DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF ARTISTS PUBLISHING
with Wikimedia UK
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Public Workshop
Sun. Feb. 2nd, 2-6pm
Venue: Wikimedia UK
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Join us for an ongoing series of workshops to open up the strategies and software that the technological team are developing for the Digital Archive of Artists Publishing, with a focus on the software applications developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, and how these can contribute to a more ethically driven archival process.
Please come along and bring your own items ready for upload, data about the items and any anecdotal histories you wish to share. The workshops will involve software training and user testing sessions. These will in turn inform the design and development of the technological stack of the archive.
More details about the workshop: Attendance to the previous workshops from the series is not required. In the third workshop, participants will get an introduction to Wikimedia and its applications, highlighting the key features of the Wiki software which facilitate community contributions and effective sharing of knowledge across platforms, languages and communities. Members of the Digital Archive team will also briefly describe the goals of the digital archive and how we are working towards trying to eliminate traditional problems associated with the ethics of archival processes.
This workshop will focus on practical work with the archive database. A complete demo will present all the steps – from start to finish – necessary to get started adding and editing materials in the database. Participants will have the option to work with their own materials or with sample materials from the Banner Repeater archive. Participants who attended previous workshops will be able to continue working with their chosen materials and will have the option to skip the demo. Throughout the workshop there will be time for questions and discussions, particularly focusing on the ethics and biases which may be explicitly or implicitly embedded in database and archive infrastructures.
To reserve your spot, please fill out this short form: https://forms.gle/1YDmoyTGP2s253Vb6
​more details
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Inspired by the site of Banner Repeater’s Archive of Artists’ Publishing on Hackney Downs train station, with over 11,000 passengers passing a day, we are building a Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing responding to the need for similar accessibility, in an online context, for a growing community of people engaged with Artists publishing.
The Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing has been in development for over 4 years, and over this time, increasingly sophisticated software has developed, which means we are now in a position to intensify our efforts, with the support of Wikimedia UK.
The online platform will provide an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ Books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers, and a community of producers in contemporary Artists’ Publishing. With an emphasis on inclusivity from the start, we aim to privilege anecdotal histories and multiple perspectives alongside factual data, establishing an important new precedent in digital, as well as analogue archival practice. The wiki style approach means that users can upload their own material, single items, or entire collections, choosing appropriate sharing permissions at time of upload. The archive project is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project will work to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development. Anyone participating in the landscape of Artists Publishing is welcome to join our user community as active collaborators and stakeholders.
In tandem with this, the publicly sited resource of the Archive on platform 1, home to over a thousand Artists’ books and publications, is also undergoing refurbishment, to be launched alongside the digital archive, to celebrate Banner Repeater’s 10th anniversary in 2020.
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​For more information / updates on progress on the digital archive please join the mailing list
Hybrid Strategies in Network Culture
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Networked strategies underpin everything we do, pioneering a hybrid way of working in contemporary art practice through the strong symbiosis between the experiments in text and publishing held in the Archive, and artistic practices engaging in networked strategies today. Over the next 18 months the publicly sited Archive of Artists’ Publishing, home to over a thousand Artists’ books and publications, is also undergoing refurbishment, to be launched alongside the digital archive in 2020. We welcome thousands of visitors a year, and provide lectures about the archive and the Banner Repeater programme for the many students visiting each year from leading UK art universities such as: Central Saint Martins UAL, Goldsmiths University, Royal College of Art, Chelsea UAL, etc. If you would like to arrange a visit, please get in touch at info@bannerrepeater.org.
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More information
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You will find more information below regarding the people we are working with in Artists publishing, as well as details about the technical team, and more technical descriptions of how the archive will be developed here.