CHAIR: Richard Legay

Alessia Francesca Casiraghi (online: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/9515655240pwd=djM5dnFTUE4zNXBlYkxsTmhNdEJPdz09)

Platforms’ Archives Between Intergenerational Nostalgia and National Memory: the Home Movies 100 Project

As digital media platforms have incredibly developed over the last decades, they can no longer be thought simply as multi-hour libraries of audiovisual content, but rather as complex ecosystems where the past can shape future worlds. Digital media have changed the way private and collective memory is collected, producing a new ecology of remembering and forgetting. This article questions how media dynamics affect the creation of a shared cultural memory, focusing on the role of the italian Home Movies Archive – Archivio Nazionale dei Film di Famiglia of Bologna as an agent of intergenerational nostalgia and historical knowledge. Specifically, the article explore the project Home Movies 100, a year-long online programming, a digital almanac created from archive excerpt shot on that same day during the XX century. A new way to reconnect the collective story to today, through private glances, daily micro-situations of families, and public events shot by amateur filmmakers. This article aims to expand on current research and deepen understandings of media archiving best practices, investigated as a range of activities that are intimately related to the assembling, building and designing of specific future worlds. To achieve this, three theoretical frameworks will be considered: media and memory, the platformization of cultural production as described by Nieborg and Poell, and the notion of intergenerational nostalgia. How do platforming processes influence the way national and collective memory is constructed and experienced? Is it possible to foresee a new taxonomy alongside the more classic categories? What new form of temporality emerges in the face of the possibility of accessing repackaged audiovisual memories? Furthermore, in a bigger picture, the article would shed the light on the internal dynamics and paradoxes of platforms, such as the risks associated with the fragmented use of audiovisual archive contents. There are two interrelated dangers future archiving and collecting practices will have to warn against: if context collapses, time also collapses.

Ellen Scally

Amateur Homes for Amateur Histories: Considering the Role of Hobbyists and Collectors in Preserving Nonprofessional Cine-culture in Ireland

Using as a case study the Irish amateur filmmaker, enthusiast and collector Andy Kelly, this paper aims to examine the contribution of hobbyists to the preservation of film and cine-culture within the amateur cinema community. As well as being a keen amateur photographer and filmmaker, Andy Kelly has been collecting photography and film paraphernalia since the 1970s. His collection spans more than a century of amateur photographic and cinematic history and includes photographs, films, cameras, magic lantern projectors and other small gauge film equipment. Unlike those found in the UK, there are no regional archives for visual media in Ireland, meaning that the onus falls on one centralised institution, the IFI Irish Film Archive (IFA), to acquire and preserve as much as possible of Ireland’s moving image heritage. While the variety of material visible on the IFA’s website is demonstrative of its mission statement to “reflect all aspects of indigenous amateur and professional production” (IFA Website), resources are limited and amateur material may not always be a high priority. Following research by Ciara Chambers on amateur filmmakers the Spence Brothers and cine- culture in Northern Ireland (2013), little further has been done into the operations of regional film clubs and societies in Ireland, such as the Waterford Film Society of which Kelly was a member, and the ways in which these local clubs interacted with the wider amateur film community. A lack of official support, funding, or recognition means that these private archives exist in a state of precarity, the future of the materials therein uncertain. However, private archives such as Kelly’s may be key to filling a gap in our knowledge by offering valuable clues and insights to build a picture of regional amateur cine-culture in Ireland in the mid-20th century.

Semay Buket Şahin

Digital Visual Culture and Memory Practices: Modern Uses of Damnatio Memoriae

In our age where digital has become the norm, the modern methods of photographic production has started to provide peculiar and novel modes for the visual experience. The digitization of images has changed how we remember and how we shape our memory. Digital archives created with digital data, texts, pictures, maps, videos and audio files accessible on the Internet have fundamentally been transformed in relation to the memory practices of the past. Given that the social-media platforms now serve as the archival platforms for controlling and managing the cultural memory of both the public and private space— even if it would appear that the internet allows for a more open form of remembering— we will examine how these new technologies simultaneously open up a larger platform and access to cultural memory while also creating a new form of imperial memory control through the ancient damnatio memoraie. The term Damnatio Memoriae is used by the Romans to describe the methodology used to construct and manage historical memory. I will argue that a cyberspace now constructed by social media platforms has fundamanetally transformed the damnatio memoriae method and therefore also has dramatically changed both archival practices and the very ways in which we also participate in collective social practices of remembering. The damnatio memoriae method can attain a better viewpoint from which to understand the complex shift in this ubquity of instantaneous archiving and memory. This study aims to reveal how the digitalization of archives affects our memory and remembering practices by examining how digital visual archives provide a permanent source in reconstructing history through past historical examples."

Veronika Hanáková

Just One Click: DVD Menu and Ephemerality of Digital Artefacts

The digital transformation of audiovisual archives has been facilitated in recent years by technological advancements: including new pieces of equipment for storage, preservation, restoration, and research, but also curatorship or distribution of their film collections that consist primarily of film stocks (Fossati, 2018). However, the advent of digitalisation has given emergence to new audiovisual artefacts. Such cases could include minor details such as the DVD menu, which exceeds the established archival categories and procedures, as it is an interface connected to specific media (both technological and visual) configuration. The prism of archival theory and practice formed on and tailored to the character of an analogue medium (materiality and technology), which dominated the global audiovisual industry until the early 2010s, cannot grasp digital artefacts due to their different materialities. Digital technologies have signalled a rupture in understanding the relationship between the audiovisual medium and the technological background. As Benoît Turquety (2014: 51) notes, “at the time of mechanisation, technique and technology were cinematic notions; in the digital era, the link between the cinema and those concepts has changed, because the paradigms have changed around them, perhaps the episteme itself.” Therefore, there is a gap between created digital artefacts and the archive paradigm based on analogue materiality – this crack is the beginning of this project. The proposal addresses the fundamental question – of what comes after the post-cinematic condition – from the view of archiving. The artefact – the DVD menu – will be a crucial point as a case study through which the paper elaborates on the problem of digital objects; ephemerality for archival theory. How to define a digital artefact to acquire object-ness for archival theory? Or, to be more accurate, how to try to capture from the perspective of theory and practise something that is transformable, variable, and ephemeral?