The Digital Performance Archive

While digital performance events and experiments proliferate and new performance genres are beginning to emerge, no central record or archive of these developments is currently being collated. The Digital Performance Archive (DPA) aims to fill that gap by archiving and critically analysing significant new interdisciplinary developments in performance which draw upon (or exist within) digital media in its varied forms. To this end, The Digital Performance Archive will undertake a comprehensive study and recording of the development of 'digital performance' in the last decade of the Twentieth Century.

The study will cover both digital resources used in performance and digital resources on performance created in the two year period 1999 to 2000 (with important precedents of the 90's also being catalogued). Digital resources in performance include theatrical productions and live-art installations that incorporate electronic media, to live-broadcast World Wide Web performances and Internet based collaborations, to interactive drama and the new performative 'virtual environments' of MUDS, MOOs and IRC. Digital resources on performance include those being used to document, analyse and critique performance: from performing arts databases, websites and mailing lists, to academic CD-ROMS and laser discs. The project aims to be of value to researchers across a wide range of academic disciplines, from drama and performance to art and design, from the social sciences to computer science and cybernetics.

The Digital Performance Archive will have several outcomes. Firstly it will collate an extensive searchable database on the World Wide Web, in order that the public will be able to gain access to work held by the DPA, in particular to the websites and digital files provided by practitioners. Secondly, as material for a DVD, the DPA will document exemplars of digital performance on video. This interactive DVD will also include other significant documents and examples of digitally related performance, all of which will be critically examined. Lastly, the DPA will produce an academic publication presenting a critical overview of the field. As already stated there is currently no other archive that is devoted specifically to this type of work. Perhaps the main reasons for this are that these types of works are so current, so diverse and developing at such an extraordinary rate that there is, as yet, no accepted methodology for dealing with them. Whilst one of the DPA's objectives is to create this web-searchable database archive of the works within the field, clearly it also has an important role to play in beginning to create a structure for the study of the works in its collection and of the field as a whole. It is these seemingly conflicting roles of provider of raw information on the web and of interpreter in such a fast moving 'discipline' that make the project so interesting and ambitious.

In no part of the project is this paradox more evident than in the Web based database of works. Here the archive benefits from a comparison with photographs and photographic archives. Sekula writes that,

The photographic archives' components are not conventional lexical units, but rather are subject to the circumstantial character of all that is photographable. Thus it is absurd to imagine a dictionary of photographs, unless one is willing to disregard the specificity of individual images in favor of some model of typicality ... Clearly one way of 'taming' photography is by means of this transformation of the circumstantial and idiosyncratic into the typical and emblematic. This is usually achieved by a stylistic or interpretive feat, or by a sampling of the archive's offerings for a 'representative' instance.
Clearly, as in the above description, the DPA, whilst dealing with files and information of similar types, will not be dealing with standard content within these types, especially in such a broad and shifting field. However, an interpretative ' taming' route will be taken with the material chosen by the DPA for the DVD and publication. This approach however is not viable for the searchable web database whose aim is to provide files to the researcher as the practitioner meant them to be seen. If this is not wholly possible visually, the files should at least be as free as possible from any interpretation that might be placed on them by the DPA.
Sekula continues:

Another way is to invent a machine, or rather a clerical apparatus, a filing system, which allows the operator/researcher/editor to retrieve the individual instance from the huge quantity of images contained within the archive. Here the photograph is not regarded as necessarily typical or emblematic of anything, but only as a particular image which had been isolated for purposes of inspection.

The creation of such a filing system is the ultimate aim of the DPA web database. However, Sekula creates a picture of an ideal situation in which a user finds exactly what they are looking for in the filing system. He does not consider that there are inherent biases in the creation of such a system. When attaching metadata to practitioners' files in order to allow database searches, the DPA must respect the descriptions attached to them by practitioners themselves, whilst also trying to create a system which is coherent and consistent (or typical and emblematic) across all the works. In addition, there needs to be some mediation between these two biases and the searches that the user brings to the database. It is a challenging aspect of the project.

This poster will provide delegates with the opportunity to see the breadth of works that the DPA must archive and define. It will be a chance to see how far the DPA has progressed with its acquisitions and with placing these acquisitions within its web 'filing system'. The poster will give delegates the opportunity to test this web searchable database and provide comment. The DPA will welcome the opportunity to discuss with delegates any similar problems and solutions they have encountered.

The archive is a joint project between Digital Research Unit of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at The Nottingham Trent University, and the Media and Performance Research Unit, Department of Media and Performance at the University of Salford.

References

Sekula, A. (1996). 'The Body and the Archive'. In R. Bolton (ed). The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.