Documenting electroacoustic music for preservation: the design of a network-driven application based on MemoRekall and IIIF
Résumé
MemoRekall is a free and open source web app for the documentation and preservation of time-based media art that has been in active development since 2015. Subscribing to a practice-led approach to development, we shall examine how a number of collaborative projects (Bardiot et al. 2016; Bureaud 2017; Bardiot 2022; Bardiot et al. 2022) allowed the tool to materialize into its current state, and the methodologies that have emerged through these case studies. Taking video as a primary resource, MemoRekall proposes an interface for the redocumentarisation (Pédauque 2006; Zacklad 2007) of this essential yet incomplete artifact. Through the creation of capsules which augment the video with intra- and inter-documentary, multi-modal annotations, the user creates a new digital document which can be shared and embedded. MemoRekall has imposed itself as a powerful tool for the documentation and valorisation of digitized time-based artworks and born digital artifacts for a number of different user-types: researchers, artists, cultural institutions and mediators, teachers and students.
Recent work (Jacquemin et al. 2023) - notably around the constitution and materialization of Art Zoyd Studio’s archival collection of multi-modal documents around the work of composer Gérard Hourbette - has proposed new avenues for the development of MemoRekall. Since 1999, the studio has welcomed a number of electroacoustic composers for residencies such as Alejandro Viniao, Luc Ferrari and Kasper Toeplitz. One of the studio’s missions is the preservation and integration into repertoire of musical works that use electronics : since 2018 the studio has been actively developing ways of preserving their rich archives that include including digital objects and sources in peril of technological obsolescence.
These questions combine with fundamental theoretical discussions around the friction between performance and time-based artworks and their documentation and preservation (Saaze et Laurenson 2014; Bardiot 2021). We propose a network-driven, heterarchical approach to documentation and analysis. Not only does this concept marry with the reality of archival collections which can constitute thousands of documents of multiple natures, distributed across multiple databases and institutions; it also allows new perspectives on the work to emerge without seeking to supplant or appropriate it.
To meet the technical requirements of this approach, we have made MemoRekall compatible with IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework, https://iiif.io/), a standard that is already implanted in the world of GLAM. We have adapted the IIIF Presentation API in order to create networks of manifests which can be navigated within a version of MemoRekall that comes as a plugin for the manifest viewer Mirador (https://github.com/ProjectMirador/mirador). This allows for the construction of complex networks of multi-modal documents, and dynamic navigation of these networks within MemoRekall. The integration of IIIF also circumnavigates two important issues in contemporary documentation: the multiplication of interfaces (we have integrated MemoRekall within an existing framework that is already used by much of our target user base); and the multiplication of ressources (with IIIF, we can reference already existing media, avoiding the need to systematically upload more content to servers which has a significantly negative ecological impact).
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