Performance, practice and presence: Design parameters for the Living Archive

In this chapter I discuss what it means to design such a thing as the Circus Oz Living Archive. As stated in the introduction to this book, this archive is the realisation of a series of propositions which were founded on differing levels of authoritative knowledge and expertise. The project is a collaborative investigation, bringing together academics from across the humanities and science fields, as well as archivists, cultural organisations and members of the Circus Oz company. The team is a complex mix of people, disciplinary fields and professionallmowledge and as such the Living Archive propositions were not baseless steps into the unknown; 1 and yet what they would really mean in practice for all the various stakeholders and users does represent a move into unknown territory. Such is the case with the co-design of radical innovations to practices and processes within any applied context.