trouble in the media archive:

hybrid practices, hybrid discourses

expert meeting on online archivesmars lab, st augustin, october 25-26 2002minna tarkka, chair, m-cult

m-cult, centre for new media culture

m-cult was established in 2000 to support production, research and development of new media culture by an active involvement in the practices, policies and structures of the field.

aiming at long-term sustainable development of media culture, m-cult strives at creating productive and critical, multidisciplinary encounters between actors in culture, technology and society.

m-cult works to establish a major international research, development and production centre for new media culture in Helsinki by 2004.

networked expert organisation

prior to the opening of the fully staffed centre m-cult operates as a networked expert organisation, carrying out research and development projects, consulting on policy and educational issues, publishing information and producing international events and conferences.

online information and communication resourcedatabase of actors, eventsweblog and list digest.. to be developed:metadata – keywords in media cultureorganisational memory - information ergonomypersonalised service, registered user input

m-cult.net

web journal for new media cultureforum for researhcers and practitionersthematic issues: ecity, mobile culture, open source..review and keyword sectionsto be developed: audio/visual features, multi-platform publishing

mediumi

new media culture as innovation environmentfinnish&international research

commissioned byministry of trade&industryministry of traffic&communication

hybrid practices:

’tactical’ crossovers between artistic and commercial workmulti-contextual productionparallel organisational modes and economies

example: katastro.fi

hybrid discourses:

notions drifting across disciplines and practices,socio/technical, culture/economical,

techno/pedagogical…

example: value-added

translations and politics

in translation, not only objects but also their contexts are changed (akrich, latour)

categories have politics (suchman); politics is ontological (mol)

boundary objects – weakly structured, ambiguous but constant enough formations that travel across communities of practice (bowker & star)

politics of archival technologies?

self-organizing maps ..

metadata, object-relation models ..

user-produced input and categories ..