Workshop: Curating Archives, Building Infrastructure

In this two-part workshop, we explore how small-scale internet, community, and non-commercial radio stations have emerged in the era of platform capitalism as a local and participatory media infrastructure – enabling new channels of circulation for music and sound art – and new aesthetic and artistic forms in and of themselves. As more and more stations begin broadcasting at the same time as others close at increasingly fast rates, our workshop invites participants to think about their work in an archival afterlife. Bringing together academics, internet radio stations, and archivists, this workshop will be a chance to collaborate on the technical, political, and aesthetic creation of an archive. This workshop is intended to tease out the challenges of thinking about the local and specific context in which these stations operate while also engaging with the shifting media landscape more generally. It is meant as a first step in a larger conversation focused on the posterity and sustainability of community radio.

Part 1: Where Are We At?
In the first half of this workshop, we work collaboratively to take a barometer of current archival practices and pitfalls, identifying shared points of convergence and divergence. We will invite participants to explore questions including, what is the archive of any one station? How can we build collective and shared archives amongst stations? What are the processes for decommercialization? How do you create and curate an archive, and, crucially, what is it that the archive enables? Is there a distinction between a publicly accessible media center to listen to previous broadcasts and an archive? And, if so, what are the criteria regarding the stored items and how are they handled?

Part 2: Future Solutions
The second half of this workshop will take part as a facilitated conversation between current practitioners and archivists who are actively seeking out new challenges. This panel is not intended to offer a one-size fits all solution to questions of archives, but rather to introduce models and frameworks that are intended to spur future collaborations.