“Find the File” (Mar 21 – 24, 2019) at HKW, Berlin is a discursive music festival on the questions: How is music collected, preserved, selected and reactivated today? What do collections and archives represent? And what can be found in them? We are proud to contribute “Artistic Shadow Libraries”, a new video work by Cornelia Sollfrank based on interviews we conducted during the research process of "Creating Commons".
This interview montage shows artists creating web archives as commons practice: the art wiki Monoskop, the no-budget avant-garde archive UbuWeb, the online libraries Aaaaarg and memoryoftheworld.org and 0xdb.org, a database containing 15,000 films. By means of technical infrastructures, communities and mutual negotiation of terms of use, these “shadow libraries” provide access to cultural assets – unauthorized, free of charge, collaborative. In times of progressive containment, they thus make a both undogmatic and precarious contribution to accessing and collaboratively establishing cultural memory.
Creating Commons (Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, Shusha Niederberger)
