Archival Atelier is an ongoing series of workshops and talks originally started in 2022 by Cinemobilia's director of operations, Jean-Pierre Marchant. Within each of these workshops, we invite artists, archivists, and researchers to walk us through a specific aspect of their work and explain how they professionally engage with processes of preservation, documentation, restoration, digitization, and/or archiving.
This year, A/CA's Knowledge Mobilization Officer, Andrew Bailey, is organizing the Archival Atelier workshop series and has gathered a collection of practitioners who all work with archives and repositories of born-digital material.
Please note that all of these workshops will have closed captioning and will be recorded.
"Up Close and Personal: Documenting Design with the Method for Design Materialization"
Workshop Leader: Pippin Barr (Concordia University)
Thursday, May 4th, 2023. 4:30-6 PM EST. Free. Online / Zoom.
In this workshop, we will introduce the Method for Design Materialization (MDM), an approach to documenting digital design processes at all levels. We will focus on the software engineering technology of version control, a way to track and recover the history of a software development project, showing how it can be used to rigorously track not just changes to software, but the entire design and development lifecycle.
Click the following link to register for this free workshop on Eventbrite:
NOTE: The Zoom link will be emailed to all who register on May 3.
Pippin Barr is an experimental game designer and Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. He is a prolific maker of videogames, producing work addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to the nature of videogames and videogame technologies. He is a well-known figure in the independent and artistic videogame scenes, makes his source code and process documentation publicly available via his presence on GitHub, and his forthcoming book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of (2023, MIT Press), discusses videogame design from the perspective of its materials.
"Archiving Websites with Webrecorder"
Workshop Leader: Hélène Brousseau and Sarah Lake (Concordia University)
Thursday, May 18th, 2023. 4:30-6 PM EST. Free. Online / Zoom.
As our collective cultural output becomes increasingly web-based, how can artists and researchers preserve at-risk websites of enduring value? This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to Webrecorder, a suite of free and open-source web archiving tools. Participants will have the opportunity to practice preserving interactive online content like web-based artworks, virtual exhibitions, and digital publications.
Click the following link to register for this free workshop on Eventbrite:
NOTE: The Zoom link will be emailed to all who register on May 17.
Hélène Brousseau is the digital media and visual resources librarian at Concordia University, subject librarian for Cinema, Contemporary dance and Music. She was formerly the digital collections and systems librarian at Artexte where she lead Artexte’s Web archiving initiatives, including introductory workshops using Webrecorder and Conifer.
Sarah Lake is the digital preservation librarian at Concordia University, where she leads the library’s web archiving initiatives and delivers web archiving workshops for students and faculty.
Net Art Restoration With Cheryl L'hirondelle's Vancouversonglines.Ca/Nikamon Ohci Askiy
Roundtable Participants: Callum Beckford, Anna Douglas, Jeremy Heil, Jennifer Kennedy, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, and Susan Lord
Friday, June 16th, 2023. 11 AM - 12:30 PM EST. Free. Online / Zoom.
In this roundtable, we will hear from a number of scholars, artists, and archivists involved with the ongoing restoration of Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) net art project vancouversonglines.ca/nikamon ohci askiy (2008). Over the course of this presentation, the speakers will discuss how they have approached working together on this process as well as some of the practical and conceptual challenges involved with preserving and maintaining net art, especially those that rely on legacy formats such as Flash that are no longer being officially supported or updated.
Speaker Bios:
Callum Beckford is an emerging Cree/Metis and Jamaican/German BIPOC interdisciplinary media artist and musician. Callum’s artistic practice explores media as both the medium and the apparatus in the creation of art. His work incorporates, installation, video art & sound art, building audio and video synthesizers and live performance. As a music producer and musician Callum is currently releasing his third album entitled LO-FI OP (under the name <3). This upcoming release is an exploration of the creation of pop art and music with an experimental approach, recording live instruments, incorporating samples juxtaposed with a mixture of natural and digital sounds. The album is a gritty and sad pop album with accompanying experimental music videos. Callum graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2020 with a degree in Media Arts and a Software Development diploma from Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in 2022. He is currently co-owner of Variable Oscillations, a company that designs, builds, and sells electronic music instruments.
Anna Douglas is an MA candidate in Art History at Queen’s University. She holds a BAH in Art History from Queen’s University and a BA in Gender and Women’s Studies from Dalhousie University. Her MA research looks at the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa and their contributions to cyberfeminisms in the late-‘90s and early-2000s. More broadly, her research explores feminist art practices, with an emphasis on internet activisms that are grounded in networked technologies and performance. She is interested in the use of technology as medium and method in art histories, and technology’s relationship to alternative publics.
Jeremy Heil is the Digital and Private Records Archivist at Queens University Archives. He holds a Master of Archival Studies from the University of British Columbia and a B.A. (Honours) in History and Visual Arts from Brock University. He has worked as an archivist for the Chung Collection at the UBC Rare Book and Special Collections, and in the Private Records Section of the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Jeremy is former president of the Archives Association of Ontario and served on various committees. He has published articles, presented papers, and has taught workshops on the topics of electronic records, photographs, and artworks in archives.
Jen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen's. She is co-editor of Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art (Routledge 2021) and a founding member of Open Art Histories. She is currently completing a monograph on the histories and legacies of the artistic practices that developed in relation to the transnational cyberfeminist movements of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, entitled Beyond Zeros and Ones: Cyberfeminism, Art, and Transnational Techno-Cultures, 1985-2005. She is the co-PI (with Susan Lord) of a digital born art restoration and conservation project based at Queen’s University. Topics of some recent publications and talks include the Banff New Media Institute (1995-2005), Canadian cyberfeminist artist Nancy Paterson, and the unrealized net art collaboration between Australian artist Linda Dement and writer Kathy Acker.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family roots are from Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wāskahikan (Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, AB. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nēhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place incorporating Indigenous language(s), music, audio, video, VR, sewn objects, the olfactory, and audience/user participation to create immersive environments towards radical inclusion and decolonisation. As a songwriter, L’Hirondelle’s focus is on both sharing nēhiyawēwin (Cree language) and Indigenous and contemporary song-forms and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance. Cheryl has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally.
She is the recent recipient the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. In addition, she was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 & 2006), and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 & 2007). She is currently a PhD candidate with SMARTlab / University College Dublin, in Ireland. www.cheryllhirondelle.com
Susan Lord is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University and Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies. She is the Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab (with Dylan Robinson and Rosaleen Hill). With a background in feminist and critical theory, her research has been dedicated to the histories of vulnerable media and in the remediation of these histories through curatorial and cultural events. These projects are necessarily collaborative, engaging with other researchers, cultural producers, policy and social actors to advance citizenship practices, expand the civic spaces, and decolonize the lands on which we live and work.
Her publications include two recent special issues of PUBLIC: Archive/Counter Archives and Havana (http://www.publicjournal.ca/issues/). A book on the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez is forthcoming in 2019. Other books include Killing Women: Gender, Violence and Representation (with Annette Burfoot); New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (with K. Dubinsky, et al.); Fluid Screens/Expanded Cinema (with Janine Marchessault).