July 4, 2019

Happy birthday, America! Although we did no celebrating here, it's kind of fun to think that today was a holiday. We started our morning with a trip to the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, in Hilversum. The NISV keeps an archive of television, radio, websites, and even video games that have Dutch origins or held importance in Dutch culture, and they also offer a museum and library in their same building. One of the speakers we heard from during our lecture portion spoke about his project called ‘Re: Vive’ in which he invites artists to come to the institute and work with him to create electronic music which contains sound bites exclusively from the archives. His talk was particularly striking, because he spoke about how he does not want to ‘engage’ a community, he wants to become part of the community, and add more to enrich that community. This was a very new sentiment, as all of our other site visits described how they were trying to engage with different audiences through their innovations. Although I still think that at their core, these other sites meant to engage people in a positive way, I completely understand where our speaker was coming from, and I think that his point is a good one. To engage a community means that they are participating, so by inviting members of the community to create the music, inviting other members of the community to listen to that music, and to promote that music live and online, Re: Vive is getting at the root of what engagement entails, and doing so very successfully. I particularly liked this project because it was innovative in how it got people to engage with the archives. Rather than forcing a traditional approach to watching or listening to items from the archives, the electronic music approach allows people to adapt what the archives have to offer into something that can endure longer than a single visit or viewing. I appreciated the project for this reason, because it welcomes adaptability and innovation. Although at first glance this project appears to be something other than preservation, at its core Re: Vive is preserving these archival clips better than pure digitization. By inviting people to continue to interact with this material, the content is carried forward through time as part of electronic music so that it is both preserved and appreciated. I am definitely interested in continuing individual study into Re: Vive because I loved the motivation and techniques of the project, but I also loved the music that was played that was created through the project. I think that other preservation techniques could be modeled to be more like this one, where the preservation takes place in a less conventional way and interacts with a given community more.

After we returned to the hotel, we enjoyed a very low-key day: blogging, hanging out, and dinner in. It was nice to take a break from all of the hustle and bustle of the rest of the trip, and rest up for a big Friday!