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Art and Archive Futures – Event 1
Exploring research and practice informed by creative work with archives, digital data and code
Research summary
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.)
Gallery
Research team
Event Organisers
Ben White and Eileen Simpson are researchers in the Department of Art and Performance at Manchester School of Art, at Manchester Metropolitan University. They have a proven track record in working with archives in the digital realm. Many of their projects make use of archival and computational processes, processing data for public projects, generating new code and releasing new resources into the public domain for use and re-use by others. They established Open Music Archive in 2005.
Dr Stuart Cunningham, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Mathematics at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work encompasses a range of technical and creative areas with interests in the field of audio data compression; emotional and affective technologies; sonic interaction; and media technologies for health and wellbeing. His work is principally oriented around sound, visuals and the interaction of these media with a human audience and recent research outputs can be found in the Journal of New Music Research, the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, Dementia, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, and in the recent book Doing Research in Sound Design.
Prof Yonghong Peng is currently the Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Head and Director of the University Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University which conducts research on AI, Data Science, Cyber Security and Mathematical Modelling (fluid dynamics). His research concerns the advancement of AI technologies that helps improve the performance of data science life cycle, including - data preparing and selection, knowledge generation and reasoning, and the decision making or decision-making support. His research also concerns the integration of human behaviour and knowledge into the process of decision making to power the Artificial Intelligence systems.
Contact us
Contact us
For general enquiries about our Art and Archive Futures group, you can contact its leads Ben White or Eileen Simpson.