Archiving Autonomy: Regenerating The Attic Archive As An Open-Source Web Platform

What might it mean to regenerate an artist's archive as an open-source infrastructure? Can rearchiving an artist's life work in this way help us find ways to 'repurpose' rather than solely 'revive' vintage media artworks (Cramer, 2014) and thus reinvestigate their contemporary relevance for new audiences? What curatorial methods can be used to construct an archival model that brings new insight into an artist's work through its regeneration? Since 2021, curator Judit Bodor and artist Roddy Hunter have been exploring how to curate The Attic Archive (1980-2020), established by artist Pete Horobin at 37 Union Street, Dundee, Scotland as a self-historicisation project of work produced under four different identities, namely Pete Horobin (1980-89), Marshall Anderson (1990-99), Peter Haining (2000-09), and aitch (2010-19). Responding to the archive's historical formation through peer-to-peer networked correspondence art and its present dispersal across collections in Scotland, Ireland and Hungary, Bodor and Hunter are establishing an open-source, user-generated web platform built and maintained by an open and inclusive network of care of artists, archivists, curators, and researchers internationally to share and generate work, correspondence and ephemera related to the archive. This paper will describe how the project has reassessed established methods of curating artists' archives, including performative and hybrid approaches to offline and online exhibition-making, introduce the web platform publicly for the first time and outline the project's future challenges and opportunities in attempting to secure a sustainable legacy for this and potentially other media art archives.