Although the approximately 800 exhibitions of the 100-year history of the Kunsthalle Bern have not left behind an art collection of their own, a rich archive of everything around it unfolds in the basement: posters, catalogues and photographs, and above all a large correspondence archive. This is arranged in boxes according to exhibition, but the contents of the individual documents are mostly unknown. It consists mainly of customs documents, invoices and delivery notes, but also includes interesting correspondence between artists, curators and other personalities relevant to the art world of the last century. Now the question: Is the great effort of time and money for a general digitization justified in order to find these individual gold pieces? "Yes," the almost 100 researchers who visit the archive every year would say, to look through old exhibition dossiers, take notes and digitally perpetuate important documents with their mobile phone camera.
This is exactly where we - Astrom / Zimmer & Tereszkiewicz - decided to dock on behalf of Kunsthalle Bern: We create a working environment that allows researchers to carry out their research in a simplified manner, while at the same time systematically returning the results to the archive.
Individual exhibitions are summarized in dossiers and each dossier is equipped with an RFID chip. A work table specially created for the Kunsthalle Bern with a pre-assembled, computer-controlled camera allows researchers to digitize individual documents easily. The system uses the built-in RFID antenna to identify what kind of exhibition dossier is on the table, and the scanned document is automatically supplemented with the associated metadata. Additional information can be added by the researchers and individual documents can be linked in digital collections.
In order to make it possible for the general public to experience and navigate the continuous discovery of this archival Eldorado, we have expanded the catalogues of the exhibitions by an estimate of the number of associated archives and thus created a visual, interactive point landscape. An exhibition thus already receives a volume, although the individual documents have not yet been recorded. As soon as a letter or picture is scanned, it takes the place of a placeholder dot, and so over the coming months and years the public online archive of the Kunsthalle Bern fills up.
For this purpose, researchers can offer the public new access to the archive through narratives woven through their scanned documents. For interested parties, they not only serve as access to the archive, but also represent previously invisible connections and overlaps.
We see our project as both a working tool and an experiment. It is a functional-practical feasibility study for a new generation of digital archives. We hope that it will stimulate a broader discussion on the benefits, challenges and potential of digitisation of estates and archives.
Project link: archiv.kunsthalle-bern.ch
Client: Kunsthalle Bern
In collaboration with: 51st Floor
