 Grayson Perry |
 Julia Kristeva |
 Jacques Herzog |
 Sarah Lucas |
Artists, museums and the heritage sector are creating ever increasing amounts of audio-visual and digital content. One of the biggest issues facing the museum and heritage sector over the next five years will be how to manage and present that content to the public and to the education sector in order to provide optimum opportunities for delivery and interpretation. Without effective methods for searching and sorting items, the growing mass of cultural data risks becoming increasingly difficult to access.
Tate is working in collaboration with the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College (University of London) to produce an open source application for searching and retrieving audio/video content online. Initially, a prototype will be built using sample files from Tate’s Online Events Archive, demonstrating the potential for an intuitive and intertextual context for the delivery and presentation of that audio-visual content.
The Online Events Archive currently holds around 400-450 hours of audio/video content: artist talks, cultural theory lectures, symposia, sound and performance events, including, for example, talks by those pictured above: artist Grayson Perry; semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva; architect Jacques Herzog and artist Sarah Lucas.
From late 2005 through to 2007 the project moves into a second stage of research and development, which is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, ICT Fund for Cultural Resource Enhancement.
 Robert Frank Symposia |
 Yinka Shonibare, Turner Prize 2004 |
 Olafur Elliason, Unilever Series |
 Sean Scully, Tate Collection |
Research will engage with five main areas:
• culture ontologies
• culture and heritage interfaces
• user narratives
• intelligent and intuitive search engines
• technical standards for online audio/video content
The project aims to develop a user-centred tool that will allow audiences and academics to draw new and extended associations from individually defined and highly specific search criteria. It is aligned with research elsewhere into more effective preservation, management, and hosting models for digital content and online archive.
The ambition is to identify and expand evolving technical standards associated with multimedia content, in order to optimise an application that will be able to integrate and evolve relational behaviour between a range of information and content. These technical architectures will integrate with the development of suitable vocabularies and an ontological infrastructure for an effective description of content contained in the archive.
Aims and Objectives:
• create an on-line intelligent, flexible archive, retrieval system and interface for Tate's digital video and audio recordings of cultural theory lectures, artist talks, symposia, sound and performance
• develop systems that will aid in the management and maintenance of such archives. The maintenance will be expedited by making very laborious tasks automatic
• lay out the process for generalizing Tate's intelligent archive prototype into an open source, off-the-shelf software system
• disseminate the archive and methods
In partnership with the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Project team:
Kelli Dipple (Tate Webcasting Curator, project leader - Tate); Professor Robert Zimmer (Head of Department of Computing, project leader - Goldsmiths);. Marian Ursu (Goldsmiths University Lecturer and Director of Studies); a full time post-doctoral Researcher (technical) and Consultant (domain expert), yet to be appointed. Preliminary Research further engaged assistance from Adrian Passow (Goldsmiths University PHD researcher); Nicolette Cavaleros (Birkbeck University MA Digital Art History intern).
Preliminary research raised questions about how we select, interpret and present cultural artifacts and associated documents, challenging traditional assumptions about the role of the curator and audiences, in an information and online content ecology. The Online Events programme further addressed these issues:
 Curating, Immateriality, Systems
 Tate Modern 4 June 2005 |
 c0dE 0f practice
Tate Online 13 June - 18 July 2005 |
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| A conference/webcast on curating digital media and immaterial culture, focussed around online interfaces, distributed practice, netart and software art. | An online panel discussion: How do we identify, sort, search and locate ourselves amidst the dynamic instability of immaterial culture and its artifacts?
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 Open Congress
Tate Britain 7 - 8 October 2005 |
 d_culture
Tate Modern / Tate Online 28 January - 31 March 2005 |
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| An Open Congress that seeks to understand how methodologies derived from Free/Libre and Open Source Software [FLOSS] production can be deployed by those working in the area of art, and visual culture. Part of an umbrella online season titled Common Ground, including an online panel discussion focussed on intellectual property in context of time-based, distributed and media arts practice. | An online season of downloadable sound and debate, which prototyped new content and contract models, incorporating creative commons licensing for the redistribution and use of audio tools and resources. Audience data analysis in conjunction with this project, further assessed the tendencies of peer to peer exchange and the effect of viral distribution. |
Last updated: Sept 2005 |
