15 January, 15:00 CET
Preserving Practices #3: Materialities of Archiving
Artists, designers, and makers often struggle with processes of archiving their own work. This is especially true for individuals or collectives who work digitally or who have more intersectional and social practices. Archiving your own work can often feel like a lonely task, and one that gets left behind, forgotten, moved to the end of the to-do list. How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices is a four part workshop series on digital archiving that gives creators and makers the tools they need to archive their own practice.
Digital archiving can often seem quite ephemeral, with our projects, files, and even the artworks themselves, stored on servers, on external hard drives, in the cloud. But when we archive our work in the cloud or on external hard drives, is it safe? What happens when the platforms that a work was originally made on don’t exist anymore? And how can we create new ways of caring for digital work together? In our third session, Materialities of Archiving, we’ll focus on the materiality of digital archiving, thinking about what it means to archive a website, an online project, or a browser-based work. In this session we’ll explore digital archiving tools and processes and learn about decentralised, autonomous, and self-hosted approaches to archiving digital work.
The session will begin with a talk from Kelani Nichole, a technologist and exhibition maker who founded TRANSFER, an experimental media art gallery. She has been exploring decentralised networks and virtual worlds in contemporary art for over a decade. Kelani will be joining us to talk about her own practice and her latest initiative TRANSFER Data Trust, a decentralised artist-owned archive whose mission it is to cooperatively maintain artworks in perpetuity, ensuring their preservation and access across generations. Backed by a network of care, this model offers a new approach to media art valuation, conservation, and governance.
The talk will be followed by a hands-on workshop led by Karl Moubarak and Heerko van der Kooij, who are both part of the Hackers and Designers collective. For this workshop we’ll be exploring strategies to archive web and code-based projects using digital archiving processes and tools. The workshop will start with a practical hands-on overview on how to use git, a version control system used to store, share, and work together with others to write code. Together we’ll explore the various tool ecosystems around git and focus on the archiving-publishing possibilities embedded in collaboration on code projects. We will also explore more autonomous and self-hosted approaches to archiving code projects.
đź“… Date: 15 January 2026
đź•— Time: 15.00 – 18.00 CET
đź“Ť Location: Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB, Rotterdam and online
🎟 Tickets: €5 per workshop & €15 for all 4 workshops (onsite or online)
As these workshops are more intimate sessions, there is a limited supply of tickets available. They are also available to follow simultaneously online. You can find information about physical accessibility at Nieuwe Instituu here.
Note for passepartout ticketholders:
With a passepartout ticket, you can join all four sessions onsite or online. We ask that you email us at info@thehmm.nl in advance to let us know which workshops you would like to attend, and your mode of presence. Please scroll further for the specific location of the session(s) you would like to join onsite.
About How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices
How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices is a workshop series made in collaboration between The Hmm and Network Archives Design and Digital Culture (NADD), a growing network of museums, creators, archives, designers, researchers and collectives who have combined forces to make design and digital culture archives visible, accessible and future-proof.
This four-part series encourages us to move from individual practices to collective archiving—practicing ways to support one another in acts of archiving. With this in mind, the sessions will include knowledge sharing combined with a practical collective working session. Each workshop will begin with a talk from an artist, designer, or researcher, sharing their own archiving practice and experience as inspiration, followed by a more hands-on workshop where an invited guest (researcher, artist, archivist) teaches a specific set of skills or approach to archiving. Following the workshop, time will be dedicated to work on archiving your own practice as an extension of the tools or ideas shared in the session.
The sessions will be hybrid and participants can join onsite or online. The onsite sessions will take place either in Amsterdam at The Hmm’s studio in the NDSM Loods or Rotterdam at Nieuwe Instituut. Please check the session you would like to join for the specific onsite location.
You can join for all four sessions with a passepartout ticket, or choose one or two to take part in.
Upcoming workshops in the series (tickets already available via ticket link):
đź”· 12 February 2026: Automated Archiving
Onsite location: The Hmm’s studio, NDSM-plein 125, 1033 WB, Amsterdam
In this workshop we want to explore if, and how, we can use AI and other tools for automated, and even speculative archiving. Can these tools make our archiving processes better? And what is the value of the archive in the face of these fast-paced developments in AI?
