Presentation of the collective volume "Creative Archives as Living Landscapes of Memory in the Digital Era", edited by Eleni Papalexiou, Athens: Crearch - CReative European ARCHives - Fagottobooks, 2022. (original) (raw)
Related papers
FuturoClassico, 2021
In 2000 the CRIMTA (Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale Multimediale sul Teatro Antico) was founded at the University of Pavia. Besides promoting various research activities and publications, the Centre owns an audiovisual fund with near a hundred videos of performances and films inspired by ancient dramas. In recent years, the CRIMTA fund has ensured the possibility to consult the videos for both academic and didactic purposes. A composite audience (researchers, teachers, theatre professionals) was thus able to access a valuable collection of materials that are often difficult to find. From its foundation, however, the role of archives has changed and must deal with the needs of an increasingly international research landscape, as well as with new teaching tools and strategies. Since October 2019, the CRIMTA has been reflecting on the digitization of its holdings. With our paper, we want to illustrate the actions that will lead to the creation of a digital version of the CRIMTA archive. This initiative will be possible in collaboration with the Digital Library Project of the University of Pavia, which is providing for the digitization of some funds from the Pavia libraries. The objective of this initiative is twofold: conservation and access. On the one hand, there is a technical need to preserve the fund, which, otherwise, risks deteriorating and being lost; on the other hand, the digitization would allow greater accessibility of documents, a need which, during the recent sanitary emergence, has become central. The paper will also provide an opportunity to reflect on the advantages of a digital archive for the performances of ancient dramas, in terms of accessibility and usability, but also some difficulties and limits, not only technical, of such a project.
Idiosyncratic ways of preserving performing arts creation in an (digital) archive
Proceedings of the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation, PRISM Laboratory, pp. 78-84 (979-10-97498-03-0)., 2022
Most collections conceived in artistic domains, whether in dance, music or theatre, as they are performances and involve heterogeneous sources such as text, image, audio- video recordings, music, scenarios, gesture, movement, among others, are difficult to describe or document in archival contexts (e.g., music theatre). Archiving these works challenges musicologists, as it requires an in-depth knowledge of their collaborative practices, in addition to a study considering an archaeological musicology, being necessary to gather the pieces of the puzzle, since the different elements/materials of the works are dispersed by various sources. Post-custodial forms of archive present some solutions, however it would be important to seek for a common core language and combine archival standards in order to allow the interoperability of information to understand these works from a holistic perspective. In this paper, I seek to broaden discussions about the issues around preserving creations in the field of performing arts in the (digital) archive, giving specific examples in different artistic spheres.
Memory and the Digital Archive of Contemporary Art
2021
This article outlines some reflections about digital reality, contemporary art production, and possible ways of archiving and constructing memory through and for a historiography of contemporary art in light of the project Archivo Español de Media Art / Spanish Archive of Media Art (AEMA/SAOMA). In the first part I propose a definition and an account of media art and its artifacts. In the second part I present and describe the SAOMA project, and its antecedent, the MIDECIANT museum project, and discuss the conceptual and technical requirements of an archive devoted to the media arts. In the third part I sketch some interconnections between the concepts of memory and archive with reference to new media art and outline the difficulties that are inherent to any effort to define and archive these art forms. The final section includes some concluding thoughts and a brief explanation of what I regard as the most urgent needs for any archival project in the realm of digital art (digital re...
The paper aims at a critical dialogue between music education and museum education, arguing for reflective, practice-based approaches to learning about the past in an ambivalent present. We begin by unpacking current, conflicting discourses on creativity in contemporary Greek educational contexts, describing a number of 'fences' (in the form of unexamined practices, authoritarianism, imposition of obsolete forms of thinking music and education) that curtail children’s creative engagement with music. Such fences form a generalised conception which we refer to as 'museum music': a stereotyped vision of music as definitive, monumental, canonic collection of historic masterpieces, preserved and restored by expert professionals. Highlighting the complexities that arise out of the curious interaction between this 'monumental' conception of music and emerging neoliberal discourses on fast, effective, skills-and-results-based creative production, we argue that the import of neoliberal discourses in a context where didacticism and authoritarian teaching practices still prevail, short-circuits and undermines both creative practices in themselves and qualitative understandings of creativity, in alarming and seemingly irreparable ways. At the same time, we recognise that the museum, as a public space for including, producing, staging but also problematising people’s subjective approaches to the past, can be a powerful, disruptive locus, where linear, singular narrative conceptions of History are revisited and critically relativized. It can thus act as a fertile context for fostering creative engagement with aspects of the (musical, cultural and social) past and as an open space where students can actively construct and present personal narratives. In the last two sections of this text, we inquire into ways in which music education might be liberated from 'museum music' stereotypes by actually 'taking a ride to the museum', that is, by adopting contemporary museum education modes of practice and bringing critical, open-ended learning approaches into museum spaces. We thus offer two short critical accounts of recent practice-based projects in that direction, carried out at the Archaeological Museum of the city of Volos and the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens respectively. In discussing these projects, we reflect on the potential of a situated, museum-based or museum-inspired music education, as a remedy against the vacuum of a placeless, instrumentalised, 'museum music' education. On the basis of a “performative, embodied approach” to museum education (Hooper-Greenhill 2007: 192), musical experiences of this kind may contribute to a broader creative recontextualisation of the relationships between sound, context and memory.
Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2021
In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.
History and Archival: the pitfalls of storage.
Our musical history continues to expand at a rapid pace. Aesthetic boundaries are stretched to their limits and we begin to question if they exist at all. Yet we remain interested and excited by developments, both technical and aesthetic, in sound and it seems obvious that both are engaged by an understanding of theoretical and contextual elements. We all have access to our own critical histories and some are bound to be deeper and stronger than others, but the democratisation and change of technology has given rise to a breadth of information that stifles in-depth study. I would like to focus my thoughts around the inextricable links between composition, theory, analysis and historical context and the need to access pertinent data that is highly organised. I would like to suggest that our current archives do not allow for the addition of human emotional content because they are (quite naturally) obsessed with storage and retrieval of large quantities of electronic data. I would also like to suggest that for electroacoustic composers writing especially for fixed media, there is a huge responsibility to document above and beyond an audio file and that one should consider how others may adapt your work in the future.