Carolyn Birdsall will be moderating a roundtable panel at the 2018 EYE International Conference entitled “Activating Audio Collections”. The EYE International Conference 2018 will take place at EYE-Amsterdam from Saturday 26 May to Tuesday 29 May 2018.
The discussion takes as its departure point recent strategies and challenges concerning access and attempts at ‘activating’ audio collections. How are stakeholders involved? Which role do artists play in featuring archival material? What is the potential role of researchers in initiatives, such as Europeana Sounds? What kinds of specific possibilities or problems appear with audio materials? What kinds of contextualisations are necessary for recorded audio? And what kinds of ethical considerations need to be taken into account? How do current trends at working interdisciplinarily generate new strategies and forms of collaborations in creating access and re-using the collections? How can gender and queer history be mediated by these archives? How can historic media materials reframe our understandings of national and colonial histories? The roundtable participants bring expertise of archives in different cultural contexts and have experience with work as researchers and artists using audio collections and/or promoting access.
The panel will be participated in by:
Carolyn Birdsall (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She teaches in the P&P programme, and her current research examines the early history of radio archiving in and beyond Europe.
John Ashley Burgoyne is Lecturer in Computational Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the Project Leader on Hooked on Music, a music experiment and game that has now been played over 3 million times worldwide. Currently he is co-editing the new Oxford Handbook on Music Corpus Analysis.
Ricarda Franzen is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and coordinates the programme of the MA Dramaturgy. Her doctoral research explores the history, contexts and possible uses of theatre sound archives. As a Dramaturge for radio plays, she has researched archival material for re-use in radio drama narratives.
Jennifer Hsieh is Anthropologist and Postdoctoral Researcher. She is currently completing a study entitled From Festival to Decibel: Making Noise in Urban Taiwan, which investigates the technological, bureaucratic, and informal practices underlying the production of environmental noise as a regulatory object in Taiwan, from the Japanese colonial period to the present.
Gregory Markus is Project Leader at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, where he runs the RE:VIVE initiative, focused on connecting the worlds of electronic music and cultural heritage developing new, simple and creative methods to present collections and increase awareness and re-use of open, digitized heritage collections.
meLê yamomo is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Theatre/Musicology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, and is also a Theatre Director and Composer. His current research project is entitled Sonic Entanglements: Listening to Modernities in Southeast Asian Sound Recordings (NWO-Veni, 2017-2021).