Living Archive: ‘Living’ means present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended’
Hall, S. (2001). Constituting an archive. Third text, 15(54), 89-92
“Artist-Run Stories. Archives. Information. Ideas. Inspiration. For everyone”
IN PROGRESS:
ARI REMIX COMMUNITY ARCHIVES PROJECT – (Re) Presenting – Reframing Art Ephemera for a new public – Australian ARIs 1970 to NOW
ARI Remix https://remix.org.au is an online activist archives. As a community-based participatory practice resource it represents the voices, records, networks and hidden histories of the Australian artist-run continuum. It is staged as a new, bold and unprecedented three-stage, collaborative, interactive transmedia eresource and Web 2.0 artwork mapping and digitising hidden and at risk artists’ ephemera and traces through cultural storytelling. It involves active participation by artists, co-creatives, peers and cohorts who together have built out from, extended and re-imagined the foundations of the 1970s experimental art ecology. ARI Remix is made possible through the generous collaborative collecting efforts of over 300 artists so far. Many of the items of artists’ ephemera represented are drawn from extensive personal collections.
ARI Remix in it’s nascent online form was instigated in November 2012 through a networked social media “public group” to assist with the ‘Ephemeral Traces’ UQAM institutional exhibition event and to significantly grow an independent and ongoing three stage living archive project that could expand long after the important UQAM exhibition event closed it’s doors.
Print + Web Self-publishing key highlight (Stage One) exemplar for MABF 2021 artist book activity two (Stage Three) – https://issuu.com/ari-remix/docs/ari-remix-issue-1-the-scene-issuu
The networked social media approach used has been transformative for many artists as a “local” ongoing community based action towards increasing artist participation here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/451268288264701. And expanded international networking potential here : https://www.facebook.com/ariremixproject
Keywords:
Activist archives, Artist-run culture, artist-run activities, artist-run narratives, grassroots archives, DIY, DIT, participatory archives, community archives, DIY archives, queering the archives, LGBTQIA+, BIPOC
email: info [at] remix.org.au
Australian ARIs, Web 2.0 and Longer-term Preservation Potential – Past Present Future
PROJECT ONE: Stages One & Two of this project (March 2011 – December 2019) are supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and have been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Stage Three of this project (January 2020 – March 2022) is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Note about approach: “Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste. The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music.[1] Today, Remix (the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste) has been extended to other areas of culture, including the visual arts; it plays a vital role in mass communication, especially on the Internet”- sourced: https://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3
ARI REMIX COMMUNITY ARCHIVES PROJECT – Reframing Art Ephemera for a new public – Australian ARIs 1970 to NOW
ARI Remix https://remix.org.au is an online community-based participatory practice resource representing the voices, records and hidden histories of the Australian artist-run continuum. It is staged as a new, bold and unprecedented three-stage, collaborative, interactive eresource and Web 2.0 artwork mapping hidden and at risk art ephemera and traces through cultural storytelling. It involves active participation by artists, co-creatives, peers and cohorts who together have built out from, extended and re-imagined the foundations of the 1970s experimental art ecology. ARI Remix is made possible through the generous collaborative collecting efforts of over 300 artists so far.
As ” a Queensland Remix” the ARI Remix Living Archives and Social Memory project is embedded in the rich and vibrant artist-run ecology ‘re-emerging’ in Brisbane during the oppressive Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland during the 1970s and 1980s..
Brisbane independent and DIY artist-run practices have a long history stemming back to the Barjai and MIYA Studio artist co-operatives in the 1943 to 1947 WW2 and post-war period. ARI Remix began as an expanded and collective DIY artist response to discussions with curator Peter Anderson in March 2011 for a then proposed exhibition to be held at the University of Queensland Art Museum. You can read more about ephemeral traces: brisbane’s artist-run scene in the 1980s here:
http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/ephemeral-traces-brisbanes-artist-run-scene-1980s
ARI Remix is imaged as an ongoing and incomplete archive it draws on the ‘at risk’ art ephemera being cared for by individuals in their private artist archives. Collaborative collecting informs this project.
SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION
Initial informal analogue and digital research began in March 2011 by reconnecting with many of the artists who actively operated Brisbane and Queensland regional artist-run spaces during the 1980s and who were the custodians of private artist/ARI archives about this period.
In November 2012 a social media open group was instigated to enable both the exhibition project and what was initially imagined as a complimentary and independent DIY feature online documentary project. The ephemeral traces exhibition was the first significant survey and introduction to the buried histories five of Brisbane’s 1980s artist-run spaces and the ARI Remix Project developed throughout 2013 and 2014 into an expanded view of Brisbane and regional Queensland’s artist-run sector. In March 2015 the remix.org.au site was launched online on the WordPress platform. You can read more on the social media page research and participation here –
https://www.facebook.com/groups/451268288264701
Please join the conversation and if you are interested please post your comments, memories and insights directly to the ARI Remix archives in the threads below many of the posts located at www.remix.org.au
In keeping with the spirit of Reconciliation we acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live and pay respect to the Elders – past, present and emerging – and acknowledge the important role Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within the Australian arts and culture ecology.
We gratefully acknowledge all the DIY enthusiasts, activists, artists, co-creatives, artist-runs and autonomous archivists who are kindly participating in the realisation of this project throughout Stages One and Two. We believe this collective DIY ARI continuum approach is invaluable in helping to grow and broaden this living conversation and making a variable Web 2.0 internet artwork like this possible and socially useful as a site for inquiry.
Please note: This ABOUT page is updated quarterly – next update is July 2020 – Take Care during Covid-19 Stay safe
Participating, kind, caring, generous, independent and DIY ARIs/artist-runs, activists, artists, artworkers, entrepreneurs, writers, poets, musicians, designers, curators, publishers, media professionals, GLAM sector colleagues and co-creatives profiled, featured or acknowledged including:
PROJECT ONE STAGE THREE
ARI REMIX COMMUNITY ARCHIVES PROJECT (Project One Stage Three) – A Queensland Remix transmedia project is a new, bold and unprecedented three-stage, collaborative, interactive eresource and Web 2.0 artwork mapping the unmapped diversity of the Queensland Artist-Run scene 1970 – NOW. Presenting untold and hidden stories by artists, co-creatives, peers and cohorts who together built upon, extended and broadened the foundations of the 1970s experimental art ecology.
In development now ( January 2020 – December 2021) – VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS – Call Out – Voluntary ARI Heritage contributions Welcomed- please contact us at info[at}remix.org.au if you would like to kindly contribute with a social memory blog post.
Thank you for your interest and care.
PROJECT ONE STAGE ONE
ARTIST COLLABORATIONS:
Peter Anderson, Jeffrey Gibson, Tim Gruchy, Barbara Campbell, Adam Boyd, Virginia Barratt, Dee Martin, John Jiggens, Dianne Heenan, John Waller, Angelina Martinez, Michelle Andringa, Jay Younger, Sally Hart, Jim Knox, Diena Georgetti, Linda Dement, Jasmine Hirst, Jeanelle Hurst, Lehan Ramsay, Terry Smith, Hiram To, Russell Lake, Adam Wolter, Ted Riggs, John Willsteed, Bryan Spencer, Robert Whyte, Anne Jones, Irena Luckus, Nicholas Zurbrugg, Gary Warner, Dale Chapman, Belinda Gunn, Steven Grainger, Martyn Sommer, Paul Andrew, Maria Filippow, Joanna Kambourian, Racheal Bruhn, Deborah Long, Deborah Fenwick, Anna Zsoldos, Jane Richens, Simon Reptile, Sue Palmer, Chris Feld, Brian Doherty, Kieran Knox, Feral Sound, Robert Munday, John Douglas, Rebekah Fogarty, John Stafford, Brendan Smith, Luke Roberts, Barbara Heath, Sheridan Kennedy, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Urszula Szulakowska, Peter Anderson, Ivan Nunn, Malcolm Enright, Ruth Propsting, Lindy Collins, Lindy Johnson, Rebecca Chapman, Jenny Chirnside, Ross Thompson, Donald Holt, Kenn Bushby, Fleur MacDonald, Wendy Mills, Lyndall Milani, Jose Macalino, Kate White, Toyo Tsuchiya, Philip Dean, Christine Turner, Ross Wallace, Gus Eagleton, Travis Dewan, Cassie Doyle, Richard Stringer, Louise Rollman, Leah Cottrell, Joanna Kambourian, Mervyn Moriarty, Julie Barratt, Sue Barratt, Kathryn Brimblecomb-Fox, Elsie Brimblecombe, Jon Adams, Claire Adams, Kent Johnson, Brad Pimm, Carl Warner, Shane Kneipp, Jay Dea Lopez, Ian McIntosh, Mark Ross, Chris Stannard, Robyn MacDonald, Doug Spowart, Cassie Doyle, Jac Bates, David Don, David Stafford, Anna Zsoldos…and many more…
Australian (Queensland) ARIs Profiles, collaborations, participants , acknowledgements and links including:
PAST:
Barjai Co-operative, Miya Studio Co-operative, Brisbane School of Art, EastAus Art School, Flying Art School, Red Comb House, Brisbane Community Arts Centre, E.M.U, Jewell Palace, Imagery Gallery, Art Walk Magazine, Art Wonder Stories, ZIP Collective, A Room, One Flat South Brisbane, One Flat George Street, Belltower Studios, No Names (Guest Curated IMA 1982), O’Flate Studios, The Observatory Collective, That Space (That Collective), John Mills National, John Mills National Annexe, John Mills Himself Artist Studios, Artworker’s Union Queensland, Queensland Artworkers Alliance (QAA), Entrepot, Versions Magazine, SCAM Magazine, Jumbo, Oblivion (Festival of Ephemeral Arts), Eyeline Magazine,UQ Activities ( UQ Student Union), That Annexe,The Campfire Room, Crux, Breathing Concrete, AXIS Art Projects (Art Xtremists International Syndicate), [Bureau] Artspace, Arch Lane Public Art, Black Banana Poster Collective, Poets Union QLD, Anarchists Union, Outdoor Art Drive In, Interface Project 88 – City As A Work of Art, Galerie Brutal, Cement Box Theatre UQ, Schonell Theatre UQ, La Boite Theatre – Hale Street, Milton (Raw Roar etc), Space 90, Brisbane Independent Film Collective (BIF), Film Facts Collective, John Mills Annexe, GlamourPussy, The Paint Factory, Fluba Troupe, AGLASSOFWATER, Young Artists Gallery (M.O.C.A), Blunt Focus Cinema Collective, BAFStudio, Chasm, Margaret Street Artist Studios, Loch Street Artist Studios, Little Roma Street Artist Studios, Flaming Star, Art Cast, 2D Design, Clout, Cane Toad Times 2nd Collective, 4ZZZ Public Radio ( 4ZZZ Radio Times) , Inkahoots, MacTaggarts Woolstores, Dada Le Tarte, BAT Channel, The Billboard Project, Fine Arts Society UQ, State of the Art: Art of the State (Forgan Smith Tower UQ), Order By Numbers, The Photographers Gallery, Little Roma Street Festival, Chi Chi Deluxe, Janice Claxton Dance Studios, Le Scoops, Aromas Cafe, Puzzles Café,Talk It Down, Drippy Taps, Q Space Q Space Annexe, The Studios St Mary’s Kangaroo Point, F.Art, The Future Now, Tropical Artist Guild, Satellite Space…
PRESENT:
The Laundry Art Space, Boxcopy, BNE Art, The Brisbane Collective, Fake Estate, ORAL ARI, Cut Thumb, Kontraband Studios, BARI Festival 2016, Raygun Projects, Kunstbunker, InResidence ARI, Aggregate, Reflex, The Walls, DAAO…
EMERGING:
The Laundry Artspace, Clutch Collective, InResidence ARI
We are truly grateful for testimonies and letters of support for the research and development for Stage One from many people including Andrew McNamara, Queensland University of Technology, Peter Anderson, Michele Helmrich, University of Queensland Art Museum, Gillian Fuller, Luke Roberts, Russell Lake, Professor Ross Harley UNSW, Professor Jay Younger, Queensland College of Art, Adam Boyd, Sally Hart, Sarah Follent, Jeanelle Hurst, Travis Dewan, BNE Art, Eyeline Magazine, Queensland College of Art Griffith University, Kath Kerswell, Beth Jackson, Lismore Art Space, Joanna Kambourian, State Library of Queensland, University of Queensland Art Museum, State Library of New South Wales, Joan Sheriff…
email: info [at] remix.org.au
Completed December 2019
Participating, kind, caring, generous independent and DIY ARIs/artist-runs activists, artists, entrepreneurs, writers, poets, musicians, designers, curators, publishers, media professionals, GLAM sector colleagues and co-creatives profiled, featured or acknowledged including:
PROJECT ONE STAGE THREE
FYI – In development now – contact us at info[at}remix.org.au if you would like to kindly contribute. Voluntary contributions always welcome. Thanks for your interest and care.
ARTIST COLLABORATIONS:
Elysha Rei, Evelyn Hartogh, Women’s Art Register, Doug Spowart, Victoria Cooper,
ARIs
The Soylent Spot, Made Creative Toowoomba, C.R.A.P, Women’s Art Register,
2011- 2019
PROJECT ONE STAGE TWO
Participating activists, artists, entrepreneurs, musicians, writers, designers, publishers, media professionals, curators, GLAM sector colleagues and co-creatives including;
ARTIST COLLABORATIONS:
Jacklyn Bates, David Don, Brisbane Street Art Festival, Travis Dewan, BARI Festival, Troy-Anthony Baylis, Steven Alderton, The Shared Camera, Caitlin Franzmann, Shane Kneipp, Shehab Uddin, Ian McIntosh, Sally Hart, Tobias De Maine, Sally Hart, Jane Richens, Lucinda Elliott, Ian McIntosh, Brian Doherty, Jane Richens, Peter Breen, Stephen Jones, Jac Dyson, Erena Mercer, Kinly Grey, Lu Forsberg, Callum McGrath, Annie Winter, Rod Bunter, David Broker, Linda Wallace, Tayla Haggarty, Anna MacMahon, Madeline Bishop, John Waller, Stephen Jones, Meagan Mendels, Sharon Jewell, Casselle Mountford, Barbara Campbell, Richard Mansfield, Niko Velutic, Adam Donovan, Simone Eisler, Kevin Wilson, Brian Doherty, Joanna Kambourian, Susie Forster, Elysha Rei, Jon & Claire Adams, Hollie, Paul Andrew, Erika Scott, Charlie Hillhouse, Jennifer Riggs, Hollie, Helen Lai, Matt Dabrowski, Shehab Uddin, Roz Craig, Ev Hartogh and many others.
Australian (Queensland) ARIs Profiles, collaborations, participants, acknowledgements and links including:
ARIs
PAST
Including Jugglers Artspace, Pop Gallery – QCA Changes 40 Years, Lismore Artspace, The Soylent Spot, PAST, Made Creative Space, Modus Studios, No.9, Process, Omniscient Collective, Trance Plant, Ruth Francis Studio, Light Street Studio, Terrace Street Studio, Queensland Artworkers Alliance Artist Studios, Accidentally Annie Street Space (AASS), Union Street Gallery, Dog Art Space, Doggett Street Studios, The Butterfactory (Dayboro), Umbrella Studio, The Hold Artspace, Whitebox Gallery, Soapbox Gallery, Spring Hill Gallery, wandA, Secuumb Art Space, Kiss My Art, ISN’T, Bartleme Galleries, Boulder Lodge Concepts, [Q]ARI, The Wandering Room, Infozone, The White House, Raw Space, Space Plentitude, The Farm, Man Bites Pumpkin, No Frills*, Witchmeat ARI, INHOUSE ARI,One Place After Another, Corflute ARI, Lines in the Sand, Addition, Love Love Studio, Inbetweenspace, The Tidy, Moreton Street Space Room (MSSR), Flipbook, Thoughtforms, McWhirters Artspace,Vegas Spray, Atomic Workshop, Smith + Stoneley, The Fort, Diagram, Current Projects, Bland People Die, Spring Hill Gallery, Omniscient Collective, Galerie Brutal, In Residence ARI, Kunstbunker, The Laundry Art Space, Clutch Collective, BARI Festival, Level, ISN’T, Modus Studios, Process, Cut Thumb ARI, Video Access Centre Brisbane, White Box, Busybric ARI and many others.
PRESENT
Including Boxcopy, The Soylent Spot, Outer Space
EMERGING
Including Wreckers Artspace, The Laundry Artspace, Stable, XYZ ARI, Dum Dum ARI
Australian (NT, TAS, SA, WA, VIC, NSW) ARIs Profiles, participants, acknowledgements and links including:
We are truly grateful for testimonies, expressions of interest and letters of support from artists including Luke Roberts, Simone Eisler, Kevin Wilson, Peter Breen, Tobias De Maine, Franz Ehmann, Adam Donovan, Luke Roberts, Matt Dabrowski, Scott Whittaker, Allyson Reynolds, Sally Hart, Maria Filippow and from kind and generous supporters, curators, writers and academics including Michele Helmrich, Peter Anderson, Jay Younger, IMA, Jennifer Riggs, Helen Lai, Asia Art Publishing, Monash Centre Prato CIRN Conference 2017, RESAW 2019, Louise Denoon…
ARI Remix Project is decentred/decentring in its transmedia Web 2.0 curatorial aim and approach.
These online nodes outlined below form part of the Web 2.0 information and collective content recovery, retrieval and keeping places:
Living Archives- Queensland Artist-Run Heritage 1980 – NOW https://www.facebook.com/groups/451268288264701
ARI Remix Project – Living Archives, Artist-Runs Past Present Future https://www.facebook.com/ariremixproject
Instagram #ariremix
Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/remix-org-au
Vimeo https://vimeo.com/channels/1032743/129531628
You Tube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5iLyGaOmKYYlPhXLTEBn9HoCuChmoJAv
Pinterest
https://www.pinterest.com.au/ariremixlivingarchivesproject
Independent – Web Archiving – courtesy of Internet Archive WayBack Machine https://web.archive.org/web/*/remix.org.au
Cofounder, DIY Coordinator, Artist, Paul Andrew
Artist/Designer, Joanna Kambourian (Lismore Artspace 2008-2018, Ms Browns Lounge)
Many artists and peers have been generous mentors, directly and indirectly during the initial research and set up on the remix.org.au archives throughout 2011 – 2015 including artists Joanna Kambourian, Linda Dement, Sarah Waterson, Liz Stokes, John Tonkin, Brian Doherty, Jane Richens, Virginia Barratt, Gillian Fuller, Jay Younger and many others.
issuu.com/ari-remix/docs/ari-remix-issue-1-the-scene-issuu
Editors – Brian Doherty & Jane Richens
email: info [at] remix.org.au
Collective or social memories are shaped by social, economic and political circumstances; by beliefs and values; by opposition and resistance. They involve cultural norms and issues of authenticity, identity and power. They are implicated in ideologies. Social memories are associated with or belong to particular categories or groups so they can be, and often are, the focus of conflict and contestation. They can be discussed and negotiated, accepted or rejected. Collective memories are expressed in a variety of ways. They create interpretive frameworks that help make experience comprehensible. They are marked by a dialectic between stability or historical continuities and innovations or change.
Jacob Climo and Maria Cattell, eds., Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (Walnut Creek, CA:Altamira Press, 2002),4.
noun. An artist-run initiative is any project run by visual artists to present their and others’ projects. They might approximate a traditional art gallery space in appearance or function, or they may take a markedly different approach, limited only by the artist’s understanding of the term. …“Artist-run means initiating exchange; emphasizing cross and inter-disciplinary approaches to making art; developing networks; through curation, putting creative ideas and arguments into action”
Catalyst Arts (1996), Life/Live, Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne, p. 45
“To borrow a definition from LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre), the ‘living’ archive’s aim is not to bury the past in boxes or databases for posterity, but to “unearth fresh forms of thinking from what has gone before” (2010, online). The ‘living’ component of this archival framework is thus twofold: on the one hand it is about access as it encourages researchers to make connections between materials and to map out their own archival journeys in hopes of “revealing new ways of looking at the future by examining the past” (LIFT 2010, online). On the other hand, it is also about survival, in opposition to death, loss, and destruction, by way of engaging with the traces and remnants that live on. But just what constitutes digital traces online and how traces are retrieved remains one of the dominant conundrums of the online archive…”
( http://archinodes.com/node/168)
A living archive has myriad affordances, Eric Ketelaar among others, also consider a living archive ‘as a place of contestation’ (Ketelaar, 2009 p.110), the author cites what Hayden White describes as a space where ‘different kinds of discourse about what happened and what is to be done’( White cited in Ketelaar, 2009, p110).From an artist perspective it is a metaphor that is fluid, fecund and denotes living memory, a way of strategizing around rethinking and re-representing local history, social memory and artist records for a new public.
Website copyright information.
This website contains information, data, documents, pages, photographs, audio, video and images (‘the material’) prepared by the ARI Remix Project which is a collaborative memory and living archives project of Queensland /Australia 1980-NOW artist-run heritage and culture for the purposes of documenting the vibrant, diverse, neglected and under-valued and un-valued DIY collaborations of the region.
Kindly include your contact details, provenance details, contextual information, appropriate credits, url links, tags and acknowledgements or if you prefer kindly request for its removal from the archive. Thanks for your interest, enthusiasm and shared passion for helping us redress the blind spot of artist-run heritage in the local global arts and culture canon, thanks for reading, thanks for your care, your attention and for participating, thanks for sharing in the spirit of open-source social and cultural change and digital community engagement and strengthening.
Artist-run spaces, places, projects and initiatives have long been sites of both precarity and impact for the shared professional development of artists; groups, collectives and informal associations, artists together working for artists, for growing audience engagement and for public activation of knowledge about the diversity of contemporary art practices. Here using a polyvocal approach and the re-iterating of ephemera, digital storytelling and resources we share something of Australia’s participatory heritage in the artist-run field since the countercultural 1970s as a small way of tempering, altering, transforming, critiquing and nuancing the official or dominant narratives that have long told the stories of contemporary art, community participation and social histories.
In the popular imagination 1980’s Queensland is often touted as the “Police State” years, a decade of menace during the final leg of an oppressive twenty-year right wing regime. Queensland under the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Government was known locally, nationally and internationally for many things, most particularly for its inappropriate police powers and extensive police brutalities, for citizen disappearances, for deaths in custody, for state-sanctioned disavowal of dissent, disavowal of community consultation and collaboration, for its hubris surrounding truthful media reportage and public accountability, for its gross disregard of civil liberties and human rights, for wrongful imprisonment, for its vehement disregard for refugees, disregard for racial diversity, for transgender politics, for homosexuality, for feminism, for migration, for refugees and perhaps most pernicious of all, for its anti-integration and apartheid policies, its desecration of the social and ecological frameworks that formed the cornerstone of an ancient living aboriginal heritage at the heart of Queensland’s ancient, rich, diverse arts and culture history.
It is during this era that artist-run spaces proliferated as never before, and this living archive we are participating in now is beginning to slowly gather together and share, testimonies, artist interviews, ephemera and resources to map and remix the 1980-Now artist-run scene and to begin to understand something of it’s impact on diversifying the arts ecology we know today.