Designing in the living archive: Software and representation

The design of digital archives has become a significant issue for the fields of interaction design and software studies. This is because our engagement with cultural heritage and contemporaty cultural production is increasingly digitally mediated. In this chapter I focus on my practice-based research in the design of a digital media archive of performance videos, where I have been an embedded design researcher in the Circus Oz Living Archive Project (hereafter 'the project'). The project utilises the Circus Oz collection of over 800 videos, documenting the company's performance history since 1978, as a context in which to experiment with the design of a 'living archive' prototype. This discussion draws on the recent software studies work of Lev Manovich, who makes the claim that all media is software. I will use Manovich's frame to analyse the digital archive of this project as software material, to consider what a living archive might be. In this chapter I will demonstrate, through an analysis of some of the underlying design principles that were used to enact the Circus Oz Living Archive, how this understanding of the archive as software manifests in practice. I will conclude by arguing that a possible new definition of living archive emerges from an understanding of the archive as software, one that frames the archive as a platform for design representations.