The Digital Image as Collective Practice: Speculative Curation of the Borough Road Collection Digital Archive View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Theresa Kneppers,  Kelly Rappleye  

➡️https://zoom.us/j/94906740134?pwd=ajcwTjd5SWZ0UXBqOUQ2bk4yR2VXZz09⬅️ The live engagement and networked sharing of digital images, and the infrastructures of storing, sharing, and receiving masses of content at unprecedented rates of circulation fundamentally alters the interpretation of digital images. In light of this, our research displaces traditional curatorial emphases on provenance, authenticity, and authoritative knowledge production by considering the digital image as a live, collective process of world-building. As part of PhD research with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at LSBU, Theresa Kneppers and Artemis Gryllaki developed the Borough Road Collection Archive, a wiki-based digital platform as a research tool to trace the desire lines of archive users. Sourcing content from A David Bomberg Legacy - The Sarah Rose Collection held at LSBU, it hosts a selection of Modern British and contemporary art works alongside event and exhibition documentation. Curatorial researchers Theresa Kneppers and Kelly Rappleye are leading a series of participatory digital workshops, using collaborative speculation to engage the digital archive user as an active agent in creating the meaning of digital images. Our workshop ‘User Manifesto!’ declares the BRCA archive’s digital images open for users to save, edit and redistribute to embrace networked, multiplicitous digital interpretation. Workshop participants will co-develop a ‘Terms and Conditions of Use’ for the BRCA digital archive to re/co-imagine digital accountability, respect, and care through images. We hope the ‘Terms and Conditions of Use’ workshop will offer all digital image practitioners a generative method to re-evaluate curatorial methods as collective practice in this moment of cultural transformation.