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Use and Reuse of
the Digital Archive

Edited by John Potts

Use and Reuse of the Digital Archive
 John Potts
Editor

Use and Reuse of the

Digital Archive
Editor
John Potts
Department of Media
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-79522-1    ISBN 978-3-030-79523-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79523-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
­institutional affiliations.

Cover Illustration: Front cover image shows telegram from John Kaldor to Christo, 1969,
from the Kaldor Public Art Projects Digital Archive. Reproduced with permission of Kaldor
Public Art Projects.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

The editor thanks the contributors for their essays in this book. I also
thank Camille Davies at Palgrave Macmillan for her support and encour-
agement of this book project.
I am grateful to John Kaldor and the staff of Kaldor Public Art Projects
for their assistance, including permission to reproduce images from the
digital archive website for publication. Bettina Kaldor, Sophie Forbat,
Robin Stern, and Eliza Hormsby at Kaldor Public Art Projects provided
valuable assistance during preparation of this book. Michael Baber in the
Media Department at Macquarie University provided helpful technical
assistance in reproducing images. Thanks to Ross Harley for help with
the book.
All images are reproduced by permission of Kaldor Public Art Projects
and the artists, except: Fig. 9.1, The Neural Archive, courtesy of Alessandro
Ludovico, Fig. 9.2, Temporary Library, by Alessandro Ludovico and
Annette Gilbert, Creative Commons License, Adam Berry, CC BY-SA
4.0; Fig. 10.1, ACMI Mediatheque, Fig. 10.2, Shannon McGrath, Memory
Garden, and Fig. 10.3, Black Magic Media Preservation Lab, reproduced
with permission of ACMI and the artists.
This book project was supported by the Australian Research Council
(ARC) through the ARC Linkage Grant LP170101175 ‘Digitising the
Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive’. I acknowledge the support of the
ARC; this book is part of the Linkage Grant project. The research project
was also supported by the Department of Media and the Faculty of Arts at
Macquarie University, Sydney.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
John Potts

Part I Making a Digital Archive  11

2 Making the Temporary Permanent: The Digital Archive 13

John Potts

3 Digitisation & Imagination: Curating the Kaldor Public

Art Projects Archive 33
Alice Desmond

4 Public Art and Education in the Age of Digital Archives 49

Ross Rudesch Harley

5 The (After) Life of the Archive 73

Scott East

Part II The Digital Archive and Its Effects  87

6 The Romance of Form 89

Julia Mant

vii
viii Contents

7 Hauntology: The Archive as Past and Future105

Nicole Anderson

8 Anthropocene Archival Ethics115

Sean Cubitt

9 Temporary Library, Archiving Digital Culture129

Alessandro Ludovico

10 Preservation/Access/Reuse—Audio Visual Collections

in the Digital Age143
Katrina Sedgwick

11 Conclusions: Use & Re-Use159

John Potts

Index163
 Notes on Contributors

Nicole Anderson is Director of the Institute of Humanities Research at

Arizona State University, and Honorary Professor at Macquarie University.
She is also the co-founder and chief editor of the journal Derrida Today.
She is the author of the books Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure and Cultural
Theory in Everyday Practice. She was a Chief Investigator of the ARC
Linkage Project Digitising the Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive.
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne.
His publications include The Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of
Light: Genealogies of Visual Media, Finite Media: Environmental
Implications of Digital Technology and Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique
from Hollywood to the Mass Image. He is series editor for Leonardo Books
at MIT Press. His current research is on political aesthetics, media art his-
tory, ecocritique, and practices of truth.
Alice Desmond was the Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive Collection
Curator in 2019, working to complete the digital archive project in that
year. Alice has worked as a curator and digital producer at various cultural
organisations, including the National Gallery of Australia, National
Museum of Australia and the Sydney Review of Books.
Scott East is a Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design committed to engaged
research with the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and
Museums) and broader cultural sectors. His research interests include
museums and institutions, disability studies, queer theory, cultural policy

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and critical and creative pedagogies. He was a Chief Investigator of the

ARC Linkage Project, Digitising the Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive.
Ross Rudesch Harley is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Art &
Design at UNSW. He is a former Dean of UNSW’s Art & Design School,
editor of the quarterly publication Art/Text, and the editor of several
anthologies. A practising artist, he is Chair of the Sydney Culture Network
and Chair of Create New South Wales Multiarts Board. He was a Chief
Investigator of the ARC Linkage Project, Digitising the Kaldor Public Art
Projects Archive.
Alessandro Ludovico is a researcher, artist and chief editor of Neural
magazine since 1993. He is Associate Professor at the Winchester School
of Art, University of Southampton. He has published and edited several
books, and has lectured worldwide. He also served as an advisor for the
Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. He is one of the authors of the award-­
winning Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks (Google Will Eat Itself,
Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook).
Julia Mant is a professional archivist and former President of the Australian
Society of Archivists. She has a background in educational archives and has
worked most recently as Manager, Information Governance and Archives at
the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Australia. She has written
a number of articles on archival projects and edited Mali’ Buku-Ruŋanmaram:
Images from Milingimbi 1927–1962, arranged and described by Joseph
Gumbula. This was recipient of the 2012 ASA Mander Jones Award for best
publication that uses, features or interprets Australian archives.
John Potts is Professor of Media at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is
the author of the books The New Time and Space, A History of Charisma,
Ideas in Time, Radio in Australia, and Culture and Technology (with
Andrew Murphie). He is also the editor of four books, including The
Future of Writing and After the Event: New Perspectives on Art History.
He was the Lead Chief Investigator of the ARC Linkage Project,
Digitising the Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive.
Katrina Sedgwick is the Director & CEO of the Australian Centre for the
Moving Image (ACMI). Previously she was the Head of Arts for ABC TV,
and the founding director of the Adelaide Film Festival with its ground-
breaking Investment Fund. She is Deputy Chair of the Creative Industries
Advisory Group and on the University of Melbourne’s Grimwade Centre
for Cultural Materials Conservation Advisory Committee.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Homepage of Kaldor Public Art Projects digital archive, detail 16
Fig. 2.2 Text on homepage of Kaldor Public Art Projects digital
archive, detail 17
Fig. 2.3 Project 07 page detail, Kaldor Public Art Projects
digital archive 18
Fig. 2.4 Letter from John Kaldor to Richard Long, 1976, archive
identification19
Fig. 4.1 Nam June Paik, Diagrams and Specifications for TV Cello,
detailed handwritten specifications and annotated
diagrams, 1976 52
Fig. 4.2 Correspondence, Christo and Jeanne-Claude to John Kaldor,
Method of Wrapping, 16 Jun 1969 55
Fig. 4.3 Volunteer call-out from UNSW’s Grandalf and John Kaldor
to students, Operation Glad Wrap, 1969 57
Fig. 4.4 Typed Project Synopsis for Packed Coast, Little Bay,
23 Oct 1969 58
Fig. 4.5 Marina Abramović, 13 Rooms, Artist Mind Maps for Education
and Programming, 2013 62
Fig. 4.6 Marina Abramović, Site, Signage & Construction, 2 Jul 2015 64
Fig. 9.1 The Neural Archive 133
Fig. 9.2 Temporary Library for Transmediale 138
Fig. 10.1 ACMI Mediatheque (opened 2009 – 2017) (credit: ACMI) 149
Fig. 10.2 Memory Garden (opened 2021) (credit: Shannon McGrath) 153
Fig. 10.3 Blackmagic Design Media Preservation Lab (opened 2021)
(credit: Shannon McGrath) 155

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

John Potts

The digital archive has radically transformed the storing, ordering and
distribution of knowledge in contemporary societies. Before the advent of
digital archives as searchable online databases, archival information was
typically removed from public view, stored in secured premises crammed
with archive boxes full of documents. Archives were largely inaccessible
and invisible to the general public. But the status of the archive shifts enor-
mously when it becomes a digital entity. Previously restricted and available
only to specialist researchers, the archive becomes a public resource avail-
able to all once it is digitised and placed online. Another benefit of the
digital archive is that it makes historical material available for creative re-­
use by contemporary artists and writers, thereby enabling a ‘living archive’
that carries creative practice from the past into the future.
This book brings together a range of writers—specialising in media and
cultural studies, contemporary art and art history, digital and networked
culture, library and museum studies—to explore the cultural impact of
digital archives. The role and significance of digital archives is discussed
from many different perspectives, while reference is made to the newly

J. Potts (*)
Department of Media, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Potts (ed.), Use and Reuse of the Digital Archive,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79523-8_1
2 J. POTTS

created Kaldor Public Art Projects Digital Archive as a case study. This
extraordinarily rich archive, documenting the creation of 36 public art
works by the world’s leading artists over 51 years, is now widely available
to researchers and to the public as an online resource. The entire Kaldor
archive was digitised and converted into an online digital archive in 2019,
by a research team led by John Potts, as an Australian Research Council
Linkage Grant project. This digital archive is available at: http://archive.
kaldorartprojects.org.au.
Use & Re-Use of the Digital Archive examines the digital archive in a
unique manner, by combining theoretical and practical approaches to the
contemporary digital archive. Several of the essays included in the book
describe the process of constructing a digital archive as a specific case
study—in digitising a physical archive and designing a searchable digital
database as the core of the digital archive. Other chapters explore the cul-
tural significance of digital archives in more general theoretical terms.
These considerations include: the specific properties of the digital archive;
its similarities and differences to the traditional paper-based archive; the
ethical decisions made in the design of an archive; and the potential for
creative re-use of online archived materials.

Theorising the Archive

Recent research has noted the increasing significance of archives in con-
temporary culture. The archive is distinct from a collection or library, and
is much more than a cupboard storing files in boxes. Rather, as Charles
Merewether wrote in The Archive (2006), an archive ‘constitutes a reposi-
tory or ordered system of documents and records, both verbal and visual,
that is the foundation from which history is written’.1 Archive theory has
developed a considerable literature across a range of disciplines, including
media studies, cultural studies, history, library and museum studies, art
history, literary studies and philosophy.
Theorists of the archive have drawn on Foucault’s investigation of the
conditions of knowledge in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). The
media studies approach known as media archaeology ‘starts with the
archive’, as Jussi Parikka has observed; German media scholars in this tra-
dition—including Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst—have synthesised
Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge with ‘information theory, media his-
tory, and McLuhan’s emphasis on the medium as the message.’2 Following
Foucault, theorists have critically appraised the archive as a form of the
regulation of knowledge within a broader regime of power and discourse.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

As Merewether has remarked, the archive from this theoretical perspective

‘governs what is said or unsaid, recorded or unrecorded’.3
Archival records have become one element in the politics of memory, in
which alternative versions of history jostle with official narratives to con-
struct national or local memory. In the twenty-first century, the internet—
especially social media—has accommodated ‘alternative facts’, including
alternative accounts of national history, following a counter-archival
impulse. Authoritarian states have often suppressed, altered, or destroyed
archives, clearing the way for the proclamation of an alternative version of
the past informing the present.
Richard Ovenden, in his 2020 book Burning the Books: A History of the
Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, emphasises the political significance
of archives. For Ovenden, the preservation of information in the form of
archives is a key component of open societies. Closed societies—dictator-
ships or totalitarian states—have an interest in annihilating, or cancelling,
archived information. The 1996 UNESCO report Lost Memory provided
a list of libraries and archives destroyed in the twentieth century. The
report declares that ‘the loss of archives is as serious as the loss of memory
in a human being.’4 Archives in that sense are the memory of a society;
their destruction alters the identity of that society, as a link to the past is
severed.
As Ovenden remarks, ‘over time society has entrusted the preservation
of knowledge to libraries and archives, but today these institutions are fac-
ing multiple threats.’ He identifies the ways in which archives differ from
libraries: whereas libraries are ‘accumulations of knowledge, built up one
book at a time’, archives directly document the ‘actions and decision-­
making processes’ of institutions, administrations and governments.
Archives, filled with details and material, are for Ovenden ‘at the heart of
history’.5 They comprise the raw materials with which history is written.
But archives have proven fragile forms of memory in the past, due to
the vulnerability of original paper documents. As the historian Jill Lepore
has observed, libraries house books—that is, copies of texts. Archives, by
contrast, ‘store documents: originals.’6 Those original paper documents
cannot be replaced if destroyed. The digital archive—founded on the digi-
tal copying and electronic housing of documents—alters this state of
archival texts, providing a greater measure of security through the act of
electronic copying. However, digital archives have their own form of fra-
gility: digital databases may suffer technical mishap or inadvertent error;
their technical platform may become outmoded—that is, obsolete; they
4 J. POTTS

may be targeted by hackers so that information is manipulated, distorted

or even erased. As Ovenden observes, ‘digital information is surprisingly
vulnerable to both neglect as well as deliberate destruction.’7

Theorising the Digital Archive

In recent years, theoretical investigations have turned to the contempo-
rary status of the digital archive. A number of theorists have re-thought
the archive in the context of networking and the digitisation of informa-
tion, where the database has become a central form of knowledge—as
detailed in Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2002). In The
Archive in Motion (2010), Eivind Rossaak described digitised archives as
‘archives in motion’ due to their dynamic, changing form, in which knowl-
edge is continually added or transformed.8 In Digital Memory and the
Archive (2013) Wolfgang Ernst argued that the internet archive is mod-
elled more like a library than a traditional archive: it is indexed and search-
able, and focuses on the transmission of knowledge as much as its storage.
Ernst examined the cultural politics of the networked archive in recent
archive theory. His analysis weighed the transparency and public availabil-
ity of the digital archive against the protocols informing the structuring of
a digital archive, and the collection of user data that may then be put to
further use.
In What is Media Archaeology? (2012) Jussi Parikka noted the need ‘to
rigorously rethink the concept and practices of the archive in the age of
audiovisual and software media’, but further remarked that this research
was in its early stages.9 Parikka called for more research on digital net-
worked archives, within media theory and digital humanities. In the years
since 2012, significant research on the cultural impact of digital archives—
for museums, libraries and other cultural arenas—has been published. This
recent literature includes Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives on a
Living Archive, edited by David Carlin and Laurene Vaughan (2015);
Abigail De Kosnik’s Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media
Fandom (2016); Currents of Archival Thinking, edited by Heather
MacNeil and Terry Eastwood, (second edition, 2017); Memory in Motion:
Archives, Technology and the Social, edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo
and Eivind Rossaak (2017); The Routledge Companion to Digital
Humanities and Art History, edited by Kathryn Brown (2020); The
Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and Provocations by Keir
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Winesmith and Suse Anderson (2020); and Libraries and Archives in the
Digital Age, edited by Susan Mizruchi (2020).
Several of these recent books engage with problems and issues arising
from the construction of digital archives within libraries and museums.
Many of the decisions made during the building of a digital archive con-
cern the process of appraisal, which—as Richard Ovenden explains in
Burning the Books—is a central factor in the design of archives. Appraisal is
the ‘system of disposal and retention’ of archival materials: what to include
and what to omit from the archive.10 This issue is particularly pertinent for
digital archives, due to the sheer volume of materials in electronic form,
such as emails—which may or may not be worthy of inclusion. In an era
of ‘digital abundance’ of online information—Ovenden calls it the ‘digital
deluge’—archivists are faced with the problem of sorting information at
enormous scale: archivists are ‘deeply concerned with how to search effec-
tively across the mass of available knowledge.’11 For Susan Mizruchi, in
Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age (2020), the role of digital archives
and libraries is ‘one of the most pressing concerns’ for citizens and scholars
worldwide. The processes of selection and appraisal of digital information
are of paramount importance: ‘what to keep and how to keep it touch the
very core of who we are as individuals, cultures, nations, and humankind.’12
Another issue specific to digital archives is that their contents are in
essence one thing: data. As Ina Blom points out in Memory in Motion
(2017), documents and contents of an archive, once digitised, ‘are no
longer separated from the archival infrastructure’; the digital archive,
based on networked data circulation, dissolves all content ‘into the coding
and protocol layer, into electronic circuits or data flow.’13 When an archive
contains art works and audio-visual works, the issue of digital preservation
becomes paramount.
In their book Re-Collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory
(2014), Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito engage with problems of social
memory, prompted by the increasing dependence on digital and net-
worked technologies for the transmission and storage of information. This
information includes not just data but also digital and audio-visual art-
works. The rapid shifts in technical platforms and network infrastructure
create the possibility that data, cultural expression and artworks may
become inaccessible, as the technological systems in which they are stored
become obsolete. Rinehart and Ippolito propose a ‘variable media’
approach to the conservation—and preservation—of information and cre-
ative works produced in the digital networked age.
6 J. POTTS

Use & Re-Use of the Digital Archive builds on the recent literature on
digital archives, while providing an original contribution to research.
While much of the existing literature offers valuable theoretical insights
into the cultural role of digital archives, the advantage of the current book
is its use of a specific digital archive as a case study. This practical aspect of
the research provides the framework to explore the affordances and prop-
erties of the digital archive in general.
Several chapters in this book refer to the digitised Kaldor Public Art
Projects archive, launched in 2019. The design, creation and impact of
this digitised archive is thoroughly explored in Use & Re-Use of the Digital
Archive. Insights into the construction process are offered, including
debates within the production design team as the database was being built.
Some of these debates—and disagreements—focused on the tension
between transparency in publishing and the need for privacy. The practical
decision-making during the construction of a digital archive—including
considerations of ethics, privacy, redaction, censorship, editing, and copy-
right—will be of interest for cultural institutions including museums,
libraries, art galleries, or research institutes which may be contemplating
the digitisation of their archives.

Structure of This Book

The book is divided into two parts. Part I—Making a Digital Archive—
investigates the properties of the digital archive through reference to the
building of the Kaldor Public Art Projects digital archive. Essays in Part
II—The Digital Archive and its Effects—explore the cultural impact of
digital archives in general. Emphasis is placed on the cultural role played
by the digital archive, both in the new accessibility to information made
possible by online archives, and in the stimulus to creative re-use of infor-
mation and archived material promoted by digital archives. The book ends
with a concluding chapter, in which the use and re-use of digital archive
material is re-considered, to offer a perspective on the cultural impact of
digital archives in general.
The opening chapter of Part I—‘Making the Temporary Permanent:
the Digital Archive’ by John Potts—explores the possibilities of the digital
archive, using as a case study the project to digitise the vast Kaldor Public
Art Projects (KPAP) archive. This case study entails consideration of the
intentions of the KPAP organisation in commissioning a digital archive: to
make the extraordinary store of archived materials easily available to the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

public; and to create a living archive, in which historical materials may be

made available for referencing and creative re-use by contemporary artists,
writers and researchers. Decisions on editing, redaction, censorship, pri-
vacy and copyright of archive materials were made during the construction
of the digital archive: these decisions and deliberations are discussed.
The third chapter, ‘Digitisation & Imagination: Curating the Kaldor
Public Art Projects Archive’ by Alice Desmond, describes the digitisation
of the Kaldor Public Art Projects archive, and the creative ways that the
collection was activated and re-imagined by artists and others in celebra-
tion of the organisation’s 50th anniversary in 2019. The technicalities of
creating a digital archive are described in detail. These include the aims,
techniques, difficulties and solutions involved in scanning, digitising,
organising and constructing an online resource based on a massive physi-
cal archive.
Chapter 4, ‘Public Art and Education in the Age of Digital Archives’ by
Ross Harley, charts the course of Kaldor Public Art Projects’ engagement
with novel forms of public engagement, with a focus on the establishment
of the KPAP online archive. The project gave digital form to the many
ways education and public engagement have coincided, particularly
since 2010.
The final chapter in Part I is ‘The (After) Life of the Archive’ by Scott
East. This chapter explores the uses of an archive through an analysis of
projects which used digital assets from the Kaldor Public Art Project
(KPAP) digital archive. These projects were: the exhibition Making Art
Public: 50 years of Kaldor Public Art Projects created by Michael Landy as
KPAP’s 35th project; the associated book project which acted as the cata-
logue for the show edited by Genevieve O’Callaghan and Mark Gowing;
and the documentary film It All Started with a Stale Sandwich (2019),
directed by Samantha Lang. All three projects made extensive use of digi-
tised archival material, but are framed in unique ways in relation to
their medium.
Part II is entitled ‘The Digital Archive and its Effects’, and considers
the digital archive in general, from a range of theoretical perspectives.
Chapter 6, ‘The Romance of Form’ by Julia Mant, is concerned with the
properties of both the physical archive and the digital archive. One of the
attractions of the archive expressed by many lovers of the past is the physi-
cal form of the record: the leather-bound volume, copperplate handwrit-
ing, silvered photographs—the colour, smell and sight of past generations.
The challenge for the digital archive has been whether it ought or should
8 J. POTTS

replicate this romance of the physical form. Debates about the merits of
encapsulation or retaining a record’s ‘look and feel’, for instance, domi-
nated early discussions about digital preservation. But does the attraction
of the digital archive lie in other conceptualisations? While the aim of
born-digital records preservation is to ensure access to information over
time, emotional connections are harder to provide. Rather—as Mant dem-
onstrates—it is in the contextual relationships, the spider-web of search
and discovery, where the digital archive can be most powerful.
Chapter 7 is ‘Hauntology: the Archive as Past and Future’ by Nicole
Anderson. This chapter considers the ways in which the archive functions
in general; it proposes that archives are about forthcoming memories as
well as the memory of the past. This chapter draws on Jacques Derrida’s
assertion in Archive Fever that the archive in the modern age has trans-
formed the entire public and private space of humanity. Derrida’s theoreti-
cal approach to the archive was to question the dichotomy between the
public and private, in order to understand the human impulse to preserve.
This preservation is enacted through technology as well as tradition.
Chapter 8, ‘Archival Ethics After Benjamin’ by Sean Cubitt, analyses
the sites of power implicit in archival ethics. Cubitt argues that digital
archives themselves are already historical. Economically, following Marx’s
description of technologies as dead labour, technical media embody the
knowledge and skills of our ancestors. Cubitt proposes that we are now in
a position to regard technologies as the congealed form of primordial nat-
ural materials and processes, as well as human skills and knowledge.
Archives are then technical-ancestral, and ecological, like any capitalist
industry. They are also discursive domains, and therefore contested opera-
tions of power, a contest which includes not only social conflict but con-
flict with technologies—our ancestors—and the ecologies in which they
subsist. Following Walter Benjamin’s redemptive theology, Cubitt argues
that an archive cannot simply store the old. It must also address and
redress the labour and materials, the land laid waste, the animals slaugh-
tered, energy expended and the downtrodden whose sufferings paid for
the materials it holds.
Chapter 9 is ‘Temporary Library, Archiving Digital Culture’ by
Alessandro Ludovico. The Temporary Library project creates curated
small libraries focused on new media art and culture, whose publications
are donated and made publicly available during an event such as a festival
or conference. The library is then donated to an institutional library, cata-
logued as a ‘special collection’, and then possibly borrowed again for a
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

different event. It is hosted in one place, but keeps its temporary nature.
This chapter addresses digital culture and its archiving. It articulates how
paper has proven to be a medium to document—and so archive—espe-
cially obsolete digital artefacts. The chapter discusses the differences
between paper and digital archives, and the possibility of the two media
enjoying a symbiosis. The Temporary Library archives culture with a
mutual acknowledgement and use of traditional and digital media.
The final chapter in Part II is ‘Preservation/Access/Reuse—Audio-­
visual Collections in the Digital Age’ by Katrina Sedgwick. This chapter
explores the possibility for creative re-use of digitised archive materials.
She argues that removing barriers to access the treasures held in our audio-­
visual archives is an urgent task. Enabling practitioners and the public to
mine these collections and remake them anew, so that they are living and
contributing to creativity today, seems magical but entirely possible.
Sedgwick asserts that in our age it is something we need to tackle with
excitement and focus.
The concluding chapter—‘Conclusions: Use & Re-Use’ by John
Potts—draws together the threads of the book, while offering reflections
on the ways in which the Kaldor Public Art Projects digital archive has
already been used and re-used in various ways. These conclusions also
provide an overview of the research and analysis offered by the various
contributors to the book. The transformative nature of the digital archive,
its properties and potentials—including the potential for creative re-use of
archive materials—are reviewed.

Notes
1. Charles Merewether, The Archive, p. 10.
2. Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?, p. 113; Erkki Huhtamo and
Jussi Parikka, Media Archaeology, p. 8.
3. Merewether, The Archive, p. 11.
4. UNESCO Report Lost Memory cited by Jill Lepore, “The Trump
Papers”, p. 22.
5. Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books, p. 4, p. 8.
6. Lepore, “The Trump Papers”, p. 22.
7. Ovenden, Burning the Books, p. 11.
8. Eivind Rossaak, The Archive in Motion, p. 12.
9. Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?, p. 113.
10. Ovenden, Burning the Books, p. 9.
11. Ovenden, Burning the Books, p. 10.
10 J. POTTS

12. Susan L. Mizruchi, ‘Introduction’ in Libraries and Archives in the Digital

Age, p. 2.
13. Ina Bloom, ‘Introduction’ in Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and
the Social, p. 12.

References
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Archives, Technology and the Social, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2017.
Brown, Kathryn (ed) The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art
History, London: Routledge, 2020.
Carlin, David and Vaughan, Laurene (eds) Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives
on a Living Archive, London: Routledge, 2015.
De Kosnik, Abigail, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996.
Ernst, Wolfgang, Digital Memory and the Archive, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013.
Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Huhtamo, Erkki and Parikka Jussi (eds) Media Archaeology: Approaches,
Applications, and Implications, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Lepore, Jill, “The Trump Papers”, The New Yorker, November 23, 2020,
pp. 20–26.
MacNeil, Heather and Eastwood, Terry (eds) Currents of Archival Thinking, sec-
ond edition, Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2017.
Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Merewether, Charles (ed) The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Mizruchi, Susan L. (ed) Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Ovenden, Richard, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of
Knowledge, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.
Parikka, Jussi, What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Rinehart, Richard and Ippolito, Jon, Re-Collection: Art, New Media and Social
Memory, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014.
Rossaak, Eivind (ed) The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in
Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices, Oslo: Novus Press, 2010.
Winesmith, Keir and Anderson, Suse, The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations
and Provocations, London: Routledge, 2020.
 PART I

Making a Digital Archive

 CHAPTER 2

Making the Temporary Permanent:

The Digital Archive

John Potts

The digitisation of the Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP) archive has
made this extensive archive widely available to researchers and to the pub-
lic as an online resource. The contents of the archive are now searchable
on a dedicated website, creating a valuable store of public knowledge on
contemporary art and cultural history. The digitised archive constitutes a
trove of materials for researchers in art history, contemporary art and
social history, for secondary and tertiary education, and for members of
the general public. As a digital archive, housed in a website at http://
archive.kaldorartprojects.org.au, this archive is searchable at any time,
from any location around the world; it is an internationally available online
resource.
This chapter details the process by which a vast physical archive, stored
in restricted premises in a Sydney office, was transformed into a searchable
online data base: a digital archive. The difficulties, problems, decisions and
logistical concerns involved in the construction of this digital archive are

J. Potts (*)
Department of Media, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Potts (ed.), Use and Reuse of the Digital Archive,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79523-8_2
14 J. POTTS

elaborated in this chapter. In particular, two pressing ethical-legal issues

associated with online culture—privacy and copyright—are addressed in
the context of constructing a digital archive.

Background to the Archive

Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP) has staged public art projects in
Australia since 1969. In that year, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped
Coast at Sydney’s Little Bay was the first large-scale public art project pre-
sented anywhere in the world, and the first time an international contem-
porary artist had created a major new work in Australia. Over a period of
51 years, KPAP staged 36 temporary site-specific projects around
Australia—all free to the public—by international and Australian artists,
supported by extensive public and educational programs for each project.
In 2016 barrangal dyara (skin and bones), staged at Sydney’s Royal
Botanic Garden by Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones, transcended disci-
plines to become a major cultural festival, incorporating an extensive pub-
lic program of lectures, talks and an Indigenous dance event.
Kaldor Public Art Projects was the first organisation of its type in the
world. Others followed, including Public Art Fund, founded in the US in
1977; Artangel in the UK in 1985; and Prada in Italy in 1993. Yet Kaldor
Public Art Projects was, in the words of Anthony Bond, former curator of
contemporary art at the Art Gallery of NSW, ‘way ahead of the field’.1 The
immense success of the first KPAP project in 1969, its impact in the inter-
national art world, and the excitement it generated in the Australian pub-
lic, encouraged founding director John Kaldor to embark on a series of
public art projects in Australia that spanned five decades. KPAP staged
temporary public art projects by many leading international artists, includ-
ing Marina Abramović, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Sol LeWitt, Richard
Long, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Gilbert and George, Vanessa Beecroft,
Santiago Sierra, Ugo Rondinone, Tino Sehgal, Tatzuo Nishi, Gregor
Schneider, Michael Landy and Thomas Demand.
The KPAP projects have all been site-specific public art projects; they
have also all been temporary works. One benefit of the digitisation of the
Kaldor archive is that it creates a permanent, easily accessible, public record
of temporary projects that otherwise have left no physical trace in the
landscape. The digital archive in this sense cements the Kaldor Public Art
cultural legacy, making the temporary permanent as an online presence.
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 15

Strong public interest in the KPAP projects has been measured in visi-
tor figures. Project 24, an installation in Sydney’s centrally located Martin
Place by Michael Landy in 2011, attracted 170,000 visitors to view
Landy’s hand-drawn map of the Sydney CBD marking 200 ‘acts of kind-
ness’. 13 Rooms (Project 27), a group exhibition of ‘living sculpture’ fea-
turing international and Australian artists, drew over 29,000 visitors to
Sydney’s Walsh Bay in 2013. Marina Abramović: In Residence (KPAP
Project 30) in 2015 attracted 32,000 visitors to Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay.
barrangal dyara by the Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones (Project 32) had
90,000 visitors in 2016. The international visitor numbers to the KPAP
website are also high, indicating a strong international enthusiasm for
Kaldor projects. This high level of international interest in the KPAP proj-
ects was one motivating factor for digitising the Kaldor archive, as the
digital archive makes documentation of every project instantly accessible
for an international audience.

The Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive

Over a period exceeding 50 years, Kaldor Public Art Projects accumulated
an extensive archive of materials associated with the 36 staged public art
projects. This archive includes plans, models, correspondence between
leading international artists and director John Kaldor, negotiations with
public authorities over sites, documentation of logistics and production
processes, planning of public and educational programs, photographic
documentation of the projects, as well as reviews, criticism, and other cor-
respondence. Documents within the archive include extensive correspon-
dence with artists, including conceptualising and planning of projects, and
negotiations with public organisations to obtain permission to stage a
temporary art work in public space. This vast archive, containing docu-
mentation of the process of proposing and realising of large-scale public
art projects, was not digitised and therefore unavailable to the public—
until 2019.
The Kaldor Public Art Projects archive is an extensive collection of
documents and other material. The scale of the physical archive can be
quantified in the following terms: over 18,000 A4 pages, collected in 77
archive boxes. In addition to these paper documents, the archive contains
a range of miscellany, including: posters, maps, plans at various stages of
project development, charts, art works, T-shirts, scarves and other items.
These miscellaneous objects provided a particular challenge in the
16 J. POTTS

digitising process, requiring either specialist scanning or photography. In

addition to the paper and other material documents, the archive included
an immaterial component prior to the digitisation process in 2019. This
electronic component of the archive included digital photographs docu-
menting project art works, as well as a cache of emails detailing the pro-
posal and realisation of KPAP projects, stored since the 1990s.
Requests were previously made by researchers to access the physical
archive, but this access was limited due to the storage of the archive within
KPAP office space in Rozelle, Sydney. The PhD thesis The Rise of the
Private Art Foundation: John Kaldor Art Projects 1969–2012 by Rebecca
Coates was published at the University of Melbourne in 2013, based on
research conducted in the KPAP archive. Coates’ published journal article,
‘John Kaldor’s Early Art Projects and the NGV’, drew on KPAP archive
material, and is an example of the research outputs that can be generated
now that researchers possess easy access to the KPAP digital archive
(Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1 Homepage of

Kaldor Public Art
Projects digital
archive, detail
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 17

Analogue to Digital
The transformation of the KPAP archive into a public repository provides
a new educational resource, making the archive materials available to all
researchers (Fig. 2.2).
Here is an example of the changed accessibility brought by the digital
archive. I have a PhD student writing a thesis on walking art in Australia;
she has a particular interest in researching the influential walking art con-
ducted in Australia by the British artist Richard Long, in 1977. As Kaldor
Public Art Project 7, Long undertook the Straight Hundred Mile Walk in
western NSW in 1977; in addition, Long created major museum exhibi-
tions in Sydney and Melbourne, involving photographs and other docu-
mentation of his walks in Australia. My student expected that the Kaldor
archive materials for Project 7 would include correspondence and plan-
ning between the artist and John Kaldor; this material may contain valu-
able insights into the conceptualisation of the walking art works.
Before the digitisation of the Kaldor archive in 2019, my student would
have needed to undertake a lengthy process to access the archive materials
in physical or analogue form. She would first need to write to KPAP,
explaining her research interest and why she was requesting access to the
archive. If her request were approved, she would then need to make time
to travel to Rozelle in inner-western Sydney, where the archive was housed.
She would be allocated a limited amount of time to sort through archive
boxes in search of relevant documents. She would need to make notes, or
perhaps request photocopies be made of documents essential for her
research. The difficulty of accessing the physical archive would be intensi-
fied in the case of interstate researchers—and intensified again for

Fig. 2.2 Text on homepage of Kaldor Public Art Projects digital archive, detail
18 J. POTTS

Fig. 2.3 Project 07 page detail, Kaldor Public Art Projects digital archive

international scholars. Indeed, at times—such as the shut-down of inter-

national travel in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic—access
to the physical archive would be impossible for international researchers.
However, these difficulties and obstacles disappear with the realisation
of the digital Kaldor Public Art Projects archive. Now, my student need
only log on to http://archive.kaldorartprojects.org.au, then click
PROJECTS, followed by Project 7 (Fig. 2.3).
She can then quickly locate all relevant documents, scanned into the digi-
tal archive. This includes correspondence between Richard Long and John
Kaldor dating back to March 1976, in which details of the proposed walking
art project are discussed in the project’s planning stages. As every docu-
ment, image, plan and chart included in the physical archive is electronically
copied and included in the digital archive, my student has all the resources
of the Kaldor archive available to her as an online resource. Accessing this
digitised information is a process completed in seconds (Fig. 2.4).
The benefits of the digital archive are even more pronounced for inter-
national scholars, researchers or art lovers. Previously, a research visit to
the analogue archive would entail great expense, significant travel time (at
least one day from Europe or North America), considerable difficulty, and
substantial jet-lag. Now, the interested arts researcher can instead access
the archive contents of Richard Long’s Project 7—or any other KPAP
project—in a matter of seconds. This immediate access is available from
anywhere in the world equipped with internet connection.
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 19

Fig. 2.4 Letter from John Kaldor to Richard Long, 1976, archive identification

Digitising the Archive

The enormous size of the physical archive, containing documents and
other materials accumulated over 51 years, meant that the process of cre-
ating a digital version of this archive would be difficult, laborious and
time-consuming. An early decision of the digitisation project team was to
hire web development company Inzen for the crucial work of building the
platform and infrastructure for the digital archive database, as well as
designing the interface and searchability protocols.
The director of Inzen, Peter Heery, worked closely with Alice Desmond,
the archive collection curator at Kaldor Public Art Projects, as well as
other staff at KPAP, including director John Kaldor. Decisions were made
on the platform to serve as the base of the searchable database, as well as
the identification and cataloguing technique necessarily applied to each
digitised item. Alice Desmond describes in detail this process—by which
each digitised item enters the database in a way that will allow it to be
searched for, and found, in the digital archive—in Chap. 3.
The next decision made was hiring the organisation to undertake the
actual scanning process, by which paper documents are converted into
digital files to be loaded into the database. We felt the need for a company
with a sophisticated and extensive scanning facility, given the requirement
of digitising not only large volumes of material, but also miscellany of
20 J. POTTS

unusual shape and size such as posters, maps, postcards, telegrams and
charts. We chose for this purpose the company Government Records
Repository (GRR), which is based within NSW State Records. GRR dem-
onstrated their remarkable range of advanced scanning technology, which
indicated that this organisation could meet the demands of the digitising
process required for this project.
During the lengthy scanning procedure, as digital files were identified,
catalogued and loaded progressively into the database, many other deci-
sions were made by the digitisation project team. Some of these decisions
related to the design of the interface, and the structure of the digital
archive website. Other decisions were more difficult, prompting debate—
even disagreement—within the project team as the building of the data-
base proceeded. The contentious decision-making centred on the two
ethical-legal issues that have haunted internet culture since its inception
around 1994, when the World Wide Web was opened to commercial traf-
fic. These issues—privacy and copyright—have become more central to
network culture since 2004, prompted by the increase in user-generated
content in the wake of Web 2.0, along with the advent of social media.

The Wide and Narrow World of Privacy

The first of these concerns is privacy, which is both an ethical and legal
issue. Privacy is legally protected as a right of individuals in various statutes
in most legal jurisdictions. Ethical decisions must be made by media out-
lets and publishers concerning the right of individuals to preserve personal
information—including data—from public scrutiny. This ethical issue has
become paramount since the mid-1990s, as culture has become increas-
ingly conducted online. Online publishing—information transmitted via
the internet—is instantaneous and global; and the digital archive is a form
of online publishing.
Privacy regulation varies throughout the legal jurisdictions of the world,
but a common reference is to the ‘right to be left alone’ definition, first
articulated by US Justice Louis Brandeis in the 1890s. The right to be left
alone encompasses physical or bodily privacy, relating to the space around
one’s physical self. In the age of mass communication, this physical space
was augmented by the space of communication, including images and other
representations of the self. The American attorney and privacy specialist
Robert Ellis Smith has defined privacy as ‘the attempt to control the time
and manner of disclosures of personal information about ourselves.’2
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 21

In the age of the internet, a virtual dimension has been added to the
conception of privacy: the right to control one’s personal information,
including the ways in which governments and organisations handle such
data. Data mining and data harvesting—by private corporations and gov-
ernment agencies—became a politically urgent concern in the twenty-first
century, particularly following revelations in 2013 and 2016. The docu-
ments released by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealing the National
Security Agency’s extensive surveillance of information derived from
search engines, social media, phone messages and smartphone apps,
alarmed many observers, who had not previously suspected the extent of
this data surveillance. Even more alarming was the disclosure in 2016 that
the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica had used information
derived from Facebook users against those users, in an attempt to influ-
ence their voting intention in the US Presidential election.
These revelations prompted further declarations of the dictum fre-
quently proclaimed in the internet age: that privacy is dead. A vice-­
president at the US information security firm Zscaler decreed in 2014 that
‘privacy is dead in the digital world that we live in.’ The likelihood that any
online information could be easily accessed—by government agency or
powerful corporation—produced the warning: ‘unless you are comfort-
able putting that statement on a billboard in Times Square and having
everyone see it, I would not share that information digitally.’3
The information aspect of privacy has also generated a new dimension
to privacy law, at least in Europe: the right to be forgotten. This plank of
European privacy legislation originates from a 2014 ruling of the European
Court of Justice that a citizen’s fundamental rights could be harmed by
information on the internet. In instances where there is no public interest
in publishing this information online, the Court held that it is within a
citizen’s rights to have adverse material concerning that citizen removed
from the internet. The archival function of the Internet—links to earlier
stories or information—can be redacted according to the wishes of
aggrieved individuals in Europe. In 2014, following passage of this legisla-
tion, Google reportedly received 41,000 requests in four days for search
results to be removed; it claimed to have removed results ‘under data-­
protection law in Europe.’4
The European right to be forgotten legislation highlights differences
between Europe and the Anglosphere regarding privacy: the decision was
widely criticised in Britain and the US on the grounds that it ‘could under-
mine press freedoms and freedom of speech.’5 Indeed, the British
22 J. POTTS

journalist Paul McMullen told the Leveson Inquiry into media practices in
2011 that he believed no one should have privacy. ‘Privacy is the space bad
people need to do bad things in,’ he declared. For this journalist, privacy
is a space used only by malevolent people: ‘nobody else needs it.’6
This view—an extreme version of the distaste for privacy—takes its
place in a long line of recent public comments either dismissive of privacy
as a concept, or disdainful of it. The captains of post-industry—that is, of
digital and online technologies—have led the charge in this regard. In
1999, Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, declared: ‘You
have zero privacy; get over it.’ In 2009, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO,
advised that: ‘If you have something you don’t want anyone to know,
maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’7 The theme of the
2007 Ars Electronica—an international electronic arts festival—was
‘Goodbye Privacy’. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, journal-
ists and cultural commentators noticed a shift in the status of privacy,
‘from something to be guarded into an anathema to modern living.’ This
altered attitude was particularly evident on social media, where Facebook
had been preaching its mission since 2004: to connect people, to allow
them to share, to create an open world. In the light of this vision, privacy
concerns began to look like hindrances to connectivity. As a result, by
2007 there were invocations to ‘say goodbye to that quaint notion,
privacy.’8
The Silicon Valley ideology in the early twenty-first century was that
online connectivity was a good in itself, which would create better, fairer,
more connected societies. Privacy in this context was increasingly regarded
as an obstacle to enhanced social connectivity. Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg was highly visible in the public denigration of privacy. He
announced in 2010 that privacy was over-rated, to the point of being out-
dated. Privacy is ‘no longer a social norm’, he declared; in its place,
Zuckerberg advocated ‘radical transparency’ through social media. ‘People
have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and
different kinds, but more openly and with more people,’ he stated. ‘That
social norm is just something that has evolved over time.’9
Zuckerberg argued that the rise of social media after 2004 reflected
changing attitudes among ordinary people, adding that this radical change
had happened in just six years since Facebook was launched. The contin-
ued use of social media over those years had fostered a new culture of
openness and connection, according to Zuckerberg, attributes to be val-
ued above privacy and secrecy. On another occasion, he proposed that
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 23

before the advent of the internet, we had suffered ‘privacy through obscu-
rity’. The development of the internet, and the rise of new technology
corporations Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and other social media,
had constituted a ‘democratising’ new form of expression, lifting us out of
obscurity and allowing any individual to publish and share in public.10
Yet Zuckerberg’s stated preference for radical transparency over obscure
privacy has been blocked, or at least checked, on the several occasions
when Facebook has attempted to change its privacy protocols—changes
resisted by Facebook user groups. The revenue of Facebook, as of Google,
derives largely from advertising. In effect, the Facebook users are the audi-
ence sold to advertisers; the information available on users’ ‘likes’, prefer-
ences, habits and desires is invaluable to advertisers—and the greater
access they have to that information, the more valuable it becomes. In this
regard, ‘Facebook still sees privacy as an encumbrance that could compro-
mise potential profits,’ according to Simon Davies, director of Privacy
International in the UK.11 The openness of social media users entails an
openness of their personal information to advertisers, who can then target
users individually as well as collectively. As was observed of Google in
2011, the many millions of Android mobile phone users have their every
movement tracked by Google, which makes more than 95% of its revenue
from advertising: all this stored information on users’ movements and life-
styles is the precious data that Google offers advertisers.
Zuckerberg’s contention that attitudes to privacy have shifted since
2004 and the advent of social media is supported by other observers. The
journalist Emily Nussbaum wrote in 2007, in a study of the internet ‘and
the end of privacy’, that privacy was the grounds of a new generation gap.
The parents’ generation is appalled by their teenagers’ disregard for pri-
vacy; those teenagers are seen as having ‘no sense of privacy’ and a danger-
ous commitment to posting all aspects of their personal lives, including
erotic photos, online.12 Sherry Turkle’s detailed study in 2011 of social
media, in her book Alone Together, concluded that young social media
users did not understand the rules of privacy. They had no conception of
privacy protocols on social media sites; they were unsure if surveillance
was legal; they didn’t know if they were entitled to any protections. As a
result of this general confusion, many users had a resigned acceptance to
the likelihood of surveillance and other intrusions on their privacy.13
Privacy has become a troubled space in the twenty-first century; it is no
longer universally held as an inviolable social right. Privacy was once
upheld—in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth—as a
24 J. POTTS

core value of citizenship, of fair and just civil societies. But the space, and
importance, accorded privacy has shrunk noticeably in the age of the
internet. In an online culture, privacy is at once a wide and narrow world:
wide because online publishing reaches instantaneously around the world,
in a realisation of Marshall McLuhan’s prophesied ‘global village’; narrow,
because privacy still pertains to the individual, and the ability of that indi-
vidual to control information and data relating to the self.
One of the founding principles of internet culture in the 1990s was that
‘information wants to be free’, that connectivity was an unquestioned
social good. However, this commitment to ‘radical transparency’ has met
stern resistance from advocates for the privacy of individuals, including
individuals’ right to control personal information. The clash of these two
principles is played out in the construction of a digital archive. Should cor-
respondence included in the archive be redacted to protect individuals’
personal information? To what degree is editing or redaction of materials
justified, or required?
One view within the digital archive project team was to publish every-
thing—every document, every item of correspondence, every image—
contained in the physical archive. The principle of online publishing—in
the form of a searchable digital archive—according to this view is that
every archive item should be made public—that is, visible to all members
of the international community. The principle involved is—if not quite
radical transparency—then freedom of information, a commitment to the
open publication of information.
However, this viewpoint was countered by a principle of redaction in
online publication, so that the personal information of private individuals
is respected and remains protected. This view prevailed in the debate
staged within the project team. It was decided that personal details found
in digitised archive documents—such as phone numbers, addresses, email
addresses—would be redacted for use on the website, to protect individu-
als’ privacy. Some items including sensitive comments or details—such as
artist fees, commercial considerations, personal conversations, unsavory
remarks—were removed from the archive altogether. In other instances,
such items were published online with sensitive personal information
redacted in the text. The project team maintained the commitment to
publish online as much of the archive as possible; in some instances this
was done by redacting specific sections of text and leaving the item online.
For the first 11 Kaldor Projects, redactions in the digitised paper archive
documents were mainly individuals’ addresses. More redactions were
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 25

implemented in the archive for all projects from Project 12 onwards

(termed the ‘post-2000’ projects). From this date, emails were increas-
ingly used in correspondence; the KPAP staff were engaged to redact per-
sonal information from these electronic documents. This lengthy,
exhaustive process meant that editorial work on the contents of the digital
archive continued throughout 2020, completed in 2021. The launch of
the digital archive in November 2019 was in effect an initial public launch
of the project; the redaction process on Projects 12–36 took many more
months of intensive work after that 2019 launch date.
The prevalence of email correspondence in the archive contents for the
later projects presented another editorial problem for the digital archive
project team: the problem of appraisal—or what to include, and what to
leave out, of the archive. This problem increases in difficulty in the era of
‘digital glut’, as termed by Richard Ovenden. The masses of email corre-
spondence accumulating around the later KPAP projects posed questions
of selection and omission, as not every email is worthy of inclusion in the
digital archive. In 2020 and 2021, this selection process was overseen by
Eliza Ormsby, archive co-ordinator at Kaldor Public Art Projects. The
principle followed by Ormsby and other KPAP staff members, in consulta-
tion with the artists, was to include items that best represented the Project.
In this way, the digital over-abundance could be subdued, and the con-
tents of the digital archive restricted to a display of relevant documents—
including emails.

Post-Copyright, Post-Author?
Copyright—and its infringement—has been the most contentious legal
issue attending the rise of internet-based culture, since the illegal down-
loading of copyrighted works became a highly publicised practice in the
late 1990s. The music industry was the hardest hit sector of the cultural
industries as a result of the free sharing of MP3 music files on peer-to-peer
file-swapping networks such as Napster. The major record companies’
recourse to the law in 2000, in prosecuting Napster for breach of copy-
right, did nothing to impede the millions of illegal downloads—and, later,
the illegal streaming of copyrighted audio-visual works such as TV pro-
grams and films.
The persistent infringement of copyright in the illegal transmission and
reception of digitised works has become a much-discussed, and virulently
debated, aspect of network culture. The sheer ease of transmitting data
26 J. POTTS

across the internet, and the difficulty in preventing copyright infringe-

ment, are major factors. Lawrence Lessig observed these factors in 1999,
in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

For the holder of the copyright, cyberspace appears to be the worst of both
worlds—a place where the ability to copy could not be better, and where the
protection of law could not be worse.14

The recognition of this situation has generated two responses: one of

panic as copyright holders, fearful of loss of income for authors and cre-
ators, have desperately attempted to protect authorial rights through
deployment of the law; and another of celebration—at the advent of a free
culture, a digital commons or new public domain, unrestricted by the
oppressive regulation of copyright.
Copyright can be regarded as a cornerstone of the modern author (in
all forms: writing, visual art, film, music, design, choreography). The first
copyright law was legislated in Britain in 1710, in the Statute of Anne, and
was a response to a convergence of technological, economic, legal and
ideological developments. The widespread use of the printing press, in the
production and circulation at high volume of books, pamphlets, maga-
zines, newspapers, journals and other printed forms, was the technological
factor. The sale of books and other printed formats at high volume on the
market—as commodities—was the economic factor. The conception of
the author as individual creator of original works, who possessed the right
to control that intellectual property, was the ideological factor, known as
possessive individualism. And the development in the eighteenth century
of the law of copyright, which came to protect the rights of authors in the
copying, distribution and sale of their works, was the legal factor.
Mark Rose, in his book Authors and Owners, argues that the crucial
characteristic of the modern author is ‘proprietorship’.15 By that he means
that the author or artist is considered in law and economic theory to be
the owner of a specific commodity—the work which they have created.
Copyright endows the author with the exclusive right to exploit their orig-
inal works; it functions in two ways to support the author as a legal-­
economic entity. The first is to provide protection against the unlawful
copying of the author’s work; the second is to provide a source of income—
in the form of royalties for works sold on the market—to authors, artists
and other creators of copyrighted works.
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 27

But both those aspects of copyright law have been greatly weakened in
the internet age, to the extent that many authors—especially song-­
writers—have abandoned careers as authors altogether. This decision is
made in the knowledge that copyright no longer functions as an economic-­
legal support: it is flagrantly violated in illegal downloading and streaming;
and income in the form of royalties is drastically reduced or obliterated
altogether. The contemporary author has in this way lost much of the
proprietorship which Mark Rose considers the essential characteristic of
the modern author. Authors are deprived of the exclusive right to exploit
their works; indeed, in the internet age the concept of ownership has
passed from authors to users.
Internet users have often expressed a conviction of entitlement, that
everything on the web should be freely available—for free—to users. This
freely available information includes news, pop music, films, art works,
literary works and the latest TV series. This is the alternative, widespread
view in response to the break-down of copyright in network culture.
Rather than mourning the demise of author’s royalties (and possibly
authors), this view celebrates free online culture, which allows for the
unrestricted circulation of creative expression, including works built on
other pre-existing works, in the form of remix and creative re-use.
Here is the musician DJ Spooky speaking in 1999, conveying his
embrace of the new digital commons, along with a cavalier attitude to
intellectual property:

Nothing is sacred…Everything is ‘public domain’. Download, remix, edit,

sequence, splice into your memory bank…information moves through us
with the speed of thought, and basically any attempt to control it always
backfires.16

In this framework, the internet is conceptualised as the base of an elec-

tronic public domain; authorship of individual works within this new com-
mons is deemed irrelevant, as the greater good is served by the free use
and creative re-use of works available on the web.
The ‘gift economy’, another term applied to the digital public domain,
entails an opposition to the proprietorship of the modern author.
According to the principles of the gift economy, works in the digital com-
mons should be freely offered to the community as gifts, to be re-worked
by other creators, then re-gifted back into the digital economy. Open
source software is a spectacularly successful instance of the gift economy,
28 J. POTTS

operating on the principle that ‘software should not have owners’. Instead,
the source code is made available to be modified by any user, with the
proviso that modifications to the code are in turn made available to other
users. Individual authors’ rights suffer in the gift economy, as does the
very concept of authors as owners of their works.
Remix culture entails a new concept of authorship and a new concept
of the work. Instead of a fixed work by an individual author, a remix work
has multiple authors as it changes through time, mutating as it moves
through different remixes. Remix and creative re-use of existing works
flourishes in an environment free of prosecution for copyright infringe-
ment. Indeed, copyright has been decried—by internet libertarians—as an
obstacle to creative re-use of found materials; for its detractors in the digi-
tal age, the enforcement of copyright functions as a form of censorship, a
brake on creative expression. A welter of books levelling critiques at the
enforcement of copyright law was published in the early years of the
twenty-first century, including Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big
Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control
Creativity (2004); and Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression:
Overzealous Copyright Bozos and other Enemies of Creativity (2005).
In response to the practices of ‘overzealous copyright bozos’, alterna-
tive means of licensing—and freely distributing—works were conceived.
Copyleft is an umbrella term for schemes supporting the free use and
distribution of software and other cultural forms. Creative Commons was
founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred as an
alternative to the restrictive aspect of copyright, with its focus on protect-
ing the rights of ‘possessive individualism’. Instead, Creative Commons
aims to contribute to the building of a stronger public domain, in the
form of a digital commons. The six types of Creative Commons licenses
range in gradation from most free or permissive for re-use at one end of
the scale, to least permissive at the other end, close to the conventional
copyright.
In addition, Creative Commons has a CC Zero (CC0) option, which
allows for the surrender of copyright altogether, enabling the work to
enter a worldwide public domain—effectively as an authorless work, which
can be adapted by others with no restrictions. The Creative Commons
licenses often used by creators with the intention of encouraging creative
re-use of their works are: CC BY-SA, which permits re-users to remix or
adapt the work, including for commercial use, so long as credit is given to
the creator; and CC BY-NC, which permits only non-commercial remix or
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 29

adaptations of the work. In 2021, Creative Commons estimated that more

than 1.4 billion works on the web were registered with Creative Commons
licenses.
One example of an online work of collaborative authorship using
copyleft licensing is Wikipedia, which launched in 2001. Wikipedia is
widely celebrated as a successful instance of the ‘collective intelligence’
and ‘wisdom of the crowd’ envisaged for the internet at its beginnings in
the early 1990s. Each Wikipedia entry has multiple authors and editors,
and is constantly evolving as a collaborative enterprise—in the manner of
a remix work. As an expression of the gift economy, individual author-
ship—and copyright—have no place in this environment. The earliest
statement on ownership posted by Wikipedia, in 2003, explicitly addressed
the refusal of individual authorship: ‘No one person “owns” the articles in
the Wikipedia. They are the common property of all humankind.”17 In her
2019 book Copyright and Collective Authorship, Daniela Simone finds that
copyright is ‘ill-adapted’ to Wikipedia, because authorship on the site is
collective and a ‘a perpetual work in progress’.18
All Wikipedia pages are in fact copyleft: Wikipedia content is co-licensed
to the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GDFL) and the Creative
Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported licence (CC-BY-SA).
This means that any user may copy or make use of Wikipedia entries, so
long as they acknowledge the original Wikipedia page, and re-license any
modifications under the CC-BY-SA licence.19 Simone characterises
Wikipedia authorship as the ‘donation of creative efforts to an altruistic
community project.’20 The author-function in the domain of Wikipedia
should be considered not as the proprietary author, but as author-as-­
donor, donating to the internet commons for the benefit of the community.
What then of copyright in a digital archive? A digital archive is a form
of publishing, in the way that a traditional paper archive is not. Documents
in a paper archive are restricted and only available on request to individual
readers; by contrast, every document included in a digital archive is made
available to a potentially vast international online readership—that is, pub-
lished. This has implications for documents, such as letters, digitised from
a restricted paper archive and posted online in a digital archive. A letter is
a private document with a possible readership of one (the addressee);
indeed some letters are unsent so have no readership. In his ground-­
breaking 1969 essay ‘What Is an Author?, Michel Foucault observed that
‘the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts to
the exclusion of others.’ Foucault offered examples of writing that do not
30 J. POTTS

have authorship—and therefore copyright—attached: ‘a private letter may

have a signatory, but it does not have an author; a contract can have an
underwriter, but not an author’.21
But this situation changes when private letters are published—that is,
made public—in the form of a book of collected letters, or a digital archive.
In 1741, a court found that the poet Alexander Pope owned copyright in
his letters, which had been published; this court case was one of several in
the eighteenth century which confirmed the legal principle that authors
were now the proprietors of their works—even letters, once they are
published.22
This legal principle means that every document published in the digital
archive—including letters and notes—is protected by copyright as a work
emanating from its author. The policy adopted by the digital archive proj-
ect team was to obtain permission from all artists whose works and docu-
ments feature in the archive. This policy encompassed a respect for the
artist’s rights covering both their art works and the documents, including
letters and other correspondence, demonstrating the process of planning
and creating the work. Artists or their estates signed agreements granting
permission for works and documents to be reproduced in electronic form
in the digital archive. Photographers whose photographs are included in
the archive as documentation of art works were also approached for per-
mission to reproduce their photographs. Any external or third party use of
the archive materials (such as this book) requires additional permission
from the copyright holders—that is, the artists. Creative or adaptive re-use
of digital archival materials therefore requires—in this case—permission
from the artist as rights holder. In this manner, use of the digital archive
proceeds courtesy of permission granted by the artists, as does creative re-­
use of archive contents.

Notes
1. Anthony Bond, ‘An Australian Odyssey: Connecting to International
Contemporary Art’, p. 25.
2. Robert Ellis Smith, Ben Franklin’s Website (2004), p. 8.
3. Jordan Robertson, ‘NSA Spying Shows Perils of Apps’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 31 January 2014, p. 16. I consider the implications for privacy in
the internet age, in more detail, in The New Time and Space, pp. 113–129.
4. Julia Fioretti, ‘Google Starts to Block Search Results after Privacy Ruling’,
Sydney Morning Herald, 28–29 June 2014, p. 44.
 2 MAKING THE TEMPORARY PERMANENT: THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE 31

5. New York Times editorial cited by Jeffrey Toobin, ‘The Solace of Oblivion’,
The New Yorker, 29 September 2014, p. 28.
6. Karen Kissane, ‘At Last, a Reporter’s Insight into Life under the “criminal-­
in-­chief”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 December 2011, p. 13.
7. McNealy and Schmidt quoted by Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, p. 256.
8. Andrew Stevenson, ‘Cyberspace: It’s the New Toilet Wall’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 21–22 July 2007, p. 30.
9. ‘Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder’, The
Guardian, 11 January 2010, at http://www.theguardian.com/technol-
ogy/2010/jan/11/facebook-­privacy.
10. Zuckerberg quoted by Jeff Jarvis, ‘Privacy, Publicness and the Web:
A Manifesto’ at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=
5779789. Accessed 27 March 2019.
11. Davies quoted in Murad Ahmed, ‘Zuckerberg’s Revamp Plans Causing
Friction’, The Australian, 16 November 2011, p. 12.
12. Emily Nussbaum, ‘Kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy’, The Weekend
Australian Magazine, 24–25 March 2007, p. 24.
13. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, p. 254.
14. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, p. 125.
15. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, p. 3.
16. DJ Spooky quoted in Andrew Murphie and John Potts, Culture and
Technology, p. 70.
17. Daniela Simone, Copyright and Collective Authorship, p. 77.
18. Simone, Copyright and Collective Authorship, p. 73.
19. Simone, Copyright and Collective Authorship, p. 91.
20. Simone, Copyright and Collective Authorship, p. 73.
21. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, p. 124.
22. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, p. 64.

References
Bond, Anthony, ‘An Australian Odyssey: Connecting to International
Contemporary Art’ in Forbat, Sophie (ed), 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects,
Sydney: Kaldor Public Art Projects, 2009.
Coates, Rebecca, The Rise of the Private Art Foundation: John Kaldor Art Projects
1969–2012, PhD Thesis, Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2013.
Coates, Rebecca, ‘John Kaldor’s Early Art Projects and the NGV’ in Art Journal
No. 54, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2015.
Ellis Smith, Robert, Ben Webster’s Website: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth
Rock to the Internet, Providence: Privacy Journal, 2004.
Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald
F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980 [1969].
32 J. POTTS

Lessig, Lawrence, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Lessig, Lawrence, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to
Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: Penguin, 2004.
McLeod, Kembrew, Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other
Enemies of Creativity, New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John, Culture and Technology, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Potts, John, The New Time and Space, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Rose, Mark, Authors and Owners, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Simone, Daniela, Copyright and Collective Authorship, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019.
Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from
Each Other, New York: Basic Books, 2011.
 CHAPTER 3

Digitisation & Imagination: Curating

the Kaldor Public Art Projects Archive

Alice Desmond

The Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP) archive was digitised in 2019 dur-
ing the fiftieth anniversary of the first Kaldor Public Art Project, Christo
and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast—One Million Square Feet, 1969. The
celebrations for this milestone included a major retrospective exhibition,
new commissioned art works, reprisals of past Projects, a slate of participa-
tory programs and other public events. The archive was central to these
varied activities that re-evaluated and expanded upon five decades of inno-
vative public art. That the initial launch of the archive website was pre-
sented as part of KPAP’s artistic program for the anniversary year indicates
its significance not just as a catalyst for remembering the past but as a
wellspring of inspiration for new creative outputs.
For the KPAP team the archive is not something dusty, official or sim-
ply documentary; it is a living resource that is in frequent use. It isn’t sepa-
rate from the day to day work of the organisation. It isn’t static or fixed by
a collecting policy—it constantly grows as new projects are developed and
as conversations with artists and collaborators continue over decades.

A. Desmond (*)
Sydney, NSW, Australia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Potts (ed.), Use and Reuse of the Digital Archive,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79523-8_3
34 A. DESMOND

Indeed the archive expanded upon itself at rapid speed during the frenzy
of activity during the fiftieth anniversary year as new projects were
undertaken and research into past projects uncovered additional stories
and items. The archive was also drawn upon by other individuals and
organisations for exhibitions, documentaries, publications and events that
acknowledged the enduring legacy of KPAP’s ground-breaking projects.
Working as the Archive Collection Curator in 2019 I had the extraor-
dinary opportunity to manage the digitisation of the KPAP archives and to
facilitate access to these archives to curators, researchers, designers, film-
makers, students and artists. I had the privilege of working with artist
Michael Landy on Kaldor Public Art Project 35: Making Art Public: 50
Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects. I also contributed to or witnessed the
creation of other works that were part of the anniversary program.
As the curator of the archive I became acquainted with the collection
from multiple perspectives, and new possibilities for its use and
interpretation were revealed in conversation with the many people who
took an interest in it. I saw the multitude ways that artists take inspiration
from the literal, physical archive as well as the living archives of ideas and
memories that relate to KPAP’s 50 years of creative activity. I saw how the
archive can serve as a catalyst for developing exhilarating, unexpected
creative works and can continue to generate community connection.
The various demands on the archive during the anniversary year bore
great influence on the way that the digital archive was constructed. This
was not only in terms of the logistical challenges of collection management
for so many overlapping projects. The different ways the archive was
utilised for varying purposes emphasised the importance of understanding
that an archive and its keepers cannot anticipate what any individual will
find meaningful or how inspiration will strike.
In this chapter I reflect on working with the KPAP archive to facilitate
various creative outputs during the anniversary year. I also detail the
process of cataloguing, digitising and publishing the KPAP archive as it
continued to grow over the course of the year’s events.
A summary of the artistic projects that were part of the fiftieth anniver-
sary is presented to provide insight into different approaches to archival
research, influence and adaptation. I discuss how new creative works influ-
enced the production of the digital archive and how the archive was chal-
lenged both materially and conceptually in the development of the various
projects. I argue through these examples that archives need not be seen as
simply static or documentary in character. Creative engagement with
archives reveals the limitless potential that archives can have as the basis for
 3 DIGITISATION & IMAGINATION: CURATING THE KALDOR PUBLIC ART… 35

experimentation. Making archives accessible through digitisation allows

an ever-broader range of participants to find inspiration in materials and
memories.

Fifty Years in the Making

When John Kaldor invited artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Australia
to present a lecture under the auspices of the Alcorso-Sekers travelling
scholarship for sculpture, it was not imagined that fifty years later the
project they undertook together would be recognised as the first of over
thirty five projects presented by a registered not-for-profit organisation
with a team of permanent staff, a board of directors and an international
curatorial advisory committee. The wrapping of Little Bay’s coastline was
the first contemporary artwork to be presented on such a monumental
scale anywhere in the world and its success inspired Kaldor to commit to
engaging leading contemporary artists to transform public spaces with
innovative projects. While KPAP now is recognised as one the first organ-
isations of its type, the reality of planning and staging ambitious, ephem-
eral, site specific works that resisted the conventions of collection-­based
institutions and white cube exhibitions made it unlike the day-to-­day
operations of an established arts organisation.
KPAP was never conceived as a collecting institution. Rather, it has
positioned itself in contrast to such through its focus on temporary projects
and use of unexpected public spaces. Similarly, KPAP did not institute
formal procedures for record-keeping, file retention and so forth that are
expected of organisations such as museums, libraries or government
agencies. The documents, objects and artworks related to the art projects
that John Kaldor himself accumulated and kept over the decades were not
deliberately collected as an organisational archive. It is interesting, then,
that the retrospective recognition that these items do form a collective
trove of rich sources (in other words, an archive) has given the organisation
a collection to which to tend. As such, the establishment of the KPAP
archive has made the organisation a collecting institution, albeit an
unconventional one.
The items that John Kaldor retained for decades formed the core of
what we now know as the KPAP archive. These were brought together as
research materials for the extensive 40th anniversary publication which
was researched and edited by Sophie Forbat in 2009. Additional materials
36 A. DESMOND

were gathered from artists, collaborating venues, past photographers,

libraries, archives and other sources at this time.
In the years that followed the archive grew to include more materials,
both physical and digital, as new projects were developed and further
items from past projects were sourced. An archivist position was even
created as the KPAP team grew and was filled by Venettia Miller, then
Ineke Dane. The material archive was sorted, categorised and eventually
placed into mylar sleeves and archival boxes, accompanied by finding aids.
For each new project objects that seemed important were retained, and
after project closure all members of the team were encouraged to save
important emails and documents for the archive. The next steps would be
to digitise the collection and share it online. In true Kaldor tradition this
would be an ambitious and unconventional undertaking.
Before returning to discuss the digitisation process and the production
of the archive website, I will describe and reflect on the various archive-­
centred projects that were created as part of the KPAP anniversary. The
contributors to the KPAP anniversary challenged expectations about how
archives can be used as materials and inspiration for creative works. While
some projects utilised digitised materials, others highlighted the
limitlessness of the archive and its potential to extend beyond the visible
or tangible.

Making an Archive Exhibition

The centrepiece of the KPAP fiftieth anniversary was Kaldor Public Art
Project 35: Making Art Public, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New
South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney, that cast new perspectives on all thirty
four previous Kaldor projects rather than presenting a staid retrospective.
John Kaldor was determined that the vision and energy of an artist would
be required to create a joyful, surprising, immersive experience inspired by
the archives of half a century of ambitious public art projects.1 British art-
ist Michael Landy, whose Acts of Kindness was the 24th Kaldor Public Art
Project in 2011, accepted John’s invitation to create an exhibition. John
knew that Michael could be relied to reimagine the archive in an uncon-
ventional way: Landy and Kaldor had started their long friendship in 2001
when Landy was meticulously cataloguing and destroying all of his belong-
ings for his renowned work Break Down.2
Michael’s approach to creating a new public art experience based on
the previous fifty years of Art Projects went far beyond selecting physical
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The crisis
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: The crisis

A record of the darker races, Vol. I, No. 3, January
1911

Author: Various

Editor: W. E. B. Du Bois

Release date: September 14, 2023 [eBook #71650]

Language: English

Original publication: New York City: National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People, 1910

Credits: Richard Tonsing, hekula03, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRISIS

***
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
 THE CRISIS
A RECORD OF THE DARKER RACES

Volume One JANUARY, 1911 Number Three

Edited by W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS, with the co-

operation of Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber,
Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, W. S.
Braithwaite and M. D. Maclean.
 CONTENTS

Along the Color Line 5

Opinion 9

A Winter Pilgrimage 15

Editorial 16

Cartoon 18
By JOHN HENRY
ADAMS

Editorial 20

Social Control 22
By JANE ADDAMS

The Teacher: Poem 23

By LESLIE PINCKNEY
HILL

Employment of Colored
Women in Chicago 24

The Burden 26

Talks About Women 27

By Mrs. J. E.
MILHOLLAND

What to Read 28

PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
AT TWENTY VESEY STREET NEW YORK CITY

ONE DOLLAR A YEAR TEN CENTS A COPY

 ONE OF THE SUREST WAYS
TO SUCCEED IN LIFE IS TO
TAKE A COURSE AT

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253 West 134th Street
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The most up-to-date and thoroughly equipped conservatory in
the city. Conducted under the supervision of
MME. E. TOUISSANT WELCOME
The Foremost Female Artist of the Race

Courses in Art
Drawing, Pen and Ink Sketching, Crayon, Pastel, Water
Color, Oil Painting, Designing, Cartooning, Fashion Designing,
Sign Painting, Portrait Painting and Photo Enlarging in Crayon,
Water Color, Pastel and Oil. Artistic Painting of Parasols, Fans,
Book Marks, Pin Cushions, Lamp Shades, Curtains, Screens,
Piano and Mantel Covers, Sofa Pillows, etc.

Music
Piano, Violin, Mandolin, Voice Culture and all Brass and
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TERMS REASONABLE
 THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION for the
ADVANCEMENT of COLORED PEOPLE

OBJECT.—The National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People is an organization composed of men and women of
all races and classes who believe that the present widespread
increase of prejudice against colored races and particularly the denial
of rights and opportunities to ten million Americans of Negro
descent is not only unjust and a menace to our free institutions, but
also is a direct hindrance to World Peace and the realization of
Human Brotherhood.
METHODS.—The encouragement of education and efforts for
social uplift; the dissemination of literature; the holding of mass
meetings; the maintenance of a lecture bureau; the encouragement
of vigilance committees; the investigation of complaints; the
maintenance of a Bureau of Information; the publication of The
Crisis; the collection of facts and publication of the truth.
ORGANIZATION.—All interested persons are urged to join our
organization—associate membership costs $1, and contributing and
sustaining members pay from $2 to $25 a year.
FUNDS.—We need $10,000 a year for running expenses of this
work and particularly urge the necessity of gifts to help on our
objects.
OFFICERS.—The officers of the organization are:
National President—Mr. Moorfield Storey, Boston, Mass.
Chairman of the Executive Committee—Mr. Wm. English Walling,
New York.
Treasurer—Mr. John E. Milholland, New York.
Disbursing Treasurer—Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, New York.
Director of Publicity and Research—Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, New
York.
Executive Secretary—Miss Frances Blascoer, New York.
 COMMITTEE.—Our work is carried on under the auspices of the
following General Committee, in addition to the officers named:
[1]Miss Gertrude Barnum, New York.
[1]Rev. W. H. Brooks, New York.
Prof. John Dewey, New York.
Miss Maud R. Ingersoll, New York.
Mrs. Florence Kelley, New York.
[1]Mr. Paul Kennaday, New York.
[1]Mrs. F. R. Keyser, New York.
Dr. Chas. Leng, New York.
Mr. Jacob W. Mack, New York.
[1]Mrs. M. D. MacLean, New York.
Rev. Horace G. Miller, New York.
Mrs. Max Morgenthau, Jr., New York.
Mr. James F. Morton, Jr., New York.
Mr. Henry Moskowitz, New York.
Miss Leonora O’Reilly, New York.
[1]Rev. A. Clayton Powell, New York.
[1]Mr. Charles Edward Russell, New York.
Mr. Jacob H. Schiff, New York.
Prof. E. R. A. Seligman, New York.
[1]Rev. Joseph Silverman, New York.
Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, New York.
Mrs. Henry Villard, New York.
Miss Lillian D. Wald, New York.
[1]Bishop Alexander Walters, New York.
Dr. Stephen S. Wise, New York.
Rev. Jas. E. Haynes, D.D., Brooklyn, N. Y.
[1]Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Miss M. R. Lyons, Brooklyn, N. Y.
[1]Miss M. W. Ovington, Brooklyn, N. Y.
[1]Dr. O. M. Waller, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Mrs. M. H. Talbert, Buffalo, N. Y.
Hon. Thos. M. Osborne, Auburn, N. Y.
[1]Mr. W. L. Bulkley, Ridgewood, N. J.
Mr. George W. Crawford, New Haven, Conn.
Miss Maria Baldwin, Boston, Mass.
Mr. Francis J. Garrison, Boston, Mass.
Mr. Archibald H. Grimke, Boston, Mass.
[1]Mr. Albert E. Pillsbury, Boston, Mass.
Mr. Wm. Munroe Trotter, Boston, Mass.
Dr. Horace Bumstead, Brookline, Mass.
Miss Elizabeth C. Carter, New Bedford, Mass.
Prest. Chas. T. Thwing, Cleveland, O.
Mr. Chas. W. Chesnutt, Cleveland, O.
Prest H. C. King, Oberlin, O.
Prest. W. S. Scarborough, Wilberforce, O.
[1]Miss Jane Addams, Chicago, Ill.
[1]Mrs. Ida B. Wells Barnett, Chicago, Ill.
[1]Dr. C. E. Bentley, Chicago, Ill.
Miss Sopbronisba Breckenridge, Chicago, Ill.
Mr. Clarence Darrow, Chicago, Ill.
[1]Mrs. Celia Parker Woolley, Chicago, Ill.
[1]Dr. N. F. Mossell, Philadelphia, Pa.
[1]Dr. Wm. A. Sinclair, Philadelphia, Pa.
Miss Susan Wharton, Philadelphia, Pa.
Mr. R. R. Wright, Jr., Philadelphia, Pa.
Mr. W. Justin Carter, Harrisburg, Pa.
Rev. Harvey Johnson, D.D., Baltimore, Md.
Hon. Wm. S. Bennett, Washington, D. C.
Mr. L. M. Hershaw, Washington, D. C.
Prof. Kelly Miller, Washington, D. C.
Prof. L. B. Moore, Washington, D. C.
Justice W. P. Stafford, Washington, D. C.
[1]Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, Washington, D. C.
[1]Rev. J. Milton Waldron, Washington, D. C.
Prest. John Hope, Atlanta, Ga.
Mr. Leslie P. Hill, Manassas, Va.

1. Executive Committee.
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 We Print THE CRISIS
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Wedding Invitations Printed and Engraved. Society
and Commercial Printing a Specialty. A postal or the
telephone (Lenox 6667) brings us to your door.

ROBERT N. WOOD
202 EAST 99th STREET NEW YORK

Phone 2877 Lenox

White Rose Working Girls’ Home

217 EAST 86TH STREET

Bet. Second and Third Avenue

Pleasant temporary lodgings for working girls, with privileges, at
reasonable rates. The Home solicits orders for working dresses,
aprons, etc.
Address:
MRS. FRANCES R. KEYSER, Supt.

JUST OUT
A beautiful sentimental song entitled
“My Home is Down in Dixie, Where the Cotton Grows.”
 By Eugene Alexander Burkes

Price 25 Cents Postpaid

Published by
WEBB, ARBUCKLE & CO.,
BOSTON, MASS.
 Along the Color Line

POLITICAL.
Objections to the proposed appointment of William R. Lewis, a
Negro attorney of Boston, as an assistant attorney-general are being
presented to Attorney-General Wickersham. President Taft’s
intention to appoint Lewis was learned semi-officially at the White
House several weeks ago. Booker T. Washington has called upon Mr.
Wickersham to urge his approval of the appointment, and Speaker
Cannon has opposed it.

President Taft said in his message: “I renew my recommendation

that the claims of the depositors in the Freedman’s Bank be
recognized and paid by the passage of the pending bill on that
subject. I also renew my recommendation that steps be taken looking
to the holding of a Negro exposition in celebration of the fiftieth
anniversary of the issuing by Mr. Lincoln of the Emancipation
Proclamation.”

There is only one feature of the apportionment matter which is apt

to precipitate trouble, and that is the proposal to reduce the
representation of the Southern States which have deprived a part of
their population of the right of suffrage. Louisiana, Mississippi,
North Carolina, South Carolina and other Commonwealths below the
Mason and Dixon line have imposed restrictions upon the Negroes
which make it impossible for them to vote at any election.—Denver
Times.
 THE COURTS.
In Richmond, Va., Judge Goff, in the United States Circuit Court of
Appeals, decided that no deed conveying real estate could legally
preclude the subsequent conveyance of any part of that real estate to
persons of African descent. He held that any provision or clause
providing that real estate shall not be acquired by Negroes is invalid
and void, and that no such provision can be put into a deed. The case
was argued for the Negroes by George J. Hooper and William L.
Royall. A. O. Boschen argued for the other side. The decision of
Judge Goff will be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United
States. It is attracting wide attention and much comment among
members of the local bar. The case was that of the People’s Pleasure
Park vs. Worsham.

Having been defeated in the Supreme Court of New York, and that
defeat having been affirmed by the Appellate Division, the colored
Order of Elks has filed an appeal to the Court of Appeals and has
filed a bond of the National Surety Company to cover the payment of
any costs that may be awarded against it. The colored order was
enjoined from using the name or the emblem of the white Order of
Elks.

The verdict of $1,000 awarded George W. Griffin, a Pullman car

porter, against Daniel L. Brady, brother of “Diamond Jim” Brady,
was affirmed by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. Griffin
was arrested by Brady on a charge of theft, and after proving his
innocence sued his accuser.

Joseph Atwater, an Oklahoma Negro, filed in the Supreme Court

of the United States at Washington his appeal from the decision of
the Oklahoma courts which had refused to enjoin election officials in
Oklahoma City from denying him the right to vote on Nov. 8th. The
petition for injunction was based on the claim that the “grandfather
clause” placed in the Oklahoma constitution by amendment was
invalid, because it would deny the right to vote to a large number of
Negroes in the State entirely on account of color or previous
condition of servitude.