CURATING THE DIGITAL ATTIC ARCHIVE
International Network Meeting at Artpool
24-25 October 2024

Following our first gathering in Scotland, the second meeting of the two-year Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded Research Network Project Curating The Digital Attic Archive: A Case Study For Open-Source Approaches To Artists’ Archive happened on 24-25 October 2024 in Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest with researchers from Hungary, Scotland and Ireland. The Programme of the two days has been developed in consultation with the artist haha (an acronymic collective identy used by the artist since 2020 based on 4 previous identities) by Project Leads (Dr Judit Bodor, University of Dundee and Dr Roddy Hunter, The Glasgow School of Art) and Artpool’s team (Julia Klaniczay, Dora Halasi and Viktor Kotun) who hosted the meeting as project partners.

On the first day Julia Klaniczay, co-founder of Artpool, led a tour of the current exhibition ‘Documents from the first ten years of Artpool Art Research Center’ and introduced participants and invited guests (Andrea Patek, postgraduate student from MOME and Anna Kryvenko, film maker, and visiting fellow at CEU) to this documentary exhibition of significant projects, events and publications between 1992-2022 curated by Artpool co-founder, György Galantai.

Following this Viktória Monhor, socially engaged intermedia artist based in Budapest was invited to discuss her own practice with the group and how her work might link with the earlier practices of artists connected with the Attic Archive.

In the afternoon researchers had studied material from an archival display of artworks and documentation selected by Dora Halasi and Judit Bodor from Artpool's collection of material relating to Pete Horobin's 10-year DATA project (1 January 1980- 31 December 1989). The day concluded with network partners report on the progress made with cataloguing the Attic Archive since our last meeting at National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, University of Dundee Archives and National Irish Visual Library at National College of Art & Design, Dublin. The cataloguing work will be continuing with haha whose detailed descriptions and corrections will lead to better accessibility and usability of the material. In addition, artists connected to the Attic Archive, including Stefan Szcelkun, Malcolm Dickson, and Florian Cramer have donated related material from their personal archives to University of Dundee Archives, which will be catalogued as extension of the Attic collection in the future.

On the second day the network members participated in an online consultancy and workshop with international practitioners who were invited to discuss advantages and risks associated with open-source and digital archives through their own experience. The aim of the workshop was to support the research group’s work as a ‘network of care’ towards securing a sustainable future for the Attic Archive, established by Dundee-based artist Pete Horobin in 1975 and now dispersed internationally across collections in Scotland, Hungary and Ireland.

Danish artist Niels Lomholt spoke about the Lomholt Mail Art Archive developed through his participation in the international Mail Art Network between 1969-1985 and the establishment of the the digital version of the Lomholt Mail Art Archive in 2014 in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Museum in Roskilde and art historian Lene Aagaard Denhart to “to open up new possibilities of volume, open-endedness and flexibilities, making it possible to expose the entire archive, add and develop new connections on the site”.

The website by now contains over 17000 documents digitized from 30000 artworks and correspondence in the archive. The digital archive was hosted on the museum’s website for 9 years when due to maintenance issues and financial considerations it almost closed, with the artist managing to secure funding for a further 5 years from the New Carlsberd Foundation in the last minute. In response to the network members questions the artist discussed how the website enhanced accessibility to the physical archive, the practical issues around copyright when it comes to multi-artist archives, and his view on future issues with maintanance.
He also introduced his book, Lomholt Mail Archive, Fotowerke and Video Work (eds. Lomholt, Niels Peter and Lene Aagaard Denhart, Lomholt Formular Press, 2010) which has been a key resource for Artpool’s ongoing archival project, the Mail Art Chro-No-Logy.

Florian Cramer writer, theorist, and film maker from the Netherlands was asked by the network to discuss his view on the historical significance and contemporary relevance of The Attic Archive and his connections to it and Neoism through projects such as the early neoist website Seven By Nine Squares and the exhibition D 2 R v E + A = THE ATTIC ARCHIVE IN TRANSIT, and working with vintage media artworks in a post-digital context.
In his presentation, and based on his own experience, he emphasised the precarity of physical and online archives, the significance of Open-Source publishing in this context, and why web platforms can sometimes be a trap due to issues arising from software problems, human resources, financial issues or copyright. Several artists mentioned in the presentation working with archives (eg Ruud Jansen and Mark Block - PanScan) is also connected to Artpool’s network.

Lozana Rossenova, a digital humanities researcher and designer based in Berlin who currently works as Postdoc Researcher at the Open Science Lab in TIB Hannover, discussed her practice and the possibility of developing sustainable (collaborative and community driven) open-source infrastructures to resist recuperation and provide alternatives to platforms built using proprietary software. Rossenova discussed in particular how artists' network activities might be translated in a collaborative online environment.

Participants left the Budapest meeting with a gift of an illustrated booklet/notebook, designed by Dora Halasi, showing how the Attic Archive is stored at Artpool.

Network members: Judit Bodor (University of Dundee, Project Lead), Roddy Hunter (The Glasgow School of Art, Project Co-Lead), and representatives of research network partner institutions Caroline Brown (University of Dundee), Donna Romano (National Irish Visual Art Library, National College of Art&Design, Dublin) Heidi Egginton (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh), Dóra Halasi, Júlia Klaniczay and Viktor Kotun (Artpool Art Research Center, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest).

For further information about this project please get in touch via email to j.bodor@dundee.ac.uk or join our newsletter https://tinyrl.com/54bxb4hf.

Blog post by: Judit Bodor & Dora Halasi
Photographs by: Dora Halasi and Imre Kiss.

Disclaimer:
‘Curating the Digital Attic Archive: A Case Study For Open-Source Approaches to Artists’ Archives’ is supported by Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network Award.