Editorial

No. 10 (2010)

We recently found out that the journal is to be indexed in Scopus – an important bibliographic database for abstracts and citations from scientific journal articles –. We are extremely pleased with this news, given the positive boost it will give the journal and given that, in some way, it is reward for the effort put in over all these years by all those involved: faculty and researchers from this and other universities around the world who have acted as editors, reviewers or members of the advisory and editorial boards; and the technical team who have worked throughout to continuously improve the journal and ensure excellence in their tasks to edit and publish it online.

Scopus offers access to the leading scientific bibliography and ensures the establishing of scientific publishing standards. It holds around 18,000 peer-reviewed journal titles from over 5,000 publishers worldwide. It should be stressed that Artnodes has been one of the first e-journals to be indexed by Scopus, which had to date only contained journals produced on paper. We have thus contributed to the recognition of free, Creative Commons-licensed e-journals, demonstrating how the digital format is perfectly valid if rigorously produced. This also represents a decisive contribution to open-access policies for academic publications.

The focus for this monographic node coordinated by lecturer Pau Alsina and the team from LABoral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, is precisely the meaning and importance of archives nowadays, and above all the need to create archives for artistic practice linked digital technologies that adapt to both the specific nature and circumstances of our times. This node is the result of the 1st International Symposium on Media Libraries and Archives for the 21st Century, held at LABoral, Gijón, on 28 and 29 May.

As the symposium organiser, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial’s interest lies in its position at the crossroads between several of the various movements running through contemporary culture. And though it has earned a name for itself as a place for the meeting, presentation and dialogue between symbolic manifestations–art, science, technology, industry, society–that, up until now, have been completely removed from one another, it has also shown a constant concern for the production of contents. In this way, it strives to address the problem of access from the twofold perspective of user and producer. The work carried out with the Mediateca_Archivo takes this principle as a road map, accepting the need to provide tools to users and trusting that this gesture may be inserted into the contemporary dynamic of sampling. The Mediateca_Archivo is a free-access documentation centre, offering–printed and digital–bibliographic materials as well as audiovisual collections of present-day culture and creation.

The openness brought into play by the development of ICTs with regards to the involvement of users in the process of cultural configuration poses new challenges in relation to archives. The generation of inclusive dynamics, the fostering of collaborative processes through the opening of codes, the creation of protocols for dialogue with institutions sharing the same goals, which may lead to the emergence of synergies unimaginable in pre-digital times, is a task requiring an ongoing exchange of ideas and proposals. Collaboration among institutions to build up globally accessible databanks is a truly exciting opportunity to offer users integral reference sources which may contribute to the creation of new contents.

But the exponential growth of archives also places us at permanent risk of ROM collapse. The potential storage space promised by the digitalisation of contents; the growing possibility of copying, reformulating, communicating and distributing, is yet another risk when it comes to storing and retrieving data. Just as history is narrated from a minute selection of events structured to form a plot, the elaboration of a discourse–either visual, aural, sculptural, digital or textual–requires previous signifiers. It is the task of institutions to store and select those contents, as well as to facilitate access to them, to further the progress of the cultural machinery.

Alex Adriaansens, Director of Amsterdam’s V2_, explores in his article to what degree today’s archives are undergoing transformation, making it necessary to reassess their role in institutions, the way we should understand them, what they should represent, and how we should structure them. The way we structure, organize and process information in archives determines how we understand the past, present and future, and this affects not only historians and researchers, but also the public in general that has access to them.

Likewise, Mike Stubbs, Director of Liverpool’s FACT, reflects on the challenges we face in terms of digital culture and art. The supposedly infinite capacity for storage, the role of the viewer as producer, the collective practice of tagging or the need for a narrative able to construct meaning from the excess of data are some of the subjects dealt with in his article. In turn, Jesus Carrillo, Director of Activities at Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, offers further reflections on the confirmation of the crisis in the metanarrations that maintained the role and function of museums in our society.

Finally, there are two articles reflecting in depth, from the specifics of the digital, on the new function and form of archives. On the one hand, Alessandro Ludovico, Editor of the journal Neural, highlights the current vacuum on the internet with respect to information prior to 1994 and shows us how this content which has “disappeared” on paper is progressively “reappearing” in digital format, with no small number of complications. On the other hand, Attila Márton, from the London School of Economics, closes the node by reflecting on digital objects, which have become more technological operations than fixed entities.

All these articles look to offer a panoramic vision from a range of perspectives that need to be taken into account when assessing the challenges for archives in the 21st century, archives capable of offering an account of new media artistic practices. We need to thank all of the authors for taking part in this node.

Rosina Gómez-Baeza
Manager of LABoral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

Pau Alsina
Director of Artnodes, e-journal on art, science and technology