The ‘Living Archive’ project was a collaboration between Wayne McGregor | Random Dance and City University London to design and build a prototype digital archive of unique materials produced during the career of choreographer Wayne McGregor. Its aim was to collate disparate collections belonging to McGregor and the companies he has worked with in order to act as a central repository from this point forward, reflecting the evolution of McGregor’s works and allowing exploratory navigation through the archive material.

The project sought to research and develop visualisation models for presenting the Geffrye’s unique archive of highly documented, digitised photographs of ordinary people’s homes (some 5,000 items). The vision was to go beyond the item-by-item list typically returned by searches on collections management systems, and to move towards a way of representing the archive that allows the user to be able to see and interrogate the archive in informative ways.

In collaboration with CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practise) Irene and Cathy worked with the Her Noise Archive as a starting point to develop a resource of collected materials investigating music and sound histories in relation to gender, creating a modular curriculum that can be adapted and tailored for specific opportunities or needs.

The Connections project was devised to provide a further step in the development of the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive. The project provided a window of opportunity to conduct a small and focused exploration of the archive and to identify its potential value with academic stakeholders.

Event company Creative Belly fronted by head chef Ben Spalding, (Per Se: New York, Roganic: London, L’Autre Pied: London, Brasserie Lipp: Paris and 28+: Gothenburg), has been partnered with Dr Joshua Abrams from University of Roehampton to explore how culinary performance has varied over time.

Using material gathered over 12 years, Sue Clayton has followed the stories of separated young people living in the UK who arrived having for instance been child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo or whose families fought alongside British troops in Helmand or who got caught on the wrong side of partition in Sudan. The material takes the form of interviews, video diaries, and re-created scenarios, which turn on their head many public and media assumptions about ‘asylum’, ‘scroungers’ and what it means to be ‘British’.

This collaboration between the Song Collectors Collective and the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS, University of London sought to investigate current song collecting practice and devise ways of encouraging and improving song collecting in the digital age.

The project utilised a variety of research methods to assess and enhance the SR holdings pertaining to Live Art and feminism. A programme of performance-based research strategies were designed to increase the visibility of specialised areas of cultural practice and investigate ways to redefine how these can be more widely disseminated.