I’m happy to announce the launch of archiveremix.com. The site presents a small selection of artefacts from the archives from the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections with the intention of them being starting points for new remixes.
There has been much movement towards encouraging galleries, libraries, archives and museums to open up their archives for use by the public. Quite often this is hampered by a variety of factors including cost, copryright and just having the resources to manage such a task. One approach to this, which served as a big inspiration for this project, came from Oliver Laric. In 2012 he started a project to make 3D scans of sculptural works from the Usher Gallery and The Collection in Lincoln. The resulting remix works that were made from these scans came in various forms including 3D models, videos, gifs.
Taking inspiration from this I set about making use of the archives from University of Birmingham in a creative way. Over the last year I have been releasing remix works on the Archive Remix tumblr site and at the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media. Although they, in some cases, lack narrative, in making these remixes I wanted to show the opportunities to be had from allowing artists to remix works. Of course, this is not a new practice at all with artists doing this in collages, in music and every other creative practice.
The selection made available obviously only represents a small amount of what is available. This was a conscious decision as I did not want to overwhelm artists with too much of a collection.
A number of remixes have already been made by artists that I invited to participate in the Remix Party on 20th January.
The party featured remixes by Dan Hett, Lorna Mills, Ashley James Brown, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Michaël Borras A.K.A. Systaime, Benjamin Berg, Michael Lightborne, Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Salisbury, Carla Gannis, Faith Holland, Nick Briz, Daniel Temkin, Adam Ferriss, Víctor Arce, Chema Padilla, Kate Spence, Jessica Evans, Emily Haasch. The approaches to working with this archive were very varied indeed. It featured still images, animated gifs, remixes based on compression, videos, and in the case of Nick Briz, an interactive website!
It is my hope that the archiveremix.com site, my exhibition(s) and the work made by the artists joins the case being put forth by websites such as OpenGLAM and encourages more institutions to free their archives.
Remix this
If you feel inspired by any of the works please download them and make a remix of your own! These can then be uploaded back onto the website.
This project couldn’t have been made possible without the support of the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections and the amazing web design skills of Sebastian Lenton (you should hire him).
Over time new works from the archives of Research and Cultural Collections will be added, so check back often!