Preserving Practices: The Archive and the Audience

Many artists and makers, especially those working with digital technologies, have interactive aspects to their work where the audience also becomes an important part of the work itself. When working on an interactive project, how do you archive the audience and their experiences? And what are ways to experiment with forms of collective archiving?

The Archive and the Audience is the second session of How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices, a four part workshop series on digital archiving that gives creators and makers the tools they need to archive their own practice.

During this second session, we’ll explore how to archive an audience, discussing and immediately experimenting hands-on with ways to do this collectively. One of our guests is Avery Dame-Griff, author of the book The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet and founder of the Queer Digital History Project. Avery will share his experience with archiving what people do on the internet and why this is important. At the same time, he’ll also be sharing how to take people’s privacy into account when archiving often personal experiences.

We will collectively archive and report Avery’s presentation, by using the open-source and free-to-use publishing tool Etherport. Etherport is a tool for experimental, multi-voiced, and non-linear cultural event reports, developed by Open Source Publishing and the Institute of Network Cultures in the context of the research project Going Hybrid. Gijs de Heij from Open Source Publishing and Tommaso Campagna from the Institute of Network Cultures will join us to introduce us to Etherport and share how it allows for the creation of hybrid publications developed through a collective process with space for audience participation.

After this session, you’ll not only learn about how to bring together the archive and the audience, but also take home a practical tool for quickly and collectively publishing hybrid publications.

📅 Date: 11 December 2025
🕗 Time: 15.00 – 18.00 CET
📍 Location: Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam and online
🎟 Tickets: €5 per workshop and €15 for all 4 workshops (onsite or online)

As these workshops are more intimate sessions, there is a limited supply of tickets available. The workshops can be joined both onsite and online. You can find information about physical accessibility on the Nieuwe Instituut website 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.

How to Archive Better: Preserving Practices

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. The 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 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 above):

🔷 15 January 2026: The Materiality of Archiving
Onsite location: Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, 3015 CB Rotterdam

Digital archiving can often seem quite ephemeral, with things stored on servers, in the cloud. In this session we want to focus on the materiality of digital archiving, thinking about how to archive a website, online project, or browser-based work. 

🔷 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 faster? And what is the new value of the archive in the face of these fast-paced developments in AI?