Archivists in Residence

The Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe are announcing a joint international research and development program. The program »Archivists in Residence« focuses on researchers, who deal academically and/or artistically with practices and theories of the archive in a broader sense.

The program includes a four-month scholarship of €2000 per month. Two scholarships are being allocated per year.

The program is dedicated to two overlapping themes: the preservation of artwork which is based on electronic technology – particularly digital technology – and the requirements and possible horizons of the archive under the conditions of digitalization.

Complex digital objects

1. For art which is created with and by technical media, the interconnection between origins and futures is particularly close. The less traditional they seem, the more in-depth the investigation into their connection to history is to be. Since the beginning of the 20^th century, they have developed their own traditions and have become an essential component of contemporary art history.

But the technical artwork of the last 50 years is currently at risk of becoming irretrievably lost and only surviving in the form of rudimentary documentation. The original technical medium falls apart and can no longer be replaced; the data and programs saved on it can no longer be processed or executed. New modes of performance must be created for historical codes, which preserve in a productive tension the material and structural authenticity on the one hand and current technology and their conditions on the other hand.

Digital archives

2. Digitalization has changed the conditions of archiving and opened up new horizons for academic and artistic appropriation. However, the traditional actors who evaluate, structure, preserve and make accessible cultural events – for example archives, libraries and museums – remain mostly in a culture of list-like inventories. In addition, the real, physical location, at which most digital archives continue to be used due to legal reasons demanding localization within the institution, seems rigid in its given architecture and established technical interfaces. For this reason, the objective of the program is to analyze the current conditions of the cultural archive and to develop new forms of digital and real architectures, i.e. alternative scope for reflection and action.

New researchers

To face these challenges, archivists of the present and the future must be hybrid qualified researchers, who work just as confidently with information technology as with the archaeology of the arts and media and critical archivology. To effectively support a prospective archaeology as a future field of work, young researchers are getting the chance – in communication with academics, restorers and curators of the HfG and ZKM – to further develop practices and concepts into an expanded archive notion using tech-based artwork from the ZKM collection and the archives of the ZKM and the HfG. For researchers with academic or artistic backgrounds, new professional fields open up between archive practice, art history, technical competence and programming skills. The workshops at the university will involve the scholarship holders in teaching and incorporate the students in the research projects.

Fellows