 First up is Paul Gerhardt, a Digital Archives Associate. I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before. He's going to talk about the opportunities, what is possible, what lies before us and how we can make the best use of the archive material. Paul? Bill, as always, thank you very much and thanks particularly to the BBC Academy and to Arts Council in England for inviting me. There will obviously be an aspect of autobiography in this presentation because it reflects my interest in the creative use of archive over a number of years, particularly with moving image archives. So, what I'd like to do to start off is to take you back to a room at the idea store, which used to be called a public library in Whitechapel, in 2007. The event was the opening of an artist Chris Dordi Brown's exhibition and screening of a project called BBC in the East End, 1958 to 1973. What actually happens in this presentation, which I hope you'll see in a minute, is that the screen dissolves from a 14-year-old Richard Brown from a Peatime Man Alive documentary in 1971 to the Richard Brown of 2007, and he's not a happy man. He recollects that even as a youngster he had been aware that the film he took part in was a kind of setup of failure and potential imprisonment for what were described as these bad boys of the East End of London. Neither he nor his family liked being the object of a particular ideological construction. In fact, this entire evening has been, through material recovered from the BBC archive and enhanced by Chris Dordi Brown, has been a kind of riff on the theme of media and ideology. Media representation and change in 1971 and in 2007 and its impact on Whitechapel is the focus of a discussion in a room packed with local people. An artist and a free access to the BBC's television and radio archives has made this event possible. It should be noted that how different this event was from television's regular ability to feed off its past. Television is increasingly fascinated with revisiting the site of earlier historic coverage. But the follow-up frequently slightly sanitises the earlier footage. You can, it treating it as some kind of retro sheik or some kind of heritage material. Nostalgia you begin to realise could be the death of archives. What Chris Dordi Brown achieved was something a little bit more raw. He brought materials from the archive and recontextualised them and recontextualised them for and in a local perspective. Chris had brought it all back home by making a film using excerpts from the original programmes and by reinterviewing the participants in the same spot where they'd stood 36 years earlier. We were exposed to a fascinating blend of history, culture and identity. I was there at the Idea Store event as a kind of BBC suit to say a few words of welcome. And afterwards I was confronted by Jenny, a woman in her 30s who wanted, no demanded, a copy of the films. Where can I get the film? Can I have the DVD? Is it on the web? It's about us, you know. We should be able to have it. And she had a point and a very clear notion that cut through all the complexities of how and when the BBC should make its archive public. The BBC had a slice of her heritage. She paid for the BBC and she was determined to have access to it. It was a small event in Whitechapel but it is part of a big idea that is really said even out sizes the BBC itself. Communities across the UK are represented in our national archives, television, film and radio. These collections document the massive changes in how we lived, in fashion, transport, politics, culture and environment over the last century. The century of moving image and the century of mechanised reproduction. Just as every community expects to have a right to access a local repository of the books that describe who they are and where they come from. So they have a right to access, I believe, to the sounds and the moving images that capture that past. That they should be in the hands of people whose participation helped to make them and who can remake them for themselves and for future generations is an idea which is beginning to connect with the managers of our national collections. A thought I want to come back to. Of course, artists have explored the potential of the moving image since the invention of cinema and the rich history of the collision between art and film from Dali to Benwell to Jeremy Della or Treyd Siemann is a story that remains to be told I think in probably very exciting detail. But my theme is the confluence between creativity and our increasingly available moving image archives. The Golden Lion Award this year's Venice Biennale went to Christian Marclay for The Clock, an astonishing tour de force of 24 hours of edited movies which tells the real time clip after clip. Marclay's achievement is being recognised as a turning point I think in the use of moving image and sound archives by artists. The partnership that produced the work of Chris Dolly Brown was another one between the Arts Council and the BBC at a time of the creative archive project and a bursary was also awarded to Vicki Bennett and we can see her film here. By the way, I'm only going to show you these films mute. Anybody who wants to see the full version with audio, I can give you the links and you can follow them up. Vicki had already substantial experience of working with moving image archives, mainly with Rick Perlinger's extraordinary collection of US public information films. Known for her dark and witty take on vintage futuristic media, she brought to the creative archive project a highly focused craft-like approach to the iconic footage that she was using. Her film, Trying Things Out, is made from selected found footage using imagery collage from a number of documentaries made between 1951 and 1980, including footage shot at the Festival of Britain. She tells the story through layers of audio visual collage of how the artist could bring about positive change in culture and Vicki describes the film as partly autobiographical and that reflects by use of footage people playing with machines and affecting imagery the possibilities that access to film archives can inspire new work, creating new dialogues where previously there may have been none. The work of Vicki Bennett and Chris Dawley-Brown also had, of course, an impact on the BBC as the host institution. Their work took them across the corporation's departments and resulted in an interaction with a range of specialists and teams, especially in the archive and legal departments that would not normally experience the world and the work of the artist. Archive researchers in particular fed their pleasure back in working outside the usual parameters of programs researched for broadcast. I think the artist and filmmaker Chris Marker has identified the potential in the discrepancy between sound and image. An artist who has most successfully applied this to the archive is John O'Confra, who was awarded an Arts Council BBC Bursary in 2009. He set out to make what he called a tone poem. He described it as the fragility and the burden and the excess of remembering. I think in order to appreciate John's achievement we should reflect on the nature of an archive, indeed of any archive. The cultural theorist Alida Rassman has described the archivers the basis of what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past. A form of memory, in other words, refracted through the prism of a set of decisions, what is collected, what is kept and what is discarded. Every archive is a result of this subjectivity and it is the job of the researcher to be fully sensitive to those decisions and to understand the objective circumstances in which the collection was laid down. Any visitor today, therefore to the BBC's television and radio archives of the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s would immediately notice the cultural framework within which they are frozen. This is particularly evident around the subject of race and immigration. News reports, drama and entertainment programmes all carry a very specific narrative of a black settlement into Britain, suffusing the images and sounds with notions of difference, separateness, controversy. That they would need to be handled with care is self-evident. But the real question for John O'Confra was the morality of using these still and moving images to reframe the narrative and to tell the same story but from a different perspective with a quite different sensibility. So John O'Confra's film, which is called Nemecine, his answer to this ethical issue was to give voice to what he called the ghosts of the past and to frame that myth, that voice within a rich environment including music, poetry and Greek myth. The resulting film has had an extraordinary life. It started as a scheme, a product to stimulate regional creativity. It evolved into an ambitious rough cut which threatened to outgrow its first sponsors. As a 40-minute film, Nemecine was premiered to greater claim in West Bromwich before a long run at the BFI Gallery in the South Bank Centre. From there it evolved into the Nine Muses, a feature film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and shown with greater claim at many subsequent festivals including Sundance where it was picked up by a UK distributor. This week it opens at MoMA in New York. It remains one of the most singular success stories in the creative use of media archives by an artist. So if I can digress for a second from art to history, what we can reflect on here is the central importance of moving images, collections in our understanding of the 20th century. From today onwards, as each centenary anniversary approaches, we can be pretty sure that a camera was there to record the events and to capture the reactions, giving us an understanding of the previous century incomparably richer than our insights into earlier times. This capturing of moving images is what defines the historical record of the 20th century and provides the inspiration for both scholarship and creativity. Rowley mentioned the work of Jisk and I was very privileged also to be involved in the work of this higher education agency and its close relative of the Strategic Content Alliance. And the work that they did to promote the opening up of significant collections to the academy. I was privileged to co-chair their recent film and sound think tank and we commissioned a short film called Knowledge Is to explore this link between history, the moving image and the difficulty of accessing and using our key archives. Because we do need to ask why public access to our great audio visual collections has lagged so far behind access to the world's great libraries of books or music. It's an important question, especially when we remember that unlike music or publishing, much of our film and sound has been funded from the public purse. Part of the reason is that public access is simply not the core purpose of our national and regional collections. These are 20th century or older institutions, some going back to the 18th century, dedicated to storing knowledge and making it available to researchers and decision makers. Or they are functioning organisations, collections for the task of production and broadcasting. Their organisational structure and history has not equipped them for the world of low cost digital access and distribution. This is particularly clear I think in the relationship between broadcasters and rights organisations and collecting societies. Over time they've established a sophisticated process for the negotiation of broadcast rights, usually in the form of one or a number of transmissions within a specified window. This is very different from the strategy of born digital start-ups who work from the clean sheet, bring high expectations to the negotiating table and are prepared to take risk with intellectual property rights in order to prove a business point. Overall this situation is all the more extraordinary when we consider the technology breakthroughs which have turned our younger generation into fully fledged creative media producers and distributors. It's as if we have simultaneously created the technical conditions for a massive upsurge in literacy in moving images, but banned access to the libraries or moving image collections that creative people depend on for inspiration and for insights. The experience of Chris Dawley-Brown and Vicky Bennett and John O'Comfra shows that opening up broadcast archives to artists can be mutually beneficial. Artists are who they are because they take a licence to see our world in a different way. Artists can create new work and explore new methods. Archive institutions and the curators who manage them discover new approaches to the material they preserve and see familiar footage through fresh eyes. These kinds of schemes also have a wider application. They demonstrate the public value of the creativity locked up in our archives and they open up the question of wider professional and public access to that creative material. And of course arts bodies are now creating their own archives as they use digital media to record and enhance exhibitions and events. With the help of Arts Council London, we're currently setting up a series of workshops, The Artist in the Archive, to explore this border country between film and TV curation and arts practice. The workshops will be hosted at the BBC, at their new archive centre in Perryvale and by the BFI at their National Archives in Burkhamstead. The programme is designed to bring together the archivist and the arts practitioner and to manage practical issues such as search, discovery of content, formatting for viewing and reworking and of course the management of intellectual property. Each workshop will be followed by a tour of the respective archive and details will be announced soon and you'll be able to book places through the Arts Council and the BFI. So there is an opportunity to build on this core idea of linking artists with broadcast and other archives. The costs of providing a bursary to an artist for a fixed period is quite low. And the costs associated with project management, business negotiation, rights clearance and public exhibition could be shared across multiple schemes. Many institutions and galleries and museums already provide occasional access schemes for artists. And there may be a case for a national clearing house that opens up a wider range of opportunities which cascade downwards these rich experiences and the resulting creative output. So I'm clearly an advocate of some kind of national clearing house between artists and collections and that would be wonderful. But I think it's only one step on the road. I think the real goal is even more ambitious is to work with national and regional archives to help them embrace this relationship with the creative community and begin the process of transforming our almost static inaccessible collections into open living memory centres for all. I'll be handing over in a few minutes to Jake who will introduce the prototype for the digital public space. So I don't want to intrude on his presentation, but I do want to reflect the excitement about this space as a kind of creative playground where assets and objects can be discovered, where some of them can be reworked and where we can explore associations between different art forms that could challenge and extend curatorial practice, I think in the real world. And this is new territory for our major institutions, many of which, as I said earlier, were created in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They're used to a world where cultural objects have been defined by the collection or by the institution. But now they may have to cope with a new digital space where historical and contemporary objects can be ripped from their context and reassembled to create new and unique experiences. For instance, as we digitise the works of artists in print, in painting, in three-dimensional forms, in video, in audio, in photography, we create a historically unique opportunity to combine different art forms in the same digital space. We can begin to explore specific themes, defined perhaps by a decade or by a style. It's a huge challenge for the traditional institutions, because I think they have to relax their grip on branding and on context. The Arts Council has a special responsibility and opportunity here, and I've recently been working with the Arts Council colleagues on their physical collections, which have both historical and cultural importance, and these collections of art, film, poetry were all established in the early 1950s when the old Arts Council of Great Britain was the direct provider of excellence to the nation. A poetry library was established, which today contains probably the best collection in the country of 20th century poetry in English. An art collection was an opportunity to give a helping hand to emerging British artists by purchasing their early work, and the film collection paralleled this by documenting the fast changes in the post-war world of the arts. The film you just saw of Francis Bacon was made in 1963 by David Thompson and edited by Craven Brownlow, and it was shown in village halls and in schools and in community centres. Now, not everyone has heard of the Arts Council's collections, partly because they've not been a good fit with the changing role of a national funding institution. In fact, the poetry library is now physically housed in the Southbank Centre, which also looks after the management of the art collection. The art collection has no permanent gallery, but more than compensates for that by long-term lending of many of its artworks to public buildings all over the country. The collection of 400 films has been digitised but is currently only available within higher education. But here is the opportunity. The poetry collection is a potential online resource which could tell the story of 20th century poetry to a global audience. We're currently in conversation with key rights holders who explore that very potential. The digital world has the power to help the art collection leap from being solely being a lending service to also becoming a much more popular gallery online, allowing the public to explore and curate the collection and set it in a wider contemporary arts context. And the digitised film collection is being queued up to be one of the first assets of the digital public space and enabling it to reach a wider public. So it's a tribute to the Arts Council, I think, to say that they've seized these ideas and pushed them forward and pushed them hard. But of course the Arts Council is also a strategic body and as it steers the wider arts community towards greater involvement in the digital world and to extend its reach and to capture its past, it has a responsibility to practice what it preaches with the collections that it currently owns. And I believe that here we have a further opportunity. Because these collections of different art forms, poetry, art, film have been nurtured by a single cultural organisation in the same 60 year time frame, they share aspects of content and value that complement each other. They provide for instance an opportunity to see, if you want to see, how pop art and concrete poetry in the decade of the 1960s influenced experimental filmmaking. And it's hard to assemble these different elements in the physical world, but not impossible if a skilled curator is available. In the digital world it should be easy, not just by an editor but by anyone. So this brings me back to my key theme. Here and now in 2011 I think we have the chance to think about how we want to tell the story of art and culture and collections in the 20th century. We have the collections, we have the organisations, we have the creativity and we have the technical means. If we don't tell that story ourselves then you can be sure that others will. And the likelihood is that it could end up with a cultural bias somewhere to the west of the Atlantic. I believe that telling such a story could be a compelling way of organising the film, television, artworks, literature and music in the digital public space. In the meantime the public value partnership between the BBC and the Arts Council is stimulating some new thinking for a special season next year. I understand that details will be announced soon and could embrace new approaches to arts media as well as trialling arts practice which uses archive. Overall it could be a way of accelerating the training, skills development and digital capacity that we're already involved in here in this room today. But can I just finish by taking us back to society at large? If we're to secure the public support and the political support and the resources to make these developments sustainable then we have to demonstrate their practical application I think to the wider world. The last film I wanted to show you if we can retrieve it is a curiosity. It started life as a British Council film made in 1935 called Heart of an Empire. It's an astonishingly confident portrait of a city with a pivotal place in the world that unknown to the filmmakers was about to undergo dramatic change. No one in the UK saw this film. It was made only for export to the colonies of the empire. Side by side you can see a remake of Heart of an Empire shot and edited in one day on a device like this. The film has been digitised, distributed, researched and then recreated by a young team called Time Image. All in their early 20s, with this as their first proper employment experience, they're lovingly working in their way through the British Council's collection and they're revealing a unique portrait of a country before and during the war, all the more special because it was exclusively for overseas consumption. So the Time Image work is one of a number of projects initiated by New Deal of the Mind, which has set up over 100 creative placements around the country to focus on archives, heritage, interpretation and digital technology. It is providing real training and real jobs for young people working on local projects with artists and archivists, collecting, curating, digitising stories, images, experiences and knowledge. In a small way, it's proving not only that there is work to be done on Britain's archives, and there are young unemployed people that can be employed to do it, but the results can be a tangible addition to the UK's cultural heritage. Nestor has predicted that employment in the creative sector in the UK will outgrow the financial sector in the next few years and that it was well placed to play a key role in bringing the UK out of the downturn. That may be bad news for bankers, I don't know, but I suspect that the creative industries will not have the same grip on the political system that the finance has had. But if this expansion is going to happen and then opening up access to our cultural archives, including our moving image and sound collections, can only help to accelerate the process. So I'm a firm believer that the big institutions that we're talking about and the big collections need all the friends they can get, both critical and supportive. For good policies to prevail, and for the right outcomes to be secured, they need the active involvement and friendly cajoling of all of us. Thanks very much.