U2 means You Too: Documenting Graffiti and Street Art

Tom Denison, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University The first piece of graffiti I can recall seeing was a hastily painted “U2 means you too” which I saw on a bridge over the railway line near Hawthorn, Melbourne, in the early 1960s. It was a reference to an incident in 1960, when a …

Digital Traces: #cirn2017

Tom Denison, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University Taking its theme as Art as Archive: Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive, the CIRN2017 Prato Conference proved fertile ground for exploring a range of ideas. A key element was the paracuratorial programme in which an exhibition, curated by Vince Dziekan and Nina Lewis, …

Agnès Varda: Documenting – or gleaning – the ephemeral

Tom Denison, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University How do you document the ephemeral? In her latest film, Visages Villages, Agnès Varda collaborates with French street-artist/photographer JR, travelling through the French countryside in his photo truck, and visiting small communities. Amongst others, they meet coal miners, farmers, factory workers, cheese makers, a postman, …

Comportamento: reproducing the past or creating new conversations?

Tom Denison, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University An exhibition at the Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato Italy nicely illustrates some of the themes to be brought out at this year’s CIRN Prato 2017 Conference. Comportamento is a re-enactment – or a re-imagining of one half of the Italian Pavilion of the …

Of course it’s not objective: archival film and documentaries

Tom Denison, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University We shall not cease from exploration And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. “Little Gidding” T. S. Eliot Working on a piece for this year’s CIRN Prato conference on archival film …

Ballarat Heritage Weekend 2017

Reds Under the Bed’ The 1950s Ballarat Red scare – Heritage Weekend display at Ballarat Trades Hall 24 Camp Street, Ballarat – 27 & 28 May 2017 Brett Edgington, Secretary, Unions Ballarat, & Ann Healey, Manager, Historical Collections, Unions Ballarat Politics through history has tried to divide us as a people by the fear of the …

Art Outside the Gallery: Archives Outside the Repository

Nina Lewis, Research Fellow, Monash University Faculty of Information Technology and coordinator for the Imagined Archives project. Imagine a participatory art project aimed at developing archives inspired by creativity and respect… On May 8-9, as part of a National Summit Setting the Record Straight: For the Rights of the Child, a “pop up” installation occupied …

Doing Fieldwork in Indigenous Communities

Annelie De Villers, eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne Archivists deal with the storage, maintenance and accessibility of unpublished information and knowledge within our societies. Those who access archives down the track are influenced by the way in which the information is represented, therefore what we do has political and cultural ramifications. Ever heard the …

Teddy Bears, Collective Memory, and the Archive

Tom Denison, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University The theme for this year’s CIRN Prato Conference (Art as Archive: Archive as Art & the Imagined Archive) immediately made me think of Agnes Varda’s 2004 film Ydessa, les Ours et etc (Ydessa, theBears and etc), an essay on an installation staged in 2003 in …

Art as Archive: Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive – Conference CFP

Prato Conference 2017, 25-27 October 2017 @ Monash University Centre, Prato, Italy Since the founding colloquium in 2003, the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) has been marked by informality, collegiality and interdisciplinary thinking, bringing together people from many different countries in an ideal Italian setting.   Themes have ranged across issues such as privilege, gender …