Two New Archives of Artists' Books

Join us for the opening event of Art and The Book for talks and conversation by and with Ami Clarke, Lozana Rossenova (DAAP) and Jan Steinbach (edcat.net).

The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) https://daap.network/ is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of artists’ books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers and a community of creative practitioners in contemporary artists’ publishing, developed via an ethically-driven design process and open-data methodology. 

Drawing upon the working knowledge of users and archivists alike, DAAP has been developed with sufficient complexity, whilst remaining searchable, to affords= multiple histories to develop, confronting issues of authorship and representation, whilst addressing the challenges of cataloguing often deliberately difficult to categorise materials. 

DAAP is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a de-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project works to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development.

Edcat https://edcat.net/ was created to augment visibility for artists’ publications and create a source and tool for exploring and engaging with the fields of art and publishing. It collects and preserves information about art publications from diverse sources in one place and makes it freely available to the interested public in an ever-growing database. Edcat also explores more diverse cataloging and categorization possibilities and systems for art publications.

Ami Clarke is a visual artist and founded Banner Repeater in 2010, conceptualising and fundraising to develop the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing with Lozana Rossenova, and Arnaud Desjardin, launched in 2021. Ami's multimedia practice spans experimental writing and publishing, film, video, sculpture, and sound, drawing out new behaviours emerging from human engagement with technology, through performative modes. Experimental writing/publishing methods and strategies, often drive the work, in both an on and offline context, as well as informing spoken word performance. ‘The Underlying’ (2019) combined video, audio, live data analysis of Bisphenol A (BPA’s – pollutant and synthetic oestrogen), and sculpture, to map entanglements between finance, social media, and environmental collapse.  More recently, their ‘more-than-human’ inquiry deepened through collaboration with Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland at Lough Neagh, devastated by algae blooms in 2023, with an emphasis on the materiallity of microbial life, drawing biosemiotics together with systems theory through a collective writing and sonic ritual. The microbial scale of attention continued in their recent residency at Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage, exploring the slipperiness of DNA, diversity, and kinship, echoing Ariel’s call to “worship the world’s diversity” lest we deny our own true nature. 

Lozana Rossenova is a digital designer and researcher. In 2021, she completed her PhD research at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organisation. Her research focused on questions of presentation and performativity in online art archives through open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructure. Rossenova currently holds a Post-doc position at the Open Science Lab at TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology, Hannover) working on the NFDI4Culture project towards a national research infrastructure of cultural heritage data. She also delivers lectures and workshops on linked open digital archives internationally. Since 2019, Rossenova has been collaborating with Banner Repeater on developing the digital platform for the DAAP (Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing) project.

Followed at 6.30pm by a launch reception for Art and The Book.

ATTENDANCE FREE. BOOKING NOT REQUIRED.

images from https://edcat.net/