The riverine Archive: AVR and preserving the contingency of digital heritage

This paper is about cataloguing the material developed in collaboration over 10 years as part of a project called the ‘Phi books’. The Phi books is an interdisciplinary collaborative project initiated by Dr. Alexandra Antonopoulou and Dr. Eleanor Dare in 2008. It has employed algorithmic narrative, storytelling, audience participation, code-writing, performance, sophisticated motion tracking technology, VR as well as custom software to explore how borders, walls, and doors facilitate collaboration.

In this paper, the authors would like to present their interested in the large amounts of material that were lost, forgotten or hidden in layers of language and code over time. In response to this, the authors constructed an alternative methodological approach called the riverine archive that interrogates and reframes what an archive can and cannot represent. We challenge the idea of an archive as a fixed account of our project since its process and intentions would contradict their methodological approach; this is based on physical, body-to-body performance relationships. This paper instead introduces the idea of an archive that is in constant flux, a mutable structure, one that celebrates the idea of occlusion and the value of intersubjective emergence. We are interested in an idea of a mutable archive that resists to fixed documentation and leaves space for the non-recordable energy of togetherness, collaboration, and performance. It allows for data to dip beneath the surface and re-emerge when variables come together.

As part of this the paper the authors discuss what are the purpose and the implications of AVR (augmented, virtual and mixed reality) for collaboration concerned with preserving the contingency of our digital heritage. Our work as designers, technologists, writers, as well as academic researchers, seeks to identify the chances and challenges of VR collaborative environments, adopting an Interdisciplinary and intermedia approach, at the intersection of the gallery, games, film, theatre and fine arts.