On personal archival, and the difficulties within

2024-07-20

Hi everyone! Today has been way too eventful, considering I spent a good chunk of it laying in bed!! My cat decided that it would rather poop in the bathtub than in the fresh new litter I had just put out for her, so that's a pretty good summation of what I've dealt with today (both in the literal and metaphorical sense). On the bright side, the store near us seems to always have reduced food, which is awesome since I'm on a tight penny lately, and I got to have a 9p clotted creme and some fancy scones for breakfast. The cat decided she was also having fancy scones and clotted cream for breakfast, and you can imagine how annoying that conversation was. 'meoww.. meow.. MEOW!!!' 'You can't have clotted cream you'll shit your pants..!' 'MEOW!!!!!!!!'

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Anyway! For today's post I wanted to talk a bit about the challenges of archival. Specifically, archival of personal work. In general, archival is an artform in itself, both physical and digital. It is a lot more complicated that it may seem on the surface, and I do feel like some people take easier to it than others. As digital artists a lot of us tend to name our files something along the lines of hhgnsndsc_0012.png or ididntreallythinkabtthislol.jpeg, which in itself is the bane of any archivists existence, but even those of us with pretty and neatly put together folders, file names, etc, will realize that it can still be a real challenge to properly document a whole lifetimes worth of work in a way that makes it accessible, traceable, and most importantly: safe.

The problems with being your own archivist can sometimes stem from our own personal view on our work. People often look down on their own work, or fail to realize that in every one of our stupid doodles is a rich history of our day to day lives. I've known too many people who will delete everything they make as soon as they're finished, far more who won't even save their work as anything but one massive collated .psd or .csp file with hundreds of layers. And well, I can't say I'm any better. As a child I lost a lot of my family's precious photographs, ones from my aunts wedding, my siblings infanthood, and my own childhood, all because no one thought to back them up on anything but a 10 year old kid's laptop. The worth of these memories is only truly felt when you lose them, that I promise you. In the same way, documenting our work as artists of all kinds (craftsmen, photographers, writers, costume designers, ad infinitum) is something we only really understand the weight of when we don't do it, and subsequently, lose it.

"Okay Cali, I get it, archival is important, I'll leave my drawings in a folder or a drawer somewhere so it doesn't get lost, so can you stop being passive aggressive?' Well dear imaginary reader, I am sorry I come across as passive aggressive in the first place! Believe me when I say, the sentiment is genuine. There's a lot of beauty that gets lost with time, and as much as it can sound like it's as easy as just putting everything away, there's honestly way more that goes into proper archival than that. Earlier, I said that theres a few things that are difficult to do with archival that are essentially what we are aiming for. For the sake of this post (as small and inconsequential as it is) I'll try and go through each of them broadly, with the hope you might come out of it with a better awareness of these things, and that maybe that might help your future self avoid some headaches :)

Let it be known, that just like my last posts, this isn't a tutorial, nor is it a comprehensive document, just a springboard from the words of a wacky little guy who has good intentions and some time on their hands!

Archives have gotta be... Accessible!

"So when you say accessible, what specifically do you mean by that? Do I have to make sure my archive is disability friendly? Or available for everyone to see?" These are pretty good questions, and the answer to both is, sure, but not necessarily. When I say accessible, I mean that whoever needs to access it needs to be able to do so with a certain amount of ease, and more importantly, that there is a system in place that makes it so if you want to find something specific, then that is in itself accessible. Making your archive accessible for others is a pretty neat thing to do, but if the reason you're making it is to have access to your own work as simply as possible then that doesn't have to be your main priority. Of course, this does mean that if you specifically need your archive to be accessible to yourself as a result of a disability, then that should be top of your list too! For instance: if you need your physical pieces to be labeled in braille, or if you need your folders to be in a dyslexia friendly font, then yes that would be an important thing to do for yourself specifically. This can also always extend to if you know that for any particular reason you may need this accessibility support for your future self. Sometimes, accessibility really is as simple as typing out what you scribbled in a notepad because you know you won't be able to read your own handwriting later down the line!

This isn't the only way that accessibility can be a necessity though. Say you're a traditional animator, with hundreds of piles of drawings stacked in your closet. While you can lable each piece differently and make it accessible in that way, you'll quickly find that it's physically difficult to access your work, as in, hundreds of piles of drawings all stacked in a closet are really heavy actually, and picking all of them up just to get the ones at the bottom really sucks actually. The biggest example of this I have and will ever see in my life was my late grandfather. He was a historian, and he had an obsession with the archival of Egyptian newspapers. Whenever I'd go to see him the piles grew higher and higher, his studio (which was a completely seperate apartment to his house, which also was full of newspapers) was practically a labyrinth. While this massive treasure trove of information existed, it couldn't truly be used for anything. Finding the one single edition from one year past the decades of newspapers would've probably been impossible, though I can't say I know if he personally had some kind of 'system' to it. In the end when he died, no one made real use of it, and all of it was sold unscruptulously to who knows what means.

So, tldr; make your archive accessible, make it easy to get into and out of, make it easy to understand what goes where, and what any of it means, save yourself the loss of your life's work!!!

Archives really do need to be... traceable!

"That was kind of depressing. I'd like to move on now?" It sure is isn't it!! Knowing that the things we try and save won't always outlive us is difficult and depressing, but there's more reasons to archive things than just for them to outlive us and our memories. Let's say you need to make a portfolio, or a retrospective, or even just show someone some stupid art you made of sonic eating a tesco's meal deal you made when you were in year 7, or maybe 8? you've made sure your archives are accessible, and you've made sure they're easy to get into... But now comes a different question: When... did I actually make this again? Why did I make it? Who was I inspired by, or where did this material come from?!

Worry not, for that means our next key point on archival is here! Traceability!!

Do you ever wonder why pinterest isn't actually a good source for any kind of academic setting? Why isn't it an archive, when everything is so easy to access and easy to understand? The simple answer is that tracing anything back from pinterest is a major pain in the bee-hind. There's no real way to know when something was made, who made it, where it was made... you gotta do your own damn sleuthing, and sometimes you end up with brick walls. Now some people are certified online detectives who can do all that for you, but what if you need to find these things out about your own art?

Well, you'll have to wait for tomorrow's post for that :]. I feel like this post has already gotten quite long, and at the risk of losing your attention, I'll post the second half of it in the next post!

Stay cool in this scalding weather, and don't delete your art or you'll regret it!! See you later :)

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