 Hello, welcome back if you are with us this morning. I'm Janice McLaren, head of education and projects at the photographers gallery. Thank you for joining us for our afternoon final afternoon of the concerning photography conference. I hope you've been following the other days where we've heard fascinating research and on a huge range of topics related to photography in the UK. Over the last 50 years, including this morning's discussion on key exhibitions and the circulation of the photographic image. I'm really happy to be here for our final afternoon session before we end the conference with a presentation by artist Antonio Roberts, who will be joined by my colleague area fresh producer of digital at the photographers gallery. Before we move on to Rahab Alana who will say more about the more on the panelists and the ideas around this session, which looks at the changing role and importance of archives in the context of an artistic practice. I just want to say a few words about how we came to the ideas that have informed this conference. As Claire graphic at the photographers Gary mentioned this morning. Discussion started in 2017 in a meeting with Paul Mellon Center and the photographers Gary staff. This led to a study day in two parts where a range of photographers, academics and historians presented short papers on the photographers Gary history to a small gathering by way of fleshing out some of the concerns about photography in the UK's past, present and future. Seeds planted at this study day led in part to this three day conference where we can celebrate new scholarship and perspective in the study of photography. I'm excited about this afternoon's panel on the future of archives, particularly as the photographers Gary itself is at a threshold as we look back over 50 years. And, and then during the course of this conference also consider what the next 50 years might bring and how our own archive might offer insight to research in the future. Before we move to our speakers here are just a few words on housekeeping. This session contains two 15 minute papers with a Q&A session afterward. After the Q&A session there's a short 15 minute comfort break before the presentation by Antonio Roberts audience members can type questions using the Q&A function. This session is being recorded and made available to the public closed captioning is available click the CC button on the bottom right of your screen to enable captions. Finally some thank you. I'd like to thank this morning speakers and audience particularly those audience members who took time with to write contributions as well as questions. Sincere thanks to the extraordinary that goes to the extraordinary partnership formed with colleagues Mark Hallett, Sarah Turner, Shawna Blanchfield, Danielle Covey, and the rest of the team at the Paul Mellon Center. And also to my colleagues at the photographer's gallery, who supported the organization and delivery of this conference. In particular, the exceptional conference curation and organization and superb attention to detail of Luisa Ilyet Curator of Talks and Events. And now I'll hand over to art historian Rahab Alana from the Alcanzi Foundation for the Arts. Thank you. Thank you so much, Janice. And thank you also of course to the Paul Mellon Center the photographer's gallery it's been an immense learning experience for me over the last two days. It's a generous invitation from you to moderate this session for me. And it's been extremely motivating to think about other motivations that have been in the field and across the world might add. And it's also about practice and theory, especially when it comes to the place and meaning of the archive in the present. And of course, I really look forward to hearing from this esteemed panel about the place and role of specific repositories and practices as we move forward. I did have a few observations about the title archival futures and of course I'd like to thank also the panel members for sharing their work with me in advance. And a lot of what I have to say some of what I have to say of course has to do as a response to that. And as a prefatory note before I introduce them. What is the place of counterculture in photography and the development of narratives of exclusion and inclusion of history, geography, politics, cultural politics, art, media, technology, nationalism, neo imperialism, aesthetic genealogies, heritage, borders, imaginaries, communities, spectators and of course the public. Ever amenable to being linked decoupled and then rearranged in different threematic permutations. These units of what might make up counterculture and the counterculture archive are not in any way conclusive. They are not a conclusive grid, but a meshed array of flexible interfaces, split screens, thresholds, portals and axes. Plains of fracture and duress, through which makers and readers may disarticulate and re aggregate their navigation of all that is paradoxical, all that is contradictory, elusive and eventually a multivalent sense of place, if not the subject that is inscribed. But what struck me about this panel is the need for the development of a meta archive within larger histories. And like archives in general, stepping outside to observe what is inside is important as it might help to see how subjects collections are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities. This seven are two, then is a structuring that invites something more freewheeling and perhaps more unexpected. However, discursively constituted, thoroughly metatextual strains and grouping photography emerges from all that is unbound to demonstrate some unruly, rhizometric properties that must prevail against oversimplification and perhaps over signification as well. But perhaps this gives us a sense of what an archive does not do, or rather, what it does not mean to do. It has no claims on being comprehensive or representative, even while it commits to reflecting the profoundly symbiotic social, cultural, political tensions that have seared their imprint into our consciousness, as well as our respective territories of engagement. And the narrative or counter narrative arcs of descent encountered in the forthcoming papers may also invoke examples of mobilization beyond their own territories of engagement. And so the cross section of lens based practices presented here takes us towards new readings of what may be considered normative and structured, regardless of their physical placements and institutions, or as exhibitions. And this is with reference to Joe Spence and Sunil Gupta. It may complicate what it might mean to identify as biographies through revisiting and re-envisioning our historical entanglements, resoutering our frayed common genealogies, rethinking our allied arts practices from across aesthetic paradigms and platforms. Such potent trans entanglements, trans engagements, I would say, might remind us of the need to empathetically deploy our cultural narratives in order to freely move into and across one another's imaginaries. An act of creative solidarity of all that is crucial now, since most of us find it difficult or even impossible to make actual journeys to these archives and exhibitions at this time. So, Charlie Neve is a SSHRC doctoral fellow and PhD candidate in the joint program in communication and culture at Ryerson University, York University in Toronto, and the archivist and research coordinator at the Ryerson Image Center, home of the largest portion of Joe Spence Memorial Archive. It holds, she holds a BFA, excuse me, in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Halifax Nova Scotia, and an MA in photographic preservation and collections management from Ryerson University, in collaboration with the Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. She has written several articles for Blackflash Magazine, Photography and Culture, Aperture Blog, Canadian Art Review, Transborder Photography. Through an analysis of the now dispersed Joe Spence Memorial Archive, her forthcoming dissertation considers the enduring legacy of political photographic practice in Britain in the 70s and the 80s. Welcome, Charlie. Fiona Anderson is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Newcastle University. She is the author of Cruising the Dead River, David Wynatovic and New York's Ruin Waterfront University of Chicago Press 2019. And co-editor with Glyn Davis and Nat Raha of Imaging Queer Europe Then and Now, a special issue of Third Text 2021. In 2016 to 2019, she was UKI UKPI for cruising the 70s and I think PHIV is Queer Sexual Cultures, a project which explored LGBTQ plus social and sexual cultures of the 70s and their significance for contemporary public discourse and LGBTQ plus politics and identity across Europe. With that, may I now invite Charlene to present her paper. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello, thank you very much for the introduction. Let me just get my screen up. Can you see me yet my screen almost. I can't see a slide show yet. Oh, there it is coming up now. You just want to go to full screen. Yeah, brilliant. Thank you. Great. So thank you very much. Thank you to the Paul Mellon Center. Thank you to the photographers gallery. It's a real pleasure to be here. So without further ado. What is the nature of responsibility for a photo archivist whose duties include, in part institutionalizing an anti institutional archive. The socialist feminist photographic work of Joe Spence was explicitly collaborative in ways that elide the individualized structures that shape most cultural institutions, the art market and the art museum system. All of which are often known to elevate and valorize individual single authors under the banner of capital a art with the effect of implicitly increasing the value of quote unquote original works. Spence's work was part of the cacophony of multiple marginalized voices using ideas of documentary and the photographic document as a critique of modernism in England beginning in the 1970s, and whose practice was a challenge to institutional institutions, such as artists addition or one of a kind art objects for sale, often viewing those institutions and their concomitant spaces as detrimental to the utilization of photography within her unfinished socialist feminist project. The archives and most institutions functions as play as places where objects, artifacts and documents from the past go to be stored preserved and sometimes forgotten. Yet they also legitimize dominant sets of values regarding what and how the historical record is constituted archivist bright Brian brothman states that the institutional archive is understood as a quote unquote fixing agent to use now absolute graphic terminology meant to quote fix the hitherto undisciplined text to fix it and to fix it in place and acts of preservation implicitly include efforts to set limits. Since the early 1900s, feminists and activists have been constructing counter archives, non static repositories, like the information and advice resource Spence and Terry Dennett placed as a top priority of photography workshop, when it was first published in the archive established in 1974 in their apartment at 152 upper street in his LinkedIn. Like others, their amalgamation of material, their archive was one that operated in the present and served as a generative space for the production and dissemination of visual culture outside the mainstream. Since the early 1990s, however, there have been concerted efforts by archivists librarians and activists alike to rethink this practice and place counter archives in institutional collections. Indeed, following Spence's death in 1992, then it became the sole steward of photography workshops repository of material, including its official transition to the Joe Spence Memorial archive. And since 2006 components of it have been sold or donated to various cultural and post secondary institutions. But does collecting preserving circulating exhibiting and archiving Spence's photographic work in these new contexts risk undermining her polemic. In 2017, an exhibition of photographic work by Spence was featured in a solo show titled memory cards at New York City's shin gallery, accompanied by a published review in the September 4 issue of the New Yorker. The unknown author states that Spence followed in the footsteps of American artist Cindy Sherman's feminine archetypes and sites the consciousness raising phototherapy work Spence made in collaboration with Rosie Martin. Yet there is no mention of Rosie Martin the collaborative dimension of the work completely disappears. The recipient, the word therapy appears in the review twice, once to indicate the title of the work being discussed, and again to suggest the Spence's quote formal sophistication and quote is what renders her work successful, not its content. Content is quote therapeutic and didactic and quotes. And lastly Spence's work is rendered worthy of note primarily by its alignment with Sherman in the first two sentences of the review. So the New Yorker Spence's photographs are worth engaging with, but only as soul authored formalist works that align with the predominantly American art historical narrative collaboration consciousness raising and the heterodox methods that comprise various approaches to radical interrogations of the documentary and use of photographic documents, the genesis of Spence's work all but disappear. The theme from this example that the contemporary art world has taken up the job of placing and positioning the single artist known as quote unquote Joe Spence. The art world as it were, and it's codependent components from the art market, private and public museums and galleries and the Academy have begun to fix Joe Spence and her legacy within art history's pantheon. To what extent do institutional protocols and procedures mute the anti institutional motivation and Spence's collaborative work, work that as art historian shown a Wilson states, value the rhetoric of the photographic message over and above all else. And if these processes and protocols do have a muffling effect, and I believe they do in parts. So what strategies must be mobilized to preserve not only material integrity, ie proper housing temperature and humidity control vaults etc. But more importantly, the integrity of the material, can professional archival practice such as my own preserve this mandate from within institutions, or does archival preservation posthumously threaten its critique. In other words can formal archives become alternative institutions that preserve the motivation of Spence's work. Two files in the rise and image centers Joe Spence Memorial archive, and how I am conceiving of them in the collection demonstrate how these questions might begin to be answered. The first file is comprised of 100 high quality color photocopies and inkjet printouts, measuring 42 by 29.6 centimeters. A number of the images are collaborative photo therapy pictures, Spence made between her cancer diagnosis, and shortly before her death, or their informational composites made by Dennett to explain Spence's trajectory and her working methods. The second file is an answering machine cassette containing what I consider an iteration of children photographed. The first exhibition Spence was ever involved with in 1973 as a founding member of Children's Rights Workshop where she and Dennett first met. For various components of cataloging at the rise and image center, we refer in part to cataloging cultural objects, otherwise known as CCO, the popular American set of guidelines best practices and metadata standards for describing as the manual states quote, museum collections, visual resources collections, archives, and libraries with a primary emphasis on art and architecture. It is a manual design specifically for the description of physical objects as the author state in the general guidelines chapter that are quote, meant to be perceived primarily through the use of sites created by the use of skill and imagination and exhibit an aesthetic of quality and type that would be collected by art museums and private collectors. And quote, to be clear, this is a set of guidelines developed to standardize the description of architecture, plus objects made with the intention of being perceived as art, slowly through the sense of site, and the criteria by which something is worth describing under CCO's umbrella is determined by what museums and private collectors deem of a certain yet undefined aesthetic quality. Under CCO's umbrella then these two files I've mentioned would likely garner no description whatsoever, and would possibly end up on the deaccession list as a consequence of cherry picking. Yet upon closer scrutiny of the photocopies and printouts, one notices a portion of the images that are discreetly numbered on the backs, comprising a set of 49 sequence pictures. The historian Eric Catteller suggests that that that what we've come to refer to as the archival turn in the mid 1990s forced unnecessary refocusing of the archivist role. It shifted from quote the inactive stage of the life of recorded information to the front end of the records continuum and quote. He further states that quote the archivist professional has to understand the way people create and maintain connections and archives to arrive at such an understanding, one must take into account the stage that precedes archiving. That is what he calls archivalization and neologism denoting the conscious or unconscious choice determined by social factors, determined by social and cultural factors to consider something worth archiving. To extend extending Catteller's archivalization to the Joe Spence Memorial Archive, the photocopies and printouts read as discursive manifestation of Spence and Dennett's polemic project. They were likely made in the mid 1990s, before the widespread arrival of the Internet, and used by Dennett for informal showings instances work, and as reference for scholars and students and other interested individuals visiting the archive. The photocopier one must recall was not only a machine used for business present in most offices in the latter half of the 20th century, but also associated with activists and socially engaged archivist artists using its inexpensive reproductive capabilities to disseminate visual and textual messages. As Katie corn says in her 2016 book, adjusted margin, the copy machine is deeply entangled in in histories of 1970s, 1980s and 1990s subcultures, playing an especially notable role in the era's punk street art and DIY movements, What is clear then when archivalization is employed as a strategy is that Dennett's photocopies and printouts were kept in the archive for a reason. As he continued to deposit the original panels of numerous single authored and collaborative panel projects in institutional collections, be on the family album, the picture of health and one iteration of remodeling photo history at the Museum of contemporary art in Barcelona, for example, photocopies and digital printouts of no value whatsoever as originals in the art market, continued to be used in the same manner the panels once were to open alternate spaces and audiences to an engagement with photography rooted in a desire for social change via community agency and education. Like their predecessor panel exhibitions they had an essential function as cheaply made and easy to distribute showings of photographic work. Dennett's propensity for copies did not stop in the 22 years between Spence's death from leukemia in 1992, and the Ryerson image center receiving its final accrual of the archive in 2014. At the level of records creation in the arch in archival work, then it's photocopies are not titled as miscellaneous photocopies and printouts at best, or deaccession at worst, they are given the proper title. Joe Spence photographs from the archives. Likewise with the second file on a telephone answering machine cassette in an income on an incoming recorded message left at 152 upper street. A male caller rings photography workshop and indicates his interest in children photographed and asks for additional information on it. Halfway through his message spent picks up the phone. A table to answer before the machine the recording captures their entire conversation. In it the caller asked questions while Spence answers explaining that the show is went missing describing the exhibition, how it was organized and makes recommendations to resources towards recreating it as a slide presentation. Should the color need or want to this recording articulated in the sonic register as both a description of the project and direction on how to recreate it and use it for one's own purposes. Signifies perfectly the central driving force behind any manifestation of Spence's photographic work, education, engagement and action. To my mind, this recording is and has the potential to be a completely legitimate version of the project. Although I'm now arriving at my conclusion at the beginning of her 2017 book listening to images feminist cultural theorist Tina camp states that any good introduction begins as a quote throat clearing gesture. The kind that introduces any inquiry with a series of queries that creates an analytic space for thinking and quotes camps primary inquiry is how to build a radical visual archive of the African diaspora from identification photographs. Similar images assumed to function only as forms of institutional accounting and management, and to serve the regulatory needs of the state and the classificatory imperatives of colonization. At the heart of camps project is refusal, the refusal to see identification photographs exclusively as sites of social reproduction in her books. Indeed her book central concern is to question and contest institutional technologies of capture, and to ask what is at stake in questioning state sanctioned archival practices. The throat clearing gesture of my conclusion runs along similar lines to camps introduction, albeit in the opposite direction. The camps project reorients the meaning of photographs created by and for the institutional archive. My project strives to maintain house expenses photographic work was oriented at the time of its making. As it traverses the boundary that lies between the proverbial street or community center and the museological archival institution. In the paper on the Joe spends Memorial archive a number of years ago, an audience member who knew spends when she was alive stated that in dealing with her history and her archive, her voice must be heard. While I do not claim to channel or revive her voice, I have tried to find traces of it at various registers across scattered pieces of her archive that are accessible. While the rhetoric of spends his message, I take into serious consideration what that means beyond what we see, and indeed beyond what we have been trained to see through certain guidelines and archival work. Major modern art galleries museums and other formal institutions will continue to frame and reframe spends as collaborative and collective work, but I do not believe this represents a forfeit for socialist feminist politics. It seems to me that archival work must now take up the role of unfixing that spends spoke of where the archivist reading with the archive as historian Tom Nez with emphasizes becomes tantamount. Indeed, archivist deploying methods of archivalization at the level of records creation affirms the potential for spends his radical project to survive in the archive. In fact, it is these strategies that English English literature scholar Elizabeth Freeman states avoids any hint of nostalgia or disregarding of the past, and instead attempts to quote, mind the present for signs of undetected energy from past revolutions, end quote. Thank you very much. I would like to invite Fiona to give a presentation, and this would be approximately the time at which the public might think about putting their questions into the Q&A box. Thank you. Can you see my slides. Okay. That's great. You're me okay thank you. And so thank you very much for the invitation to speak today and thank you to Charlene for that brilliant paper. I'll just get started. And Sunil Gupta's recent retrospective exhibition at the photographers gallery took its name from a series the artist produced in 1999. From here to eternity explores themes of exclusion, alienation and belonging in the context of good just changing relationship with HIV and his own body during a period of particular ill health, pairing images of him doctors appointments or undergoing treatment at home with photographs of the exteriors of gay bars and sex clubs in South London. It engages both with the historical representation of people with AIDS, and shifts in that representation and in gay life in the UK in the late 1990s, after the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapies. I thought that it might be time he said to think about how the virus affects my life. The series had a kind of archival impulse, particularly in the context of Gupta's changing relationship with HIV in the late 1990s, following his own diagnosis in 1995, and what Gupta perceived as shifts in gay life in London in this period. He wanted to record this weird social history, he told Ted Kerr in 2017. With the arrival of AIDS suddenly there were sex clubs, and they mushroomed. Standing outside these clubs and situated instead in medicalized contexts or private domestic spaces, the two held apart by the diptych form. The series also plays with fears of infection as infiltration or border crossing, alluding to the racialized language of contagion, which consistently frames cultural and political discourse about epidemics and their treatment. This diptych in particular addressed is how queer diasporic Indian identity is constructed shaped by experiences of belonging and not belonging in multiple contexts simultaneously. The representation of the body in each pairing in the series is a localized experience, becoming legible in contingent relation to its surroundings. Behind Gupta and his shih tzu babe in London, hangs a photograph of the Couture Menard, a triumphal stone column in South Delhi built in the 13th century in the early years of the Delhi Sultanate, and intended to establish the city as an axis of the Islamic world. The tower is engraved with Quranic text and inscriptions which speak of the power of the Sultanate and Islam, including that the Menara was built in order to cast a shadow of God in the world of East and West. That knowledge cast a shadow on both the question on the billboard under the railway arch, a poster promoting the homophobic Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in Brazil in the late 1970s. The growling lion above the entrance to imperial gardens, a club which played host to the fetish night fist, the pairing of the framed inscriptions and messages of power and dominance, creating an ambivalent interplay between two imperial gardens. The ambivalence that underpins this series is also present in Gupta's earlier work exploring gay Indian experience, primarily the series exiles, in which dissonance and ambivalence about gay visibility, community and identity politics are emphasized through the practice of staged documentary, and the interplay of conversational text and constructed image. It must be marvellous for you in the West with your bars, clubs, gay liberation and all that, with a tone that one of my students recently described as a sass. Although Gupta was involved with the AIDS and photography group in the 1980s and developed the exhibition and book project ecstatic antibodies resisting the AIDS mythology. With his friend and collaborator Tessa Buffen between 1987 and 1990. He has also, he's always felt wary of being what he called an AIDS photographer, a concern that plays out across this series. It will certainly be read as an affirmative statement of queer resilience from here to eternity also captures the ambivalent experience of living with HIV long term by the late 1990s. The physical and emotional labor of chronic illness and grief, as well as Gupta's feelings of ambivalence in relation to the role of AIDS photographer. He viewed it in the present given further changes in HIV treatment and the closure of almost all the venues depicted, as well as an explosion of interest in queer visibility and mainstream cultural institutions and popular cultural discourse in the UK from queer British state Britain in 2017 to it's a sin on channel four in 2021. From here to eternity has taken on an archival quality, amplifying Gupta stated interest in recording this weird social history. The sense of the series value as an archival one both then and now is emphasized in some way in the reuse of this title for the retrospective and the accompanying publication. An intimate and informal collection of snapshots flyers and letters that Gupta has collected over the past five decades. But thinking about the series from here to eternity as largely or straightforwardly archival risks losing sight of its profound ambivalence and failing to think about the critical intervention it makes into AIDS representation, as well as the morbid humor and self deprecation of this reference to endless temporality in the title of a retrospective exhibition, which looks back at decades of work and explores among other things experiences of aging illness and death. In an essay for the book publication from here to eternity, Mark Sealy the exhibition's curator described the ephemera foregrounded in the publication as moments outside the frame that shaped the form of the exhibition itself. As we, Sealy and Gupta moved closer towards the final stages of this exhibition Sealy recalled, our discussions became more of a process of collecting recollections. The ephemera of his life facilitated this process and helped us comprehend what he looks for as an artist. In conversation with Mason Lever Yap as part of the public program for the photographer's gallery retrospective. Gupta spoke of his desire in this exhibition and more widely to give the ephemera of his life and work equal footing or waiting so that it was understood alongside the work on display in the gallery as one half of an equation. The ephemera Gupta emphasised is not a footnote. But neither is an exhibition or a catalog and archive of ephemera in any traditional or institutional sense. Thinking of an exhibition or book in this way does however underscore Jack Halberstam's observation that the archive is not simply a repository, it is also a theory of cultural relevance, or indeed Derry does notion that archivization produces as much as it records the event. Indeed Kate I corn has argued that contemporary interest in the archive both as subject of inquiry and creative locus for activism and art comes from a desire to identify new ways of manipulating the present through a turn to the past. As political agency is eroded under neoliberalism, particularly collective modes of organizing and funding, things we see represented throughout the selection of ephemera in this book. From here to eternity the exhibition and the book make clear that Gupta's archive is both ephemeral and enduring exhaustive and partial and held in his rented home in south London has a complex relationship to formal institutionalization. The affirmative and often unequivocally progressivist LGBTQ politics, which has characterized much of the recent visibility of queer visual culture in larger museums and galleries in the UK risks obscuring the precarious conditions in which many archives of queer British photography currently exist. Indeed the precarious relationships that many living practitioners like Gupta have with arts institutions, sometimes through choice stemming from concerns about agency and or control over one's archive and access and with academic institutions as visiting or fixed term lecturers. Visibility does not necessarily or quickly lead to economic security and ensure cultural longevity. And the archive or archival inclusion or presence is not visibility or accessibility par excellence. As Diana Taylor notes is a myth that the archive is always visible that things do not disappear for the from the archive or reappear there as cataloging practices and search terms change. This is something I've written about elsewhere considering the framing of this issue in the exhibition guide for queer British are at Tate, which address the partial nature of the history presented in the exhibition. This is a familiar narrative of archival gaps and conspicuous incompleteness. Much material has been lost or destroyed it read. This is a history punctuated by bonfires and dustbins. Queer experience is diverse. It continues and there are some perspectives for which we have found little surviving material. This is not a definitive selection of queer British artworks. Placing responsibility on the contemporary visitor on those outside the institution. The curators of queer British art hope that the exhibition would, they wrote be part of a bigger conversation that will encourage more material, more stories and more lives to be discovered. This kind of fixation on evidentiary holds this sense that the archives inadequacy lies in its incompleteness feeds the fiction that a complete archive can actually be gathered. If only we had the resources and the inclination. When it's failure is in fact this sense of archival totality as a possibility. In some ways the idea of a counter archive, while it is politically valuable, if not essential in many circumstances, can actually fuel this archival hegemony and the fallacy of archival totality and no ability. How might we move beyond thinking about visibility in relation to the archive in the binary terms of gaps and lacuna re discoveries and evidence. Working in progress but at this stage I found myself drawn to Claire Hemings work on the anarchist writer and activist Emma Goldman, her archives, her ambivalent relationship to feminist politics in the early 20th century, and how she and her work have been deployed by feminist scholars and activists since her death. Ambivalence Hemings writes is in fact fundamental to both the past and the present. It animates political struggles over and with precisely those objects we imagine we inherit as knowable. And it runs back and forth across time to challenge progress or loss narratives about where we come from, and what political terrain we occupy now. It runs counter to a rights based approach that characterizes the 20th century as one of increased recognition, focusing instead on what is lost through a politics of certainty. This might be compared with the practice of staged or constructed documentary, particularly as deployed by Gupta in an investigation of queer identity, HIV and AIDS representation and diaspora experience. Staged documentary itself might be seen as a kind of archival ambivalence, a model for thinking about the relationship between ephemera and the work about the limits of visibility as offered to marginalize groups and individuals by dominant cultural institutions, about the importance or value of ambivalence as a model for thinking about queer archival politics and representation more broadly. In the midst of this growing visibility and simultaneous awareness of archival precarity both materially and conceptually various grassroots initiatives in Glasgow Newcastle London, often using the exhibition format, to indicate a strong interest among a younger generation of artists, art historians and curators in recent histories of queer photographic cultures and community in the UK, particularly collective practices of organizing and sharing that were autonomous, informal and or non institutional and an ambivalent relationship to the terms on which queer photographers in the UK who preceded them are offered visibility by its major cultural institutions. I am part of that generation, my interest in this is not purely theoretical, although it's informed by a growing body of scholarship in queer and trans studies which takes opacity seriously, which thinks critically about the politics of visibility. Along with a number of friends who are also invested in queer art historical and curatorial work, many of whom are here today. I am actively engaged in conversations with Sunil Gupta about how his archive might be preserved and shared in ways that retain that collective spirit that are accessible, but don't flatten out the complexities of queer identity, racialization, and diasporic identity, and indeed the practice of photography itself. And it is that experience, along with Sunil's dry wit that has led me to try to begin to try and theorize this idea of archival ambivalence and inquire whether to paraphrase Lauren Berlant ambivalence might actually be central to the project of inciting transformation and rejecting the legitimating forms of a dominant culture, offering another way of thinking critically about the relationship between artists and institutions, the politics of queer visibility, and of the archival turn. Thank you. Thank you Fiona and and Charlene for those fascinating papers. I have to say, I started making notes and I have a bunch of field notes to consider. And as once again, if there are questions to be had we will take them shortly. What's interesting for me to think about and Charlie please do come back. I didn't turn myself off someone else did so I can't. Oh, there we go. There, there I am. Hello. Wonderful. No, I was saying that it's it's somewhat refreshing to think about how one is audaciously, you know, from kind of modernist benopticon through both of these papers. And I'm often thinking of information paradigms new ways of witnessing new ways of creating information paradigms. When I was thinking about your papers, and how we might privilege and offer broad flexible new cartographies of lens based practices over time. And of course complex historical matter relationships within the wider orbit of visual cultures and certainly this is something that happens in both of the cases, you know. And I think it's, it's also fascinating to think about archival to editorial editorial interventions and on things about an exhibition or you practice and taking material out of the archive. And these, of course, continue to intensify over a period of time depending on the cultural balance of the moment the zeitgeist of the moment. And especially as we were in the moment of post truth and alternative facts, I often think about what is the place of an archive today. And some of that leads me to think about who is doing the archiving. Right, so Charlene, as you mentioned, how does an institution and so much of your paper for me in my mind was like the state versus the people puts it in legal terms. How much, you know, of what we consider about ways in which archiving is done is about who is archiving that. So if it is a philosopher, you know, let's have the trajectory of archival futures now if it is a philosopher or, you know, or an academic of some kind or an anthropologist. Certainly the ways of archiving material will change and maybe they will then change the afterlife of that material. And so I just want you to reflect a little bit about that as one of the questions what happens when we change who the archivist is, and will that help change the nature of how the institution works around the material as well. I can reflect about that a little bit with respect to maybe some of Joe Spence's ideas about what should happen to the material, of course, in time, if there were sort of clues and hints that were given I think you, you sort of intimated over there but something more about that would be extremely exciting to hear. And Fiona I was thinking about multiple sort of vortexes when when you were talking about how an archive, especially with respect to Sunil's in this exhibition is put out. I was what came to mind is also the voice of his subjects who are often anonymous, right. And it has to have had been that way in India at a particular point of time, and often is even the case today. But when we look at that dynamic when we think about, you know, exhibition practice but also the level of ambivalence that you're talking about. As one of the key turns, can we also think about questions of different publics before whom that exhibition is shown so for instance and so much of the material also relates to South Asia I wonder if this exhibition, what kind of a life would it have had if it was in India at this time and I say that of course in South Asia, knowing that it's extremely difficult and a lot of what has happened and I know Sunil was involved with this of course we were dealing with this antiquated law from the 1860s. And then there was a legal code 377, which considered homosexuality to be illegal of course this was only repealed in 2018 to consider that span of time. I also consider, you know, how an exhibitionary sensibility will have to change across different publics. So these are kind of open ended and they're conjectural. And I thought I would leave it that way, and free willing to extend because we're thinking of futures we have an experience in senior. So maybe if you could share some of your thoughts and feel now then we can get on to you. And then I will try to solve some questions. Yeah, definitely. So, to answer the first question or one of the first questions you had about Joe spent his final wishes she was very explicit, you know, in a letter of final wishes that exists as a photo coffee, which for me is brilliant in at the Burke Beck. Joe spent Memorial Library at Burke Beck University. I have a couple photo copies of the same letter where she really says, please don't make me into a coffee table book, like explicitly she says that. And please be sure that my work maintains its polemic and keep keep it socially useful. So there, there are these final letters where this sentiment and you know, make it into some kind of Memorial archive or something, she says in the letter. So there is that trace of sort of her wishes of how things are to go. So I am the first archivist at the Ryerson image center like we really just opened our doors in 2012 so I have a real chance to sort of set the tone of how the work gets done there so I'm not really following in anybody's footsteps which is both daunting and exciting. So, I also should say that working in a sort of professional having your job title say archivist means that there are controlled vocabularies and there are metadata standards that one follows that I am I am sort of a rogue archivist is what I think of myself I'm always trying to overturn those control vocabularies or have my registration department at my institution like add, add photo copy like to the to the potential words for me to describe things to our lists. You know, a philosopher might go at the work in thinking about the archive whereas I go at the work thinking about work in in archives plural. It really for me is that is sort of the big difference is that archives are not found they're not the mythologies around the archive as these sort of places to be discovered in this archival mode that Fiona address a little bit about how you said, I think you what you said in your paper that really stuck with me is this idea of rediscoveries and evidence is those archives are created they're made by people that work in archives. And so, it can depend on who the person is how how much an archivist is willing to follow the rules or try to like push the boundaries depending on what has happened in the sort of professional archival literature over the last 20 years, which is some of the writings that I cited in my paper to think about why things were archived why they were there who made them, and to reflect out in the record. So I'm sorry that might have been a very roundabout way of getting to some of the things you were thinking. But I mean even Terry then it considered himself an archivist, and I had visited his, his place in islington and it's, you know, he really functioned in a way that the professional archival field would say is not an archivist but I considered him an archivist to in his own way. So. Thank you. So I think it's really interesting to point out the relationship between as you did between between ambivalence and anonymity as it operates in a series like I think thinking about it I think is a really compelling way actually to think about ambivalence as a means of rejecting the legitimating forms of a dominating culture because I think part of what's going on in something like I think that's one of those and I think Sunil has explored this in later work as well as actually, you know, saying that the language of gay liberation in the West doesn't isn't the most effective terminology to to use here and if you use that as your search term you're going to find very much which is happening in addition to thinking about questions of the risk of de anonymizing people and of the risks of visibility to a certain extent. I think it's important to think or to complicate the idea that when Sunil's work about queer Indian identity and experience has been shown in Britain I mean it's that it's been sort of accepted there and that that's not happened when it's been shown in India because actually there are examples of exiles for example being shown in South all and it being actually received really really negatively by South Asian community groups in in Britain so whereas I think at least one of the times that it's been shown in India know some of the times his work has been shown it's been subject to censorship but certainly not all of the, all of the time so I think it's, it's important to to complicate that as as well. If that makes sense. Absolutely. I mean so much of what both of you talked about our sort of. On the one hand, you know, how does one reach the space of a public engagement is so called popular engagement and, on the other hand, our institutional commitment that one might have also as pedagogues. Right, the line between the two sometimes is extremely stretched. That is the challenge and the terrain on which one should work because of course joining the two ends of the pole as it were, if they are considered ends of the pole is the commitment that one makes over time. And so, at the same time, it provides I think in a sense, perhaps open ground for pedagogical investigations, right. I mean the work as you mentioned Charlie and you mentioned this more than once is sort of documentary but in quote unquote post documentary in sense as well. And of course when we're thinking of the work of Sunil one could also go along the lines of performativity. And this might also happen in the work of, you know, in the case of Joe Spence to an extent. I want to ask you this question before I do move on to some of the questions from the audience about how far you think, and where do you think rather not how far but where do you think the pedagogy around lens based practices on the one hand dealing with this idea of reproduction reproducibility with respect to Joe Spence. I mean we are in an era right now, where what's happened Instagram is being archived and being presented as well. So we've certainly moved into a kind of digital terrain, in which everything that is, you know, meant in is being sort of cash in somewhere is also being created into some form of an analog inscription. I give the inscription a little bit. And with again respect to, you know, Sunil's work I'm thinking of the broader terrain I'm also thinking with respect to how one creates a discursive field that is going to be, you know, inclusive and inviting to an extent to a great number of practitioners who in this moment are also feeling, you know, challenged by this moment of xenophobia and the reason why I mentioned, sort of our contemporary predicament is also because it becomes at many times, you know, a block to accessing either pedagogy or creating interfaces and where does one go at that moment in time, what does an archive serve at that particular moment. And I suppose one of the questions I'm therefore asking is that if one is thinking of the afterlife of both of these collections. How does one sort of connected to broader fields of investigation. I guess that could be the question. Have you reflected on those aspects. With you and with you. I might have to think about that one for a little bit longer. I suppose some of this has to do with, you know, the very question you had of how the material is placed, what it's doing within the archive and the moment at which it can be pulled out and become accessible as part of the collective as part of a shared intelligence, rather than an inscribed one of an institution. Yeah, that moment to pivot in a sense. Yeah, I mean, I mean, maybe this is a simplistic answer I'm not sure but I think for us for for us specifically and we are embedded in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. So for us, actually, that moment of engagement with the archive happens almost every week. Actually, we have those moments of engagement with our collection through, you know, just classes through papers through fellowship programs like we are continually irrigating our collection, all the time, almost to the point where my head is spinning with how many people are coming in to engage with the archives. And also, what you said about reproduction, when I was first, you know, moving into the Joe Spence archive and open actually opening the bubble wrap in 2013 I guess that was starting to try to figure out what is this project what is this body and finding these different things all over the place. Really allowed me to have a real sort of really embodied understanding of that multiple the sort of reproductive, you know, Spencer's work never existed as limited edition prints it was unlimited iterations that just went and reproduced and reproduced projects that were on this color of a background that color of a background reproduced in her book with different diptych swap like things were really meant to be used and reproduced and taken up and change depending on the context and the use. So I, for me, the the moving into this project was really taking what I was given as guidelines and standards and the project I was supposed to be mapping that onto and under they were not working. So I sort of went forward with that in terms of new pedagogies and you know I speak about it when students are in our research center I speak about this sort of rogue archivist I've become just by half instance. So that's sort of where I have my moments of synergy is with students and fellows coming into our research center continually. Thank you. I don't know if that answered your question. I'll just add a bit I think if I've grasped the terms of the question correctly I mean one thing that's important to say is Sunil's archive and you don't necessarily get a sense of this from the publication that accompanied the exhibition at the photographer's gallery it's an archive of his own work so he looks after part of Tessa Boffin's archive, which there's really interesting parallels and things that we could think about in relation to the status of Joe Spence is kind of disparate archive as well. And what might happen to Tessa Boffin's archive in the future, and it's different components, but also is very much the, it's the gupta and Singh archive so it's his archive but also it's Sharon Singh's archive as well and things that they've collected as well as quite a lot of historic material relating to amateur photography in India that Sunil has actually collected as well and that exists in his flat in London so I think his archive is bigger than himself so already kind of opens out onto these various other histories. One thing I did want to say is, I think it's interesting to think it's not, I don't think it's institutionalization per se that's a problem for someone like Sunil because so much of his practice depended upon the funding that was available through something like the GLC in the 1980s so I think it's about institutionalization and what that means in the present, I mean I mentioned our kind of neoliberal present so I think a lot of it has to do with relationships to universities. And I understand that that's complex because he and I collaborate and talk about these archives and I'm, you know, deeply embedded within an academic institution but his relationship to academic institutions is quite a different one from from mine. Yes, I once visited Sunil's flat also, he has some letters like between him and Spence also so like he, yeah, his archive is, yeah I sort of have a sense of what it is, the expansiveness that, yeah. And all archives have that to, of course, agree letters or other things that someone might have left at your house but I think he does. Yeah, he sees himself as looking after some of these other these are other people as well. Fascinating, I mean it sort of leads on to many questions, even regarding cross disciplinary practices. And of course, migratory practices generally and of course, the moment of the making of something is not actually the place where it will eventually end up it sort of has a life in circulation, which also creates it's more of, of reception it's more of, maybe it senses the original object questions of authenticity I guess all of these crop up all the time when I'm thinking now, also with respect to the Joe Spence archive but without further ado we have a question from Samira Bose, who says thank you very much for your incisive presentations and curious if there's a contradiction in the impulse to provide access circulate and allow free movement of materials in an archive for example through digitization and the need to be an inverted commas true to the narrativization of the archive by whom it is created. I mean, I think I would say firstly I don't think that, so access is really important to, I think Sunil's approach to archiving. I would describe that as a sort of free movement of materials I think access is is sort of more, maybe more targeted than that that making sure that it reaches communities perhaps are not academic researchers or curators for example. I think he ideally would, I don't want to speak for him but my sense is actually completely free movement is not really what he's he's looking at because that means that it's not contextualized properly but I think that's distinct from the kind of need to be true as you say to the narration of the archive by whom it was created. I think, I think the fact that Sunil looks after the archives of others it's not just his own work complicates this kind of idea of what we might think of as a true narrativization of the archive but this is also why I'm trying to think about his archive and his approach to his work and to the practice of stage documentary so that's a way of not thinking of the archive and the work as as separate they're distinct they have circulate economically and mean different things, aesthetically and conceptually but I think that's where the idea of narrativizing the archive thinking about in relation to his approach to his work is is really important to me. Hopefully that answers the question to the third extent. But I mean so. Joe Spence passed away into 1992 and Tara Dennett was sort of in that archive for a long time. And his he so from what I understand from the way the archive was given to us and the number of sort of CD rounds of images and things that have been compiled both digitally sort of this timeline through digital technology of the 90s and into the early 90s and the anecdotal stories I know where he would just, he would just give a CD ROM to visitors who would come to see him and he would say well let me just burn those on a CD for you you take them for your research. So he was very open to dispersing but really by his choice by the communities, by which he wanted the material to go to. He was very explicit in choosing the Ryerson image center as a sort of photographic pop, you know history as a polytechnic education would be used, you know, us as an institution to take the archive, and then Burke back the library was very conscious on his choice he thought about it for quite a long time, and really seriously took it serious. So, I hope that also answers your question about that sort of choice. No, you're right I mean in both cases questions of authorship are extremely sort of central but also to be questioned with respect to what happens in time, I suppose, you know, how does one retain a sense of what is actually inscribed and put down and does it change and I suppose the next question by James Bowden. As he ends says please being the devil's advocate somewhat is that he was really interested in the issue of authorship raised by both papers is the ambivalence around the institutional archiving to some degree itself a product of a relatively conventional concern with things like authorial intent and control. It's interesting because they're the, you know they're projects that we have sets of prints in our Joe Spence Memorial archive. And then I see, you know, the, the same title of project installed at the Tate Britain for example in 2015 when they did a BP sort of spotlight, and it was different, you know, the prints that I have in our collection, for example, libido uprising one of Joe Spence's projects is a bit different. And it was one that was like matted in black mats and sent to like somewhere else I don't remember exactly off the top of my head but that our version is just different than the one that was stayed at the Tate. So, for me that question sort of collapses on itself because the, the sort of finished product, this idea of an archive of an artist for example being, you know, they're, they're working through the projects and the, you know all leading up to the finished thing is just never ever how it is with the Joe Spence Memorial archive. I think that's also endlessly frustrating for researchers when they come because I'll say, well, I have 14 CD roms. I have a bunch of photocopies color photocopies chromogenic prints and black and whites which ones, like this is it these are the images that were made to make projects in different iterations across different venues for different purposes. I mean, you know remodeling photo history is mounted on black, that was the art version used at an exhibition at MIT. The red version that was in my slideshow is in the collection at in Spain and that one was the teaching version. That was the laminated one. You know so it's the there again is the, the, the sort of contradiction I come up against when I hit my guidelines and the thing that I actually have that I'm sort of map these guidelines on to they don't match. So. Sorry Fiona would you like to address. Yes, yeah I'll address the, the devil's advocate. I think it is a really interesting question and I don't think there's even when we're talking about artists who have worked collectively I don't think there's anything that's inherently sort of problematic about a concern with their personal intent and wanting to have some control over how your archive is represented or preserves and how your work is is presented publicly in relation to that. I think. I suppose with someone like Sunil I mean he has a commercial, you know, he's represented by a commercial gallery has a commercial career at the same time so if he's. I think it's important to sort of to note that and think that actually perhaps a lot of the time his relationship to his work as an individual author. Does have a lot to do with the need to make a living as as an artist in the this cultural economy. And so I think yeah I think that was my initial sort of response to to I think he's. Yeah I don't I don't really have any more to add actually about that I think it's. I just sort of think through like you know I use that slide of the recent exhibition in Rome where the pages from from here to eternity are used as wallpaper and when I first saw that I thought that was so kind of playful particularly in relation to kind of sort of cult of personality and and I'm still sort of thinking through what that might mean in relation to like. Yeah, Sunil's work in his sort of status as an as an artist at the moment and how his his work circulates and is bought and sold and circulates within a commercial gallery context as well. And then this is something that that comes up I believe with respect to the Joe Spence, you know, election and her sort of interest in moving away from certain art sort of that's in parentheses over time but I think these are sort of real questions that will constantly and and I think forever productively you know be part of a growing arts fear of growing academic sphere and perhaps given the extent to which images may productively or ethically be deployed over time. The sort of sensibility of these questions was how to retain a certain nomadicness within an archive and within a culture. How can one perhaps remain speculative to an extent and not commit to one idea for too long. And adapt and evolve perhaps with time and I suppose in order to do that, one should always keep in mind that there might always remain some things that are invisible. And behind the frame, to an extent, but I would like to thank both of you, Charlene and Fiona for those wonderful presentations my real privilege to be moderating it and thank you again for those questions from the audience, I think we're up for a break now. And I think we will be back shortly in about 15 minutes with a keynote presentation by RIA Frosch. So with that, I suppose we conclude this session. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you for your thoughtful chairing as well. Thank you. Welcome back. Thank you for joining us again. I'm RIA Frosch. I'm the digital producer of the photographer's gallery. I'm really happy to be able to welcome artists Antonio Roberts. Before he starts his keynote presentation, which is titled copy paste. I just want to encourage you to please send through your questions in the Q&A feature, which we hope to be able to answer and respond to during the discussion part of this section. I think we're just going to jump straight in. So I'm going to pass over to you, Antonio. Really, thanks for the introduction, RIA. And yeah, looking forward to the Q&A afterwards where we can get to talk more about everything. So hi everyone. Thanks very much to photographer's gallery and Paul Menon Center for asking me to be here today. It's a real honor having worked with especially photographer's gallery in the last year. It's really nice to be back. So yeah, today I'm going to be just doing a little introduction to my work. And yeah, I think I'll jump straight into it. I'll just get to share my screen. Let's hope technology is on my side today. Sorry, share screen and desktop too. Cool. Hopefully you should all be seeing that now. That's great. Thanks, Antonio. Cool. I always love when technology works the first time. So yes, so as I mentioned, my name is Antonio Roberts and I'm an artist and curator based in Birmingham. My artwork has lots of different strands to it, including performance, video, film, curating visual art and more. And I'll go into a few of those today. Of course, you can see that if I try to go into all of that will be here for a few hours. So in my talk today called copy, paste, I'm going to be going into my practice with a focus on the conflict between copyright and technology and in particular how artists are kind of working and sharing artwork in digital age. And so before I get onto that fully, just a brief introduction to my artwork. So I mentioned that I'm primarily a digital artist and so the majority of my work I'm making using a computer, this computer in fact. And so, and my work is both exhibited online and in physical locations though increasingly more kind of like online as well. Sometimes it manifests itself in artwork like this which is made in 3D modeling software. Sometimes it's using software like Photoshop which, you know, I guess it's sort of like very familiar processes to those of you who work digitally and that's how I'm working. So yeah, just a few examples of the work I made. More often than not, my artwork incorporates programming or software, you know, coding, and that's a really big part of what I do. So when I'm using programming, I instead of like, I guess, making images in very familiar ways, I'm constructing images using code like this. And so I'll like, have the code written set up an environment and then allow the computer to sort of generate an artwork using series of random numbers. Again, go into coding like the whole basis of it today or software like this. And this sort of, I guess, having images generate automatically as a process known as a generative artwork. So I started really doing this around the 2010s. And I'd say that this way of really digging into how computers are working and using artwork as they're making artwork from this. Yeah, I guess it leads me to being quite an inquisitive person. So around 2009, I was really happy to stumble upon something called glitch art. So what glitch art is, it looks a little bit like this, but it's essentially it's anything where art is made using errors, so where you're using the computer and something breaks within it. And exploring this process of glitch art really got me to understand a bit about how images are constructed on computers, how images are represented on computers. And they are just essentially a series of zeros and ones. And so if you were to try and interpret data in a way that it's unfamiliar, it might look something like this. So for example, this is like a JPEG image being interpreted as text. And so yeah, really everything on a computer is just data but different bits of software will interpret that data in ways that you expect you click on an image and it opens. So in exploring glitch art, I really began to understand that with you delved into this code, this fabric of how things are made, you can kind of understand how they're constructed. And that really becomes apparent when an image breaks down. So as an example, I've created these. So we're using this image on the left. Basically, if you were to save the same image as like a JPEG or a TIFF or a PSD or whatever, it may look the same, the underlying code is different. And so when they start to break, when they glitch, they start to break down in different ways. So with this image on the left, I've convinced a JPEG and I've glitched it and that's what's happening on the right. So when a JPEG glitches, some of you might have experienced this accidentally, hopefully accidentally and it looks like this. Whereas, you know, here's the same image again on the left is interpreted as a big map image of BMP for those who want to know. And then on the right is a PNG file. And again, an SGI file, which might not be in the file format, which you've seen before. And then finally on the right is a TGA file. So yeah, through working in this way of glitch, I really began to understand and comprehend that like things on a computer. When they break down, they reveal a bit of how they're made, which personally, I think is quite beautiful and is something I really like to explore. So I was really doing this a lot around 2010. That's when I started working in this way with glitches. And a lot of that was really exploratory and looking at the techniques of it. But moving around into like 2014, 15, I was really thinking about the, I guess, the politics of glitch of glitch and even the images themselves and how people are making and sharing work, especially online. And to that extent, I was really interested in copyright, which is something that we've, I'm sure, have all come against in some way. Like we've had conflicts in some way, whether that be uploading images and them getting taken down or having to request someone take down some of our images. But I really wanted to understand it because it's something that governs how we all work. But that, I guess, there is a little bit of not much of an understanding of it. So I'm not going to obviously delve into all of copyright because it's extensive, it's expensive. But very briefly, copyright is a law, set of laws, which really just allows you, it details who can use the artwork that you make and how it can be shared and if they can share it or not. At least in the UK and much of the Western world, copyright is something that is automatic, so you don't necessarily need to put this copyright symbol on next to your work. And yeah, it's something which, and importantly, copyright exists on your work that you create, copyright exists for the length of your life plus 70 years. So that means that after those 70 years after you die, the artwork will enter the public domain, allowing people to then make use of it for whatever, well, for pretty much any reason. So they could make reproductions of it, they could interpret it in their own way without having to necessarily seek permission from you or your estate. So that's something which exists and these terms of copyright, it being 70 years have changed quite a lot, largely due to one company or one person, Disney. So Disney's have lobbied several times to extend the terms of the copyright many, many times. So this here what you're seeing on screen now is the first video or the first video to feature Mickey Mouse, which was Steamboat Willie from 1928. And so you can probably guess if that was life plus 70 years and Mickey Mouse should actually be in the public domain by now. But because of their lobbying, Disney or at least Mickey Mouse won't go into the public domain now until 2024 and that was through something called the Copyright Term Extension Act. So, and I'm sure once 2024 does come around, I would be really surprised if Disney don't do something to try and extend the copyright terms because that would mean that then suddenly the image of Mickey Mouse would go into the public domain allowing them to use it. And I do find their actions quite questionable for many, many, many reasons. But why are they, I guess, lobbying to protect much of, not just obviously Mickey Mouse, but all of their characters. I find it really perplexing because if you look at Disney's IP, all of their characters, a lot of them are drawn from public domain works. So a lot of them are from folk tales, which they have then made into their own cartoons and subsequently not necessarily own them themselves. So if you look at, and just a couple of examples, if you look at the Little Mermaid on the right was taken from the Little Mermaid Hans-Christiansen story from, I believe, was 1870. I've got it written down. If I can't find it, then that's okay. Yeah, so, yeah, 1837. And then, so yeah, that's what the Little Mermaid is based on. And of course, Hans-Christiansen's story is in the public domain. And then you look at the Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling had the story in 1894. So both of these are based on public domains work. So I guess in one way, they clearly are an example of how the public domain works, how it works in favor of people and how it can enable creativity. And I guess like people to reinterpret works, yet they have lobbied extensively themselves to prevent us from doing the same. So the copyright terms back when these were made were much shorter, but yet now they are so much longer. And again, no doubt that it's going to try to be extended again. So I've been making work recently, well, say in the last six, seven years about this, about really the difficulty of interpreting, especially Disney's work and how that has wider ranging impacts on the creative world. So in 2016, I did an exhibition at was part of a group exhibition called Common Property at Gerwood Space or Gerwood Arts in London. And in this exhibition, I created several works, and this is one I want to show you now, which is called Transformative Use. And it takes the idea that if you change an artwork enough, then there can always be an argument that, well, maybe it's a new artwork. It's not just a plagiarism, it's not just a derivative work. It's transformed enough for it to be a form of new work. So this, what you're seeing here is a vinyl wall installation. So all the vinyl wall and then in the negative space is a projection, a video projection, which I'll talk about in a second. So yeah, and I know that this obviously does and isn't completely transformative in many ways, but I wanted to really blur the boundaries and really be productive and go, well, okay, I have taken the individual parts of these characters. And so is the copyright, I guess, over the whole of the character? Is it, am I safe by just using parts of them? And really just to make the point, I am trying to, I guess, like remix and make something new, not plagiarize. So yeah, in the negative space is a very heavily glitched version of that video that first featured Mickey Mouse called Steamboat Willy, which you can see here. So these are just like a few screen grabs, very heavily glitched. And so now the glitch art, which I mentioned earlier, I'm kind of like using it to express my ideas around copyright and copying. And yeah, so again, hopefully, I do argue that this is quite transformative, not least because it's fairly unrecognizable, and especially in the context of it only being projected into the negative space. So, focusing still on Disney, I, in 2019, I was part of a group exhibition called Wanda at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry, and I created this artwork called Sticker Book, which, again, does something very similar to what I was doing with the transformative use of our work. But this time I was really focusing on, I guess, like deconstructing an image or deconstructing the popular characters to ask really like, are they, by not being recognizable, are they something new? And what constitutes the original character? Because these are just pictures of the installation, and I'll just show you a couple here now, closer. So, yeah, are these characters recognizable in their whole, or is it just certain parts of them that make them recognizable, and therefore, I guess, copyrightable objects? And, yes, again, being quite provocative by moving on this bled line here. But again, it's to make the point that they themselves have remixed and remade things in the public domain, but yet they are preventing us from doing so just for the sake of creativity, not necessarily plagiarism. So these are just close-ups of a couple of them, just so you know, so sorry, I'll go through this in case you're wondering. So the one on the left is Ariel from the Mythical Mermaid, or at least a remix of one on the right is Mickey Mouse. Left is Snow White, and then again next is Donald Duck. So again, it's just using these glitch art methodologies to make the case for a change in copyright laws. So moving on, well, moving actually slightly backwards to before this artwork, and it's not necessarily focusing on images. It's more on logos, which goes into whole like kind of trademarks laws, which is sort of different, but the point is still the same. In 2014, I made this artwork called Copyright Atrophy, which is a website as well if you want to go view the artworks. And using this idea still again a transformative use of something being transformed enough. I wanted to literally kind of like blur to animate this process of an image being broken down into something into a point where it becomes completely divorced from its original and where does that point happen. So I took many, I think there's a few hundred popular logos and through programming, through coding, I would animate their destruction. And let me just show you a couple of gifs or animated gifs of this. So here you can see the McDonald's logo slowly deteriorating. And again, it's like making an adjustment call on at what point does it become just a series of shapes and lines. And does it ever ever achieve that and MTV. And then finally, in this example anyway, YouTube. So again, it's just using these whole glitch art processes, which I was familiar with from the early 2010s. But in a different way for different purposes. So moving forward into more recently. This is a still from a video which I made for an exhibition or an event even at the Victorian Albert Museum in 2019 called copy paste that those words get thrown around a lot. So, yeah, and this is an artwork called visually similar. So visually similar consists of two videos. And this is a screen gas from one of them and this one's called visually similar bust of a boy. And I'll just show you the next one before moving on to explain them. And this is a screenshot from visually similar bust of a woman again from 2019. And so these artworks there's multiple levels to them. I wanted to. Yeah, so it uses as it's starting point, 3D scans from the visually from Victorian Albert Museum collections. So they've done 3D scans of a lot of artifacts of theirs and made the 3D scans. Excuse me, they're available to the public. As you can see here, this is one page showing what some of the 3D scans. So they've made these 3D scans available to the public. Which I think is quite a bold move because it very heavily leans into the idea of like copying something. Because usually, I guess there's a lot of value placed on the scarce artifacts that the more scarce an object is the more valuable it is. Whereas here they've made a not completely 100% accurate reproduction, but a very highly detailed one. If you were to go and download this yourself, you can see that it's quite high resolution, meaning that if for whatever reason you wanted to, you could make a 3D print of this of your own at any size. And you know, it would look quite faithful at quite a faithful reproduction. So we've made this 3D scan available, same as this one, the best of a boy. What I wanted to do with this is that, well, especially leaning into the names and descriptions of these artworks, they are of unknown people for various reasons. These are these these the subjects are unknown. And so I wanted to then use the internet to find visually similar images, which I could then put on the objects as a texture. So these are a couple of the textures which were made to go on to the 3D models and you can see like inside there is actually a few photos of the original. And then there's other photos as well that are in some ways visually similar, same with the best of a woman. And in doing that, I'll just go back to a couple of screenshots. In doing this, I wanted to show that again, just a comment on remix culture and that because the images are being used out of context, as well as a 3D scan, I'm creating a new narrative or a new story behind them all. So there isn't necessarily, again, plagiarism for the sake of trying to copy and pass off as original, but I've given identity to these unknown people, the unknown boy and the unknown woman through these visually similar images. So yeah, that's what I wanted to do in those two artworks. And I'm going to start wrapping up now because I actually don't know how long I've been going on for. Yeah, I'm just about over time. But so I'll wrap up now. And what I wanted to wrap up to say is that I think there's, throughout all of this, I wanted to make a little bit of a comment on how copyright really has to catch up with how we are making and sharing digital images or images online, especially. And as I mentioned earlier, there is really the focus isn't really so much now on the scarce image. The value of an image is now or the value of an artwork, whether that be video film photography, is more now in its ubiquity than its scarcity, just doing a little Google search here for Mickey Mouse. You know, here's his many images of Mickey Mouse. And so the value and why we all know him is because he's everywhere. Every production doesn't necessarily remove value from the original. So, and I've curated a couple of exhibitions, one of the artists who made artwork that tackles these issues. One of them was called no copyright infringement intended, which took place at Viver Projects Gallery in Birmingham and Phoenix Gallery in Leicester in 2017. And yeah, so of course, there's not time to talk about these unfortunately so please do check these out when you can. But this kind of very heavily leaned into I guess meme culture and as you can see here and 3d printed reproductions of imagery of sculptures. And how through their ubiquity through people sharing images they have value but how there are basically people forces whether that be the copyright owners or others who are trying to stop this for various reasons. And then the second exhibition which I curated, which was in 2020 for pixel in Norway is copy paste there's those words again, and which took place online and in a physical space. And all of these again they use copying not only they use it as a artistic for the artist in this exhibition focus on copying as an artistic practice so it's very heavily incorporated into our artistic practice, but also as some sort of material to work with so copyright as a material copyright as an area of interest, which I think is quite a thing that needs to be done more because again copyright is something which governs all of what we are doing. But yet there's not so much understanding of it. And especially in the digital sense of the digital image because as well as they're being sort of a sometimes an important place on this scarce image. I think in the last year especially when we've all been confined at home not being able to go to galleries. I think hope while I'm hoping that there's been some sort of realization that digital has value that the copying of an image has value to it, especially as in our first instance most of this experience artwork on the Internet copies of things via apps like Instagram. And sometimes that might be the only way we experience an artwork. So I'll just say, yeah, including that I hope that people are or that the attitudes towards copying are changing in favor of encouraging this copying and not trying to restrict it. Thank you very much. Thanks so much. Antonio. It's alright. Brilliant. Okay, great. If anyone has any questions please put them in the Q&A. I guess I quite want to, I mean I've got quite a lot I want to. I might start with this, this bit at the end about the copying of the image kind of having a value in it. And I wanted to ask about, I guess we call it a liveness in relation to the sharing of copied and adapted images. In relation to maybe this like live element of your of your practice. I know like for you there's, there's like a community building element to like the earlier work that you showed so these these images and kind of coming from code. And that was that was also part of like a live coding practice, which I hope is still going on. But a big thing about them were they were they were in real life they like kind of took something previously thought of maybe like less visible or a private way of making and building a building kind of like live community around that. And obviously around music as well. And I wondered if you felt there were parallels with like using and remixing existing images to enable sort of like liveness of sharing. And then that kind of community building that's been kind of quite a fundamental part of your, your like earlier practice. Definitely. So just to just to mention about what area we're saying about the live coding. So the performance aspect we didn't get to talk about is this thing called live coding. So the coding thing, the programming thing that I do people are on stage performing music using programming and making visuals using programming in a performative way. And so yeah, and that's just to mention that as well. And so yeah, definitely the community building aspects of it is completely there. Because we I guess, if you think of memes, for example, memes are people, people love memes, I love memes. But there are various different subcultures of imagery that have formed around memes. So or at least the aesthetics of memes. So in the no copyright infringement intended exhibition, there was an aesthetic called Cpunk, which those who go on the internet will definitely be more familiar with it now, especially it kind of like relates even to hyper pop. But you know that was formed around an aesthetic which really just came from that small community of people making and sharing images which had very pastily colors which had lots of see life imagery and dolphins and everything. So yeah, there is and that was, of course, again made up of found imagery as well. So there's definitely a big community side of things formed around that and which I can see, like in even in relation to the live coding with live coding. Yes, we're making music, but a lot of music is made from remixing taking samples finding really obscure samples and changing them and in very weird ways, and having fun with doing that. And it always comes together in some sort of event a gathering of people where that be online or in person. So yeah, the community aspect of it is incredibly important and it's maybe just of course it does happen but you know it's more to the source like commercial expert the exploitation of these samples these images of other people's work. But a lot of a lot of it is for the creating or sharing for people within these small circles within these communities. It's not necessarily just for commercial exploitation. And yeah, thanks. I think actually on that kind of being part of the, I guess like more public domain approaches or even like open source kind of approaches. It's quite an open and I think like sharing like digital space and I wanted, I was thinking, if there's a difference for you in approaching kind of maybe like the origins of an image or a 3D object. And if there's a difference in working with images, kind of over 3D scans that come from by the institutional sources like the V&A, or like even a corporation like Disney. And then those that come from that kind of community that you just described like the, that might be kind of 3D developers or photographers or artists or kind of even like hobbyists. Yes. And I suppose like how is it even possible to make that distinction sometimes or like even to kind of tell where those images are coming from. Yeah, that is, again, it's a really good question like because, you know, of course there are many many institutions which have made the archives available to the public to use under a primitive license so creative commons licenses for example which most of them will will have to be able to use an image in whatever way you choose. There are different licenses but you know that's that. So there are institutions which have made their things available but then, yeah, the majority of people, creative people are, excuse me, making and sharing artwork which contains just basically copyrighted material. Yeah. I guess for a lot of the artists that I know and work with, they're just doing it because it's kind of like the process of creativity. The process of creativity is always to work from inspiration and with the amount of imagery that we see every day with us on TV, the internet, walking down the street. There's no wonder that we're going to be inspired by the things that we're seeing. So there is that but then, of course, like the artists who I know, for example, I put into the exhibitions that I created into those exhibitions. They, they, I guess, more actively engage with it so they will actively like make a point of using a piece of artwork, usually to make a point about the theft of artwork or something. And yeah, so that and then, for me, even engaging with the artworks and the artifacts in the collections of various museums. At first I was doing so more just like treating them as objects without even a history or a story. And being able to now delve through the archives of these institutions, we can actually begin to learn the story of those objects even more like, I guess it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily bring them back alive, but it puts them at the forefront. It allows us to kind of explore the story of them rather than it just being kind of hidden away somewhere. And, you know, doesn't want to like say I don't want to advocate for their behavior, but again, it just allows us to do something similar to what Disney did, which is they saw these stories, and they got, okay, here's an interesting story that's trying to have to retell it. But that only like, but of course the public domain things allow us to do that. So, yeah, and the community approach where we are using found imagery and just like breaking laws. It's very more, it's much more fluid. But of course it carries over with it some inherent risks. Sorry, I know I've kind of gone a bit further than the question that you asked as well. But hopefully I've answered the question as well that you've asked. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I was thinking a bit about this Creative Commons license you mentioned and, and then the public domain. And I guess I think there's a bit of tension between those two things in that. Maybe you can correct me, obviously, if I, if I'm wrong here by the way those license off often work that they enable anyone to sort of use the maybe like the image or, or digital object. But then they have to make that kind of freely available or I suppose keep it private. It's like a non commercial usage tends to be, and this, it kind of sounds like a digital commons, but it seems to mean that there's like actually a kind of commercial hold that's retained by the initial sort of publisher, and then doing so can maybe often like the problematic power dynamics of that might come with. And I know, I mean I noticed you shared some of the artworks you started to share in the, in the exhibition she curated kind of touch on this quite a lot. And yeah, and I wonder if it was it was kind of this like dual thing of preserving those, yeah preserving that hold of the object or those power dynamics while also sort of making something seemingly kind of available. And I suppose like actually available as well. Yeah, so again just to sort of explain a little bit about the licenses that area was talking about. So with Creative Commons licenses. They have several clauses which you can attach to them so it might be non commercial it might be share alike or it might be just attribution. So, generally, one of the more basic Creative Commons licenses just says, you can use my artwork in whatever way you choose, whether that be for commercial or not, as long as you just like put attribution like you say you got this from me or it's using content from my artwork. You can make it, you can sell it or what. But then there's a clause which is actually kind of, I guess, there's a lot of discussion around it still, which is the non commercial clause because it dictates that yeah you can use it for everyone, as long as you not, it's not for commercial purposes. And I don't like using the non commercial clause because there's always like lots of discussion about what is commercial activity. This talk, for example, is commercial activity or putting it on my website, which then eventually earns me money is that commercial activity so I don't quite like that. But also it doesn't really allow for it's like still like the creative, not necessarily Creative Commons but this idea of free culture and to an extent by extension open source is really to allow people to use things without restriction. Because that's what copyright does copyright does place these restrictions on what we can do with culture with art, whereas Creative Commons, or at least the non commercial one still says well okay there's a restriction. And so yeah the institutions which are putting their work into the public into giving them these commercial, sorry creative commons licenses, but adding the non commercial clause. You're right they're still sometimes that they still want some form of control over it. And it's really a question of I guess like what did a fear will happen. Because plagiarism will happen regardless of whether or not there's a Creative Commons or a full copyright license on it. And yeah that that will just people will plagiarize because they just can, because they just will. So it's wherever it's, I guess it's like what are they feeling or even like the estates of the artists who still own the artifacts what are they feeling will happen. And I remember actually I did I was part of a talk with the photographers gallery earlier this year, where there was a photographer and I forget his name unfortunately, but he was saying that like, you know the biggest threat to an artist isn't necessarily exploitation it's probably more obscurity. And, yeah that the artwork that you have the worst thing that can happen of course, and I won't I'm of course I'm making a blanket statement there are always situations in which you don't want your artwork to be used. But like the most deal that we are creating today will kind of probably go into obscurity quite soon, like before our lives are ended which is quite you know it's unfortunate to say, but so therefore it's like well. If you, especially in the internet age the ubiquity of an image ubiquity, like I said word, the spread of an image is what will help your career more than it just being I guess protective of it. Thank you yes it's Jonathan worth that was who said that quote earlier this year in the presentation that I was part of. So yeah, and I, I just wonder in general like by using the non commercial clause what is it they're trying to protect that's the question I have. Yeah, I mean. That is good. Good question. I also be thinking about the, the, the length of work sort of in our lifetime and in relation to that 70 years copyright and also like the how long kind of digital data even preserves in relationship to that. I mean, I guess questions maybe for the future but I also really want to get on to the Q&A. Okay, sure. There's quite a few, there's quite a few questions in there. And the first one reads, I edit an open access journal and we have engaged with the copyright exemption or fair dealing, which allows you within UK law to reproduce images for the purpose of criticism and review. So is fair dealing as a concept something that you've, you've interacted. I'm also thinking practically, but also in terms of the linguistic single signals given out by the phrase fair dealing. Yeah, so I personally haven't dealt with that, but some of the orbits which I've put into exhibitions do deal with this. Fair dealing and in America fair use. Yeah, it's, I think it's something that's slightly misunderstood, because especially if you watch any sort of YouTube videos these days, which I do a lot. And they'll try and put like this disclaimer saying like this is fair use and it's like, well fair use is kind of like a defense, rather than something you just put as a disclaimer at the beginning. Yeah, by defense, it means like, well, if someone takes you to court, you would have to try and prove that it's fair use. But still, sometimes you can be quite confident with it being, I guess, like, you know, fair use, especially, for example, in this case here, I'm doing a presentation and I've had to to talk about Disney I've had to put Disney and actually, I completely like I have dealt with fair dealing in the transformative use artwork because even though I'm using the Disney imagery, I'm doing so as a form of criticism of their of their of what they're doing. So, and again, it's one of those things where it's not just because I say it's fair dealing. It's fair dealing. It's one of those things that if Disney wants to come at me which they haven't, which I don't know will thank thank goodness. I don't want to be sued. But you know, if they did, I would have to try and prove that yes, this is fair dealing and I think, yeah, it's not completely vague but it's not also watertight argument to say this is fair dealing. So, yeah, it's so I personally like, if everyone doing so. This is what I was saying earlier as well about like, you know, actively engaging with the ideas behind copyright. I don't use this as an excuse just to be able to make whatever artwork I want. I don't just put it on slap it on somewhere on like a disclaimer and say, this is fair dealing as an excuse and as a justification for using someone else's artwork, or even someone who doesn't have the idea, I, yeah, I'm hopefully engaging with more critical critically. But yeah so I do engage with it and even even even the title of the artwork of the exhibition no copyright infringement intended is the I chose that title. I think it's too kind of address the lack of understanding of what copyright is because sometimes I think people have a very walked in understanding of what it is and how to work with it, which isn't always necessarily their fault because well they're not lawyers. So, yeah, they're artists we spent our lives making artwork not studying law so yeah. Yeah, I think I mean there's a few more questions. I think they are the third talking about fair dealing actually goes into this next one quite well which is about whether the new EU copyright directive is going to affect digital artwork, or even just meme culture. I mean I know you said where artists not lawyers but if you have. Yeah. So the new copyright directive. I believe that's one where, you know, there's going to be. I'm just going to say upload filters because I know that there's like more to it but just like you know if help the platforms where you upload images will have more responsibility to check whether all of their things that are being uploaded are infringing on copyrights. Yes, there's a lot more to it I've only had to summarize right now but yeah that's what it is. And yeah well it will affect. I think that will affect everything, because you can certainly weaponize copyright, like you even you only have to look at, you know, the United States, one of the United States like anywhere where there's protests happening and please will play copyrighted music in order to try and have a video not play on new reward in order to try and take down a video or an image or something by playing copyrighted music so you know that in that sense. It can be weaponized to just prevent anything from being uploaded so and you know that can still be done now but of course if there's an upload filter then again pretty much anything that we create like just even even after this go go on your Instagram go on your Twitter right now and just have a look at all of the appropriated all the remix things are just on there. Right now and then all of us have to disappear and or it just becomes a very complicated process and the reason I don't like it is again it kind of assumes that originality exists in the first place that everything is created and avoid we all just like sitting in a cave thinking of ideas devoid of any outside influences, which again I believe is what I think that's how creativity works. So I that's that's the reason I don't really like that so I do think it's going to have wide reaching effects think it's going to have quite an effect on. Well yeah just anything and everything especially and just I know this especially on who enforces these laws so whether that's even YouTube right now there's often like they will try and flag something as like copyrighted material. But it's a it's been done by a robot it's been done by an AI who's just always lessons kind of goes oh yeah look this looks like something so it must be something so if the people who are enforcing it. Don't understand the context with which in which something is being shared whether it's copyrighted image or not or just looks like one. Then if we're leaving up to a but up to an AI, then lots of mistakes will be made. And what needs to be happening is that, well, with a copyrighted image there needs to be some context to it we need to the but or the AI needs to or the person even viewing it needs to go what's the context of why is this being shared is it for comment or criticism is it for some other reason like what what is it that's being done, but no, the I fear that the copyright directive and all of these. Things are just looking at does this thing look like this thing if yes take it down. Yeah. Yeah, I think such something quite real that I mean in some ways it's happening on a lot of platforms already and often doesn't enable like a way of interaction thing with like a secondary kind of stage or sort of more human based. Stage and obviously relies on lots of kind of training models that that have these like, um, well problems within their training. There is one more question that we, I think we both thought this might come up which is in relation to what your opinion on NFTs and if it's in a way the opposite of a copy paste practice with ownership locked into the blockchain. Yeah, I was hoping to never talk about it. No, no, it's fine. Only, so the reason I was going to try and include NFTs into this, but personally I don't engage with NFTs necessary like I have helped a couple of people like with the art side of it like as in there was a there was a projects where someone needed some artwork for a painting or digital painting and I contributed towards it and then that artwork was sold as an NFT. But myself, I don't engage your NFTs for variety of reasons, but more so because I think again it for me digital art is about copying it's about duplication, because you can make and share you can you can make a million copies of an image it immediately forever. So, I don't necessarily see why I'd want to then impose scarcity on an additional image when it can be copied. However, I still can see value for some people why they might want to do that because like, you know, some people try to compare NFTs to basically, you know, not owning the artwork but owning the like it's like a of a certificate of authenticity like that's what you are owning. So, yeah, so I can see some ways in which people might like that. And yeah it definitely is kind of is definitely the opposite of a kind of copy paste way of working. It has brought about questions about the value of digital art again. Like, you know, can can you sort of replicate the real world way of working with physical art objects in the digital space. Excuse me so this seems to be a way to do that. However, it's not one that I like, but still it seems to be working for some people. And so I feel it is completely opposite to this copy paste way of working and even our digital art has worked historically up until recently. But of course it's a changing world anyway. So maybe this is the change that this is going to be happening. But yeah just I just think. And again, one of the reasons I didn't want to necessarily put NFTs into my presentation is because it's still such an evolving field like there's still no I guess like solidified practices even the blockchains and the NFT platforms themselves are coming and going like quite quickly. So I didn't want to necessarily try and make any sort of bold statements about this is the way to do it or this is not the way to do it. And art dish like work has changed forever because well NFTs are still changing as a way of working like I still think it's could be a never like it's moving fast I still think it could be like another year before like, at least it's solidified into a practice which we all engage with like it becomes really big part of our lives, whereas I still think it's a little bit in in a hype cycle right now but yeah again to answer the question though again like it is opposite to the copy paste way of working and seems to be working for some people but not for this person right here. Well I think I think it's quite interesting thinking about what you were saying earlier about the cultural value of something being of an image being in its abundance. And I think, well, there's like the NFT ideas kesty is kind of relying on it and then, or maybe even has that as a foundation sometimes when rather than attempting to replace that they're like sharing of that image. Instead kind of put a monetary value on I suppose sort of original version of that. So it's a sort of strange situation where they seem to kind of relate to each other. So you have the abundance and the scarcity sort of simultaneous. Yeah, I will see. Yeah, I don't know. I see how that gets resolved. I think you're right in terms of how quickly things change in that field. I'm also quite aware of time. Yeah, I think I think I need to hand over now so I just want to thank you so much and Tonya. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for the questions as well. And thanks for everyone to everyone else. But before we conclude for the day, I want to hand it back to Sarah Turner from the Paul Mellon Center and Brett Rogers from the photographers gallery and just for some final comments and responses. Thank you. Thank you so much to Antonio and Sarah and to all of our panelists this afternoon, and I can see Brett joining me in motion in transit. I'm here. Great. And in this just very final session, and we will keep it brief because we realize that as audience members you've been with us, many of you all day, if not for several days, and you've joined us on this journey, which has been a long but really productive and actually quite energizing one for me anyway. So just wanted to start by just saying thank you to everyone who has been involved. And I think just to reflect on what's taken place over the last three days and that's stretched over two weeks. I think really that that central question of what does it mean to be concerned with photography, taking the phrasing of our title concerning photography which of course came from the first exhibition at the photographers gallery in 1971 the I think asking ourselves what does it mean to be concerned with photography now in 2021. You know what does it mean to look across that time span. That the photographers gallery has been operating in the landscape it's been operating in since 1971 to the present day. What does that allow us to do what does it prevent us from doing. That question of like why should we concern ourselves with photography and photographic histories. And now is something that all the papers and the discussions have addressed in in very different ways. And I think we wanted to in in convening this gathering, provide a space for questions rather than answers, and a space in which we could look across different places, through the work of very many different artists and think across media and think across different professional networks and practices and just to give you the headlines of our sessions. And that gives you a sense of the texture of the of the way in which we were constructing this, this gathering this conference. And so we had institutions, infrastructures, pedagogies, material process, magazines, books, exhibitions, touring and archival futures, and helping us think about those themes we've had three artists, give their keynote presentations, which I'll be saying Penny slinger, and then Antonio Roberts just now with the help of seven chairs. We had 21 papers by 21 presenters or maybe 22 actually because we had someone else come in to present a paper today, and we had 180 unique guests join us in the audience from 12 countries. Again, I think in doing in convening this kind of digital conference as well, which I think leaks beyond the boundaries of its formal time slots. We can think together across some of those themes and topics and ideas about what it means to concern ourselves with photography now. And I think that infrastructural approach as well has been really productive, where we've been able to think about a lot of different and disparate sets of practices together to to again not kind of create a linear chronology of photographic history, but to kind of expand that and explore it and interrogate it from many different perspectives and angles as well. So there are just some thoughts from me Brett about I think again the productiveness of providing a space for asking questions about an institutional history and to thank you and your colleagues at the photographers gallery for being so open to having an event that was not really about celebrating the photographers gallery or about making a chronology of every exhibition you've done and every artist you've worked with, but is providing the photographers gallery is a node as a as a sort of crucible from which we could think out from an into and across and pull it apart and put things back together so I think for me as well that's been incredibly productive as a way of kind of providing a historic framework, which has allowed us for this kind of expanded thinking as well. So I'll just I'll hand over to you to just say a little bit more as well about your own perspectives as you've listened. And you've also been involved people have talked about you in papers. An active agent within the conference. So I'll hand over to you Brett. Thank you so much Sarah and like you I found the conference totally absorbing and enlightening in the range and depths the papers exceeded all my expectations of what the conference could achieve when we set out years ago to think about it. In addition to taking the temperature of where research was within this field at the moment. I think the curation of the conference which was purposely left as you say and you gave us the liberty to do this to be a bit freewheeling and unbound allowed the presentations to riff off each other in a way that I've never really imagined. And so in each way in this way session providers with an opportunity to gain insights into the often surprising parallels between sort of questions like what the democratization of photography and the critical importance of socially engaged practice look like in the 1970s and what do they look like now and the emergence of vernacular and amateur photography the debates provoked through the presentations of LGBT and AIDS exhibitions in the late 80s and 90s. And the continuing issues to do with those whose voices are still excluded within programs and discourses, all such important issues in the 80s and 90s and continue to be today. I was also struck by the repetition of certain over often overlooked considerations such as I loved the recurrence of the importance of the comments books because in some of our exhibitions. We have the displays we have on the history of the gallery in our light years. Everybody loves the comments books because as somebody said it's a bit like a Facebook riff at the moment. The importance of comments books the matter of exclusion within the field of artists photo books bought up by Jacqueline, the changing role of the archivist that was attended to today. The importance of community dark rooms in the 70s and 80s as places of production. We've all forgotten all about that and that so is such an important thing to remember and to reexamine. I also was pleased to be reminded about the power of local councils and cultural bodies such as the British Council and the Arts Council in driving forward their particular political imperatives important to remember because that's certainly that is something that hasn't gone away today. And the importance also are in the 70s and 80s much less so now of touring exhibitions outside London to non photographic venues. It's something that's quite close to my heart and I'd love to see revived. And, of course, how can we any of us ever forget on day one, Andrew Judy is provocation about the future of the medium and the role of the institutions when he highlighted the fear of photography galleries navigating how to deal with the network image. Which has left the wall and being absorbed into the ether of the web. So apart from the fascinating insights into institutional practice, which I often focused on our important forebears. Here I just want to acknowledge the crucial role played by so many of those that network of galleries that no longer exists. The camera works viewpoint Cambridge dark room, half men workshop a billion leads and so new castle. You know they mustn't be forgotten their histories mustn't they've got to be written into the history of photography in UK, as well as those of course you continue to contribute so much to the sector impression still side open eye autograph and others. I much appreciated the fact that so many presenters didn't overlook addressing the day to day mundane issues and realities associated with running institutions like those all consuming things like funding dealing with the fragility of archives, the challenges in dealing with the arts council, alongside them recognizing the importance of artists and others who freely volunteered their time because of their passion and commitment to the medium to create festivals such as signals to found agencies like a autograph and camera work. But not only investing their time and enthusiasm but often their own resources at great cost to themselves and to create this incredible legacy we have today. And so perhaps I should just have in by having as an aside attribute to my own founding director Sue Davies who, as a case in point. Despite her clear vision and her persisted defied many people within the art and photography world. When in 1971 she decided to create the gallery at the photographer's gallery. She really did have to fight off a lot of non believers. And she also for went her own salary for 18 months to get the gallery up and running it's something that's very little known about her the battle she had in that she founding the gallery in 1970 71 and I really want to applaud her today, because I don't think we'd be even having this conference. So thank you to all to the 21 speakers, the seven moderators, and the three artists keynotes speakers. Of course, reminding us of the such importance of the importance of the artists to our programs to the team at poor melon. Thank you so much to Sarah to Danny to Shauna and to Mark Hallett, and of course to our own team at TPG, most especially Louise earlier to manage this event, and provided us on the occasion of our 50th anniversary with such an unrivaled opportunity to reflect on what has shaped the wider history of photography, and its institutional networks over the past five decades. It has been totally fascinating, and has provoked so many questions amongst the team that we look forward to taking forward some of these ideas and some manner manner within our own talks and events program over the coming months or years. So thank you and thank you all for listening and I hope you enjoyed it. We'd love to have some feedback. Yeah, thanks so much to the audience as well you've been so engaged, and often you know when you're doing webinars it's a bit difficult when you you're not seeing everyone out there but as an audience you've been using the chat asking questions, and that's really added to this sense of dialogue and community and the kind of liveness of these debates and these questions so I know the speakers have really appreciated that. They haven't felt like they were speaking into a void they've really got a warm and critical response from the audience so it's been absolutely brilliant to have all of you with us across the program so thank you so much. Well thank you so much Sarah. Thank you for giving me the confidence and the skill to do it. It sounds like Brett's having this, we really wanted to do it in person, but you had a very experienced team for everything you've done to me. Oh great well we've not had many digital issues or glitches but it's good to remind us that this is all happening in real time so thanks ever so much everyone and we'll just let the chat run for a little bit because I know people like to say goodbye to everyone so thanks so much and goodbye. Thank you.