Resisting Recuperation: Articulating the Unruly Politics of Artist's Archives Through Open Source Practices

A four-hour workshop and seminar convened by Judit Bodor, Principal Investigator of the research project What Is. Living Archive? Curating the Unruly Materiality of Contemporary Art, with Roddy Hunter, Head of Sculpture and Environmental art at The Glasgow School of Art. With much focus on conservation challenges of the so-called ‘dematerialisation’ of contemporary art practice, there is arguably less consideration of how archiving and curating can articulate, through practice, artists’ critical and radical politics in circumventing and critiquing institutional discourses and structures. Taking The Attic Archive (1980-2010) of formerly Dundee-based artist Peter Haining as a starting point the workshop speculated upon experimental and generative curatorial approaches to articulating pre-internet, peer-to-peer networked art practice in a post-digital context. The workshop was prepared through an eight-hour oral history interview with the artist Aitch (formerly known as Peter Haining). Participants were then through a discussion by Principal Investigator, Dr Judit Bodor, workshop co-convenor Dr Roddy Hunter, and guest experts Theresa Kneppers and Artemis Gryllaki (The Borough Road Collection Archive), and Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) about possible open-source curatorial approaches to a networked archive that is currently dispersed across collections in Scotland, Hungary and Ireland.