Art and Archive Futures – Event 1

Research summary

• Tuesday 19 July 2022

Manchester Met researchers and selected guests explored research and practice that is informed by creative work with archives, digital data and code, and convened around the idea Art and Archive Futures. This special event took place at Hallé St. Peter’s, Blossom Street, Manchester on Tuesday 19 July 2022 (changed to a hybrid event due to the heatwave).

Art and Archive Futures is a new research cluster situated in Manchester School of Art, in collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Computational Science at Manchester Met. The research cluster aims to foster cross-disciplinary relationships and knowledge exchange, with a particular interest in an experimental mode of research that discovers through doing.

Art practices that work with archives have a long and rich history. Exhibitions, projects and events that extend from archives are increasingly prevalent in galleries and museums around the UK and internationally, attracting large audiences of interested visitors and providing opportunities for meaningful engagement and outreach. Research in computer science and AI uses technology to query archival datasets and linked data to generate new knowledge and novel applications, to address societal challenges and explore new uses to benefit society.

Connecting with colleagues from disciplines of art, computing and beyond, we developed a vibrant research conversation. For this event at Hallé St. Peter’s, we were particularly interested in connecting with those working with music or sound material, media archives and archival processes. We explored links around open source, information retrieval, computational processes and AI. We shared the ways in which we have adapted these processes for the reuse of archive material, and found out more about how researchers work creatively with data.

The morning session featured a range of short presentations, to give an insight into practices and projects working with archives and data in innovative and creative ways. With presentations by:

• Eileen Simpson, Reader in Fine Art, Department of Art and Performance, Manchester Met
• Ben White, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Department of Art and Performance, Manchester Met
• Professor Yonghong Peng, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Director of RKE, Centre for Advanced Computational Science (CfACS), Manchester Met
• Dr Stuart Cunningham, Senior Lecturer, CfACS, Manchester Met
• Dr John Henry, Senior Lecturer, CfACS, Manchester Met 
• Church Andrews, Electronic Music Artist
• Dr Jon Weinel, University of Greenwich
• Eleanor Roberts, Deputy Director of Development / Archivist, Hallé
• Emma Young and Graeme Phillipson, BBC R&D
• Eleanore Berrow and Andrew Armstrong, BBC Archives

An ideas exchange workshop followed in the afternoon, featuring public domain recordings from the Hallé archive as a case study starting point. (This case study material is part of a current project that members of the Art and Archive Futures research group have been working on to digitise and re-animate 100 years of orchestral recordings from the Hallé archive.)