YOU NAME IT! Indexing and other guideposts through film archives

Arsenal Summer School 

Each year the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art offers a Summer School. For three days participants engage with a topic located at the interface of theory and practice.

Keywording, tagging, algorithms, indexing – all these terms revolve around the possibilities of approaching archives and the challenges involved with a data bank. How do you find what you’re looking for? How much are conceptual terms attributed to an artistic work defined by contemporary reception or in turn define it? How do film archives differ from other archives and how can we safeguard something as ephemeral as “oral history,” incorporating it into a meaningful systematics of search functions?
The presentations and workshops at this year’s Summer School are about the practice of indexing in archives, looking both back and into the future: What requirements should be fulfilled by contemporary databanks? Can search functions be developed that will last into the future, beyond the Zeitgeist? What criteria do we need to consider?

Contributions by Johannes Braun, Toby Cornish, Madhusree Dutta, Milena Gregor, Dr. Florian Hoof, Birgit Kohler, Sebastian Lütgert, Jasmina Metwaly, Volker Pantenburg and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.

The presentations are partly in German language only.

All those interested can register at summerschool@arsenal-berlin.de.

The number of participants is limited.