AD-lab 2025, NABA Rome Masters course, Archives Displayed.

collective workshop on utopia

PART 1: The Post-analogue-Card

The collective research proposal focuses on research involving archival collections, library catalogues, scientific databases, physical repositories, documentary and digital media collections.  The class should come together as a collective think-tank, or laboratory, setting out critical benchmarks, analytical tactics, to bring together a collective strategy for cooperation and creative intervention.

AD-Lab is a collective opportunity for students in this course to critically reassess and re-interpret the concept of Research and Documentation, and Research and Design. The intention of this collective exercise is to critically re-evaluate and creatively imagine an interactive public art project that can be either site specific, or told through performances, staged public events, installations, or multi-media documentaries.

The collective research project this semester (The Post-analogue-Card) takes for its initiative the historic legacy of the postcard and the rapid rise of images spreading across social media today. We plan to work closely with the Italy’s National Photographic Archive (ICCD Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Minister della Cultura) here in Rome, and we will be permitted direct access to their analogue and digital archives.

We will also visit and study the collections and archives at the Sapienza University – Museo della Zoologia, the Zoological Museum. With climate change impacting on so many aspects of our contemporary life, the Zoological collection will serve as a kind of “time machine” providing the archival evidence that allows us to reflect on transformations to the natural environment “before and “after.”

The premise behind this student group research project is to encourage the development of a collectively inspired creative multi-media project to catalogue, archive and communicate the vast accumulation of contemporary postcards as well as post-analogue “postcards,” that are being digitally distrubuted across global internet channels, on image sharing platforms and on the cloud. New technological developments are also to be considered within this project, like post-photographic images, multi-media performances, virtual reality productions and AI technologies.

“The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study in the ways in which the media have swallowed it.”

Marshall McLuhan. (Quoted in Susan Sontag, On Photography, first pulbished in 1971. page 201, Penguin Books).

LINK TO AD-LAB 25