Valentina Bertolani Research - jhhl/AUMI-Together GitHub Wiki

Valentina Bertolani is conducting research on how electronic and experimental music is archived, preserved, presented, and able to be curated:

from March 8, 2023:

Dear members of the AUMI Consortium,

Within the EU-funded project ARPOEXMUS: Archiving post-1960s experimental music: Exploring the ontology of music beyond the score-performance dichotomy (more info: http://www.valentinabertolani.info/arpoexmus/), I am contacting you for your involvement and knowledge of Adaptive Use Musical Instrument. My project explores what role musicology can play in ensuring the storage, preservation, management and curation of post-1960s experimental music. Within this framework, I would like to explore the case of the AUMI consortium in relation to the following question: How do we archive community-based music activities without falling in the trap of the composer-centric archive?

RESEARCH GOALS

Through the case study of AUMI, I would like to explore 3 things:

  1. intricacies of having a collectivity as document creators.
  2. understanding intellectual property in the arts nowadays and how it can be mapped against archival practices.
  3. having a rather large community of individuals sharing strong ties (know-how, personal memories, ethical and esthetical frameworks, experiences) but geographically dispersed can offer me the possibility to explore whether UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage protocols can be applied. These are my goals, but I am open to suggestions and to change my mind.

OUTCOMES

I propose 2 different outcomes: 1 academic article and a report for and commissioned by the AUMI consortium. The latter will be something you might need and that we agreed upon together based on my research, such as a map of documentary sources available, for example.

CONVERSATION STARTERS:

If you agree to meet with me to have a conversation, here are some hints that would like to be conversations starters, rather than actual questions that we must go through. These are my curiosities now, but I am open to your stories and everything that you would like to share with me.

• YOUR HISTORY WITH AUMI. When did you meet AUMI? How have you used it? What are the most important memories for you, if you want to share them? What types of knowledge of AUMI do you have (coding, historical, performative...)? How do you use this knowledge or how would you like to use it? • ASSESSING TYPES OF MATERIALS and different materialities (physical, digital, embodied) of documents and how they evolved over time. What kind of documents do you produce?

  • history: letters documenting initial idea? prototypes? memos? workshop posters? institutional exchanges?...
  • software: passage from desktop to iOS, how did this change the type of documents produced?
  • embodied: who knows how to use AUMI and how is that knowledge shared among facilitators? conversation? courses? written material? videos?
  • community: history of users/workshops? photos? videos? texts?
  • management: was it always an e-mail-based community? do you self-archive your emails/social media activity/online presence/meetings minute as AUMI? do you self-archive your AUMI- affiliated activities as individuals?
  • artistic activity: what kind of outputs?

• ASSESSING LOCATION OF MATERIALS. It is my understanding that there are already 2 archival collections: New York Public Library has the personal collection of Pauline Oliveros, the Center for Deep Listening houses its own institutional archive. Then there is the personal archive of IONE. How much of the AUMI material is located in these three collections, how much is located somewhere (physically or digitally) in a centralized place for AUMI and how much is located within individual and personal archives of AUMI practitioners and members of the AUMI consortium?

• ASSESSING SUBJECT CREATOR(S) OF MATERIALS: are these materials created by the AUMI Consortium or by AUMI affiliated individuals independently?

Thank you for reading this memo and I am looking forward to talking to you!

This research has been approved by Carleton University’s Research Ethics Board, clearance #116890. Should you have any ethical concerns with the study, please contact the REB Chair, Carleton University Research Ethics Board-A by email: [email protected]. For all other questions about the study, please contact me at [email protected] or [email protected]. Kindly, Valentina