The heritage sector is not the sexiest sector of the Dutch cultural world. Even though the EXPOSURE around your ears this season, you are more likely to think of obscure museums, monuments, stamp collections, old stuff. So it could happen that the foundation Digital Heritage Netherlands could have existed for almost 25 years without anyone in the 'more popular' arts (stage, film, literature) having heard of it. this changed in 2018. With a 'open call for ideas', and at the insistence of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), the Netherlands' other arts sectors were brought up to speed. Quite necessary, because certainly in the performing arts the archives are in a lousy state. And digitisation also leaves much to be desired.
Fine, then, that the production house Feikes House yesterday was one of the winners of the open call, with a project that enables live animation and other things by tinkering with Arduino computertjes. Exactly what that will look like, no one really knows yet, just like the plan of the Impakt festival To expand its online presence, or the navigation app 'tap' for blind people to visit van Abbe museum develops, but it does capture the imagination.
Retrieved
On Monday 4 March 2019, the three best ideas submitted to the open call were in the light of a projector at the DEN 2019 event. Something that heritage people have been eagerly awaiting for years, but the stage people were a bit uncomfortable walking around. Because, yes, saving your last performance? Pretty tricky. Posters, programme notes, videos, reviews, photos? There used to be the Theaterinstituut Nederland and the Muziekcentrum Nederland, where a few people worked all day to do that collecting work for busy theatre and music people, but they have been disbanded. The collection partly resides at the UvA, which takes care of it as long as there is money. But renew, innovate, digitise, an app? Ho on.
Why that is so difficult, apart from the fact that collaboration and data sharing is quite a thing in the arts, the case study of the Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) which has now really started to digitise its archives. These run to 1976, and at the presentation (a powerpoint with real texts and old-fashioned bullits) showed right away how tricky it could be: dancers, as well as other performing artists, are not keen on saving early work because they don't want to be reminded of embarrassing moments. And early work is usually full of those. Creators think so. And some journalists.
Pension
Another thing is copyrights. Especially on photographs. Until 2005, photographers started their careers confident that their work would automatically build up a pension. After all, their old photos could be reused, monetised again. Then came fast internet, high resolutions were no longer a problem and Google and Facebook made everything free. Many photographers now have no pension. That category takes in agencies that are working like mad to claim copyright for unjust reuse, and blame them.
It does pose a problem for those who want to put their photo archives online as an art company, because so rights have to be arranged for all those photos. That has already led to a couple of long-running court cases, and however new generations with different, more open licences work: the old guard must be protected. They are heritage too, after all. That's why the NDT's business manager said very proudly at the presentation that they were not going to pay for the rights, but his colleague added later that in some cases it had been done generously.
Proprietary platforms
Which just goes to show that archiving and access costs money, and that few people in the arts are willing to spend that money. And when they do spend money, they prefer to do so on their own platforms and apps, rather than acting in concert. Forerunner ArtTube is therefore defunct this year, successor and competitor MuseumTV is in dire straits because of the same unwillingness to cooperate. And meanwhile the Establish its own YouTube channel specifically for young people. A million goes into that. But they prefer not to share the platform. Reason for some angry noises in the corridors.
Incidentally, similar developments are under way in the performing arts. There, four platforms have now been set up for registering and streaming performing arts performances. Their chances of survival hinge on the companies' willingness to cooperate. And of their willingness to collaborate with Google, because it became clear from a few examples that without Google's massiveness, it won't work. Then you only have bargaining power if you have unique images, such as the State and the Mauritshuis demonstrated. They were (the only ones) able to do something about the draconian licences initially demanded by the search engine.
Victoria and Albert
The Netherlands does not have a national museum for visual culture, design, fashion, literature and performing arts. For all those things separately, though. Is that a bad thing? Well if you see what it V&A Museum in London is capable of. That museum, which thus preserves and nurtures all these modern and ephemeral states, can set up an event around the work of Charles Dickens, or David Bowie, drawing from its own collection: the fashions of the time, the stage work, the films, the design and, yes, the manuscripts too. Anyone wanting to set up something like this in the Netherlands around the work of W.F. Hermans, for example, would have to work with about ten separate museums and foundations. And all ten can go wrong.
It would already be nice if the government made archiving and accessing those archives a requirement when subsidising arts institutions. No archives? No money. It could well be that cooperation would then be sought very fanatically. Then a Dutch V&A could become a nice dot on the horizon.
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