensive art exhibition, held in 1999 at the Kunstraum of the University of Lüneburg. Here a number of contemporary artists showed works that in different ways challenge traditional archive structures. The economy of collective memory and identity are exposed artistically in ways that consistently reveal affinities to market structures. Finding in Fernand Braudel’s The Wheels of Commerce a suitable description of this economic structure, I define the transition from image archive to interarchive in terms of a structural transition: from a certain composition of interrelated hierarchies and meshworks to another.
RELATEREDE LINKS
Senior researcher Dag Petersson