Chapter Five: Workshops on the BRCA Platform

If we're contributing with our experience, then the curator is more relevant. If we're contributing towards the vitality of the work, then the fortune teller seems more apt. One requires immediacy, the other: augury – User Comment, June 8, 2020

All the workshops were held online using a different constellation of open source and occasionally proprietary platforms (such as Zoom) when collaborators or the format (a conference) required them. Taking place a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, most users were familiar with the format of the online video call. Listening to disembodied voices and watching unknown actors write were underlying factors of the online workshop experience. The choice of platform produced different forms of collaboration and possible ways of interaction.

The anticipated audience were those interested in the collection, users interested in MediaWikis and open-source platforms, London South Bank students and museum professionals looking for ways to engage with the digital collections. The intended workshop audience was broad in terms of experience with the collection. Typically, the audience of The Sarah Rose Collection – A David Bomberg Legacy exhibitions and related talks have skewed to an audience largely over the age of 65 (based on user surveys and data gathered from the gallery mailing list) in contrast to the performance or workshops such as the Wikipedia Editathon, where participants’ average age was 22. A possible problem that arises with such a large age range and experience is a disparity in users’ comfort using technology and their familiarity with the material, causing alienation, or creating barriers to collaborative production at the site of interpretation. Workshop participants were recruited through online social media channels, conference attendees, Eventbrite, local newsletters, the gallery mailing list and word of mouth.

The first round of workshops set out to explore with users what they hoped to get out of the designed environment by creating terms and conditions for participating and testing what relational undercurrents might surface between the users, platform, and myself as the curator/facilitator.

5.1 Speculative Curating of the Online Borough Road Archive Workshops

The first workshops on the newly designed platform were planned across the platform and a co-writing pad [see Ref 6 and 7]. The first activity was for users to look at the same digital object on the platform, then respond to one of the curator roles sets of questions on the co-writing pad: “What scents do you smell?”, “What do you feel beneath your feet?”, “If this digital object made a sound, what would it sound like?”, “What alternate title would you give this image?”. Users could see other responses build in the pad. The questions moved from using the BRCA platform to asking participants to reflect on the type of online community they are seeking to generate, helping to shape the terms and conditions of the platform. Returning to some of the types of questions I worked on in the User Manifesto workshop, participants were asked to consider authorship and scale in online communities. Through the form of the workshop, I worked to engage the new community of users with the transitory, networked nature of digital objects and highlight the terms and conditions they were generating as the discussions developed.

One of the central challenges of any user-based interaction present in this research practise is the question of moderation. Users had to create a password to create forms; users could only read other forms if they did not create an account. There were moderators present in all the workshop chat forums to create a safe environment for users to participate. This was meant to foster a safe environment for user interaction but also creates a barrier for entry and the possibility of exclusion of users who may not understand or want to follow the community guidelines.

The questions across the platform utilise museum education practices with the intention of community building and to engage users with the digital collection as objects. Embodied looking in museum education refers to a mode of engaging with artworks or objects that involves more than just visual observation; it encompasses a holistic approach that incorporates sensory experiences, physical sensations, emotions, and imagination. Embodied responses are integral to complete engagement with artworks, as they contribute to learning experiences by integrating perception, physical sensations, and emotions (Hubard, 2007). Using the offline museum education methods of embodied looking transposed into the online environment provides opportunities for users to engage with digital artefacts in multisensory ways and to consider the digital objects as objects. Through reflective prompts and discussions, the workshops aimed to not only explore the nature of digital objects but also to empower users to shape the online community and its terms of engagement, emphasising the participatory nature of digital museum experiences.

Once users got used to the co-writing format it became a more playful environment. One user compared it to the experience of using Instant Messenger in the early 2000s. As the workshop progressed users began to respond to each other’s comments, making puns, extending, and building on each other’s jokes andobservations. Instead of individual written responses to the prompts and questions a dialogue between the different participants began to build.

The silences on the pad between writing exercises were initially hard to sit with; there was no audio or video confirmation that participants were understanding and participating in the process. As users got familiar with the co-writing pad and platform the momentum began to develop. Users generally used their own names on the co- written tabs in contrast to the User Manifesto workshop, where people created different usernames. Kelly Rappleye and I used our own names in the pad, perhaps setting the precedent for other users to choose to enter the pad with their own names. The facilitators of the workshops, as well as the format of the tools (co- writing pads and wikis), formed the type of interactions that played out across the workshop, shaping user behaviour in evident and subtle ways.

The choice of wording in both the speculative fiction and embodied looking questions throughout the designed platform shaped the users' responses. Across the first two workshops there was a discussion on the co-writing pad about the use of the word “platform”. One of the speculative questions asked users to imagine “what platform do you see this digital object hosted on in the future”, and in both groups there were questions about what the term meant; for some they thought it meant a physical place, like an oil platform or train platform, and for others they saw future digital platforms, like social media platforms, as the sites that might host the digital object. The ambiguity in terms like “platform” for users generated some useful and engaging conversations about the nature of the digital object and the future world that users could imagine them participating in.

Questions arose around the assumption of universal understanding of terminology within the designed platform. The ambiguity surrounding the term “platform” highlights potential communication barriers between users with diverse backgrounds and levels of digital literacy. Furthermore, it raises concerns about the effectiveness of the use of speculative fiction and embodied looking questions in eliciting responses, as how users’ interpretations vary widely based on their individual understandings of key terms.

The workshops recognised that digital interactions occur across multiple layers of time simultaneously. Users are part of a larger, interconnected system where past interactions are stored and can be revisited, creating a temporal depth that is richer and more complex than linear, real-world experiences. Returning to Deleuze’sconcept of the virtual, the workshops framed user engagement as an interplay between actual experiences and virtual potentialities (Deleuze, 2014). The use of co- writing pads allowed participants to see responses build in real-time, creating a collaborative narrative that built continuously. This mirrors the fluid and ongoing nature of digital interaction, where content is constantly updated, and user contributions form a collective, ever-evolving dialogue. Unlike physical museum visits, which are confined to specific hours, digital workshops allow participants to engage with the content at any time. This flexibility acknowledges the non-linear, on- demand nature of time on the Internet, where users can interact with digital objects and workshop materials according to their schedules. The workshops exemplify how digital platforms can transcend the limitations of linear time, fostering a multi-layered temporal experience that enriches user engagement and collaborative creation in the virtual realm. This remains relevant as it shifts our understanding of digital engagement from a static interaction to an interplay of potentialities. This perspective highlights how digital platforms not only facilitate present engagements but also create an ongoing, expanding space for future interactions and collaborative knowledge production.

5.2 Sounding the Archives Workshop

The next round of workshops focused on creating a polyvocal audio guide [see Ref 8 and 9]. In this run of workshops audio artists, students, researchers, and collaborators worked together to create a multi-voiced interpretation of the online objects. Through the series of workshops that included deep listening and experimental audio recording techniques the hope was to create a sense of digital intimacy, a kind of familiarity dependent on a small-scale system of communication that could take place in these types of online groups.

In the first audio workshop I worked with artist Bill Daggs [see Ref 8]. Participants began the session with Bill Daggs with shared anecdotes about audio guides and unconventional audio that they have encountered in galleries and museums and how that shifted their feeling of navigating the offline museum space. The workshop attendees were very interested in Bill’s own experience working as a musician and artist, asking a lot of questions about the display and production of his artwork in different online/offline contexts. Bill spoke about his approach to sampling: in his own work he believes that nothing is really copyrighted, all files are open to be edited and sampled. He described the experience of making audio responses to the digital objects in the BRCA collection as: “it is like we are collaborating with artists across 100 years, centuries”. One of the first exercises was to ask the participants to make and upload an audio response to one of the digital objects featured on the designed platform using whatever materials they had around them. One participant made a soundscape to one of the GIFs of Paintings using celery and tortilla chips, the crunchiness adding a sort of static reflection of the dancer’s actions in the GIF. The GIF is looped video of a dancer with a work from the original painting projected on them. The result is a GIF that incorporates the offline collection as well as performance, layered with found and created audio. This new file demonstrates the ways that images can be encountered and interacted with online. The digital images can travel and be altered by a new set of users beyond the scope of the museum.

In the “Sounding the Archives” workshop, the collaboration between artist Bill Daggs and participants exemplifies the theoretical shift from the traditional museum visitor to the digital user, highlighting the concept of distributed subjectivity and the dynamic ontology of digital images within the collection. Participants engaged with digital objects not as static entities but as fluid constructs. By creating and uploading audio responses, participants enacted a form of digital subjectivity, where their interactions were mediated by the digital platform and influenced by the collective input of others. Participants engaged with digital objects not as static entities but as fluid, evolving constructs that reflect a networked, participatory form of existence. The construction of digital subjects involves matching, correlating, and modelling data, presenting these processes as a logic of fact where data is equated with documentary evidence(Goriunova, 2019). In the workshop, participants created and uploaded audio responses, enacting a form of digital subjectivity where their interactions were mediated by the digital platform and influenced by the collective input of others. This process underscores how digital environments facilitate a distributed agency, allowing users to co-create and continuously reshape the narrative. The workshop’s emphasis on sampling and remixing audio files demonstrated how digital images can be reinterpreted by users, moving beyond the confines of the original artefact to become part of a collaborative and ever-changing digital narrative. By recognising the distance in which digital subjects are produced, the workshop highlighted the indexicality that comes from outside the data, embracing the thick distance as a mark of the form of knowledge. This layered interaction not only redefines the user’srole but also transforms the digital collection into a living entity that acknowledges the distance while allowing for different subjects to materialise, aligning with the workshop’s goal of fostering a collaborative digital subjectivity.

In this workshop some participants struggled with the technical interface, the platform only accepts WAV/MP3 files, and some users were unsure how to generate the right file format. One user, who was using an iPad, struggled to navigate across all the tabs required in the workshops, moving from found sound files, Zoom, to the designed platform, but persisted and eventually uploaded her audio contributions. During the workshop a participant made drawings of what the audio files sounded like and then shared the digital image she took with her phone with the group. In the final exercise we selected one digital image, and everyone found or made a file that they thought best represented the digital object. All the files were sent to Bill Daggs and in real time he mixed and uploaded the collaborative piece. All participants, minus one, selected or made files that mimicked noises produced by technology, like a dial-up Internet sound. The workshop ended with us listening to the co-created audio as we looked at the digital image on the BRCA platform.

The technical interface posed challenges for some participants, indicating potential accessibility issues or a lack of clear instructions on file format requirements. This raises questions about the inclusivity of the workshop and whether adjustments could be made to accommodate participants with varying levels of technical expertise or access to specific devices. In addition, the reliance on specific file formats limited the participation of users who may have been unfamiliar with or unable to generate WAV/MP3 files. This constraint may have inadvertently excluded certain individuals from fully engaging with the workshop activities, highlighting the need for greater flexibility in the technical requirements.

The exploration of digital subjectivity in this workshop highlighted the shifting nature of interaction with digital collections, where users engage not just as passive observers but as active contributors shaping the digital narrative. The user that made drawings of the audio files introduced an interesting aspect to the workshop; her paper and pencil drawings were then shared in the chat, demonstrating the way that the digital collection and its interactions quickly move between formats (digital file, audio response, offline drawing, to digital file again) and the layers that this form of collective interpretation can add to the online collection. The collaborative exercise of selecting or creating files to represent the digital object resulted in a focus on technological noises, such as dial-up Internet sounds. This raises questions about the underlying assumptions or biases influencing participants’ choices and whether alternative prompts or exercises could encourage greater diversity in the representations produced. Overall, the workshop demonstrated innovative approaches to engaging with digital content, although there are areas where further reflection and adaptation could enhance the inclusivity, accessibility, and diversity of participant experiences.

5.3 Experimental Audio Guide Workshop

The second audio-based workshop I ran in collaboration with media artist Artemis Gryllaki [see Ref 9]. This version of the workshop was more structured than the previous workshop with Bill Daggs. We created a series of tasks for participants to complete on the platform and came back to the video call once between each completed task. The session began with participants talking about their experience with audio guides to start the session. One participant described the experience of going to some caves in Slovakia and punching in the wrong number in the English audio guide handset that resulted in him listening to mismatched entries to what they were looking at. He described how the gap of misunderstanding between what was described and what they were looking at created an imagined history of something that could have existed. This experience was overlaid with an in-person guide who was translating to him, causing this dissonance of the automated voice on the handset, the object itself and the in-person guide. Another participant described the experience of being on a tourist bus in London and having the sound effects of the audio guide in her ears as they navigated the city. These described experiences at the beginning of the workshop illustrated the diversity of registers that participants encountered in relating to heritage or museum audio content as it related to their surroundings.

The high level of technical fluency in the second audio workshop group meant that they produced more audio files then in the previous session and moved swiftly through the tasks. We ended on an exercise to create a group chorus. We selected an image from the collection, turned our cameras off and everyone made, played, or performed a sound. We recorded and uploaded the co-created file and sent the file to everyone so they could edit or change their own version of the audio. The experience of hearing sounds and producing random sounds to a group of black squares was at first awkward but then had moments of incredible synchronicity when sounds would match up or periods of silence would simultaneously end. This part of the workshop had a ritualistic quality that seemed to bring the change of context and potentialities of the digitised object to the fore. In this exercise there was a sense of co-creating and animating a digital object that brought the experience of witnessing and participating the same object collectively closer to the user. This exercise functioned the best to establish the idea of shared experiences, shared interests, and a shared cultural space.

The format of the second audio workshop lacked time for participants to reflect, respond and, minus the final chorus, to work collaboratively. This workshop group was very fluent working across different interfaces. The workshop could have been improved by having one less exercise and built in more time for listening together to what participants had been producing and developing user interactions.

While the second audio workshop demonstrated technical fluency and generated a higher volume of audio files, it also highlighted potential limitations and challenges inherent in its structured format. The emphasis on completing tasks within a predetermined framework may have restricted opportunities for participants to engage in deeper reflection, dialogue, and collaborative exploration of the content. The lack of dedicated time for reflection and response, aside from the final chorus exercise, may have hindered the development of a more interactive group experience, limiting the potential for collective sense-making and knowledge co- construction. The workshop’s focus on technical proficiency and efficiency may have overshadowed the exploration of diverse perspectives and experiences related to heritage and museum audio content. By prioritising the production of audio files and swift completion of tasks, there may have been missed opportunities to delve into the nuanced interpretations, emotions, and meanings evoked by the digital objects. The absence of collaborative work beyond the final chorus exercise may have hindered the fostering of a sense of community and shared ownership of the creative process, potentially diminishing the workshop’s overall impact and effectiveness in promoting engagement with the digital archive.

In the workshop I hoped to foster a deeper understanding of the forms of digital interactions and curatorial practices. This complexity underlying digital interactions suggests a paradigm shift in curatorial practice, emphasising a more tactical and speculative approach that prioritises relationality over presentation of artworks. The concept of ‘not-just-art-curating’ introduces this shift, foregrounding relationality and extending online curating beyond conventional boundaries to include a broader spectrum of practices performed by a diverse public (Tyżlik-Carver, 2017) participating in creating and interpreting digital collections, thereby shifting traditional notions of authority within cultural institutions.

The polyvocal audio workshops illustrated the enactment of digital subjectivity, relationality, and presence within online environments. These sessions showcased a shift from traditional museum experiences to interactive digital engagements. Participants moved beyond passive consumption of digital artefacts, actively contributing to, and reshaping the digital narrative. By creating audio responses and sharing personal stories, users highlighted how digital subjectivity is distributed across the network, influenced by both individual creativity and collective input. Relationality was a core aspect of the workshops, as the interactions between participants and digital objects were not static but in flux. The value lies in the relationships the workshop fostered among users and the social spaces it created, underlining that the essence of art is found in the exchanges and interactions it enables, rather than in the physical artwork itself. The collaborative nature of the exercises, such as the group chorus and the shared creation of audio files, emphasised the interconnectedness of users and digital artefacts (Bourriaud, 2008). This interconnectedness fostered a sense of community and shared experience, enhancing the depth of engagement with the digital collection. By incorporating these relational principles, the workshops not only facilitated deeper user engagement but also demonstrated how digital curation can foster a collaborative and evolving digital subjectivity. This integration of relational art into digital environments highlights the potential for creating inclusive, participatory experiences that challenge traditional museum narratives and redefine user interaction with digital collections.

However, the workshops also revealed challenges in the digital environment, particularly regarding accessibility and inclusivity. Technical difficulties and rigid format requirements highlighted the need for a more flexible and accommodating approach to ensure all participants, regardless of their technical skills or devices, could fully engage. The experiences of participants struggling with file formats or navigating multiple platforms underscored the importance of clear instructions and support.

Presence in the digital realm was cultivated through intimate and experimental audio interactions, which created a sense of digital intimacy and connection. Yet, the workshops also demonstrated the limitations of structured tasks that could restrict deeper reflection and dialogue. The emphasis on technical proficiency sometimes overshadowed the exploration of diverse perspectives and emotional connections to the digital objects. The research practise challenges and redefines traditional curatorial practices, empowering users to actively participate in the creation and interpretation of digital collections. I participated alongside the other users as a user rather than a role of curator. The workshop demonstrates how this form of online curation process can reshape cultural authority.

I applied to present a workshop at the Twelfth International Conference on The Image with the intention of testing out the form of the workshop and platform with other people working across art institutions, to see how they might engage with their own digital collections.

5.4 The Digital Image as Collective Practice Speculative Curation of the Borough Road Collection Digital Archive Workshop

The next workshop was a combination Zoom call and use of the BRCA platform as part of the Twelfth International Conference on The Image [see Ref 10]. The format of the workshop was similar to the first two workshops, with users responding to the questions in a co-writing pad and on the platform. The Zoom link was required by the conference but was a barrier for participants to write and interact on the pad as they reverted to speaking on the call rather than using the BRCA platform. There were also more technical barriers than in previous workshops; the participants required more time and guidance to be able to navigate through the MediaWiki. The intention of applying to do a workshop as part of a larger academic conference was to test the platform with participants with familiarity of the issues arising from the circulation of a digital collection. This workshop underlined the need for engaged users, the barrier for entry for the platform and the labour required by the curator/host to enable interaction. This was the least successful workshop in terms of building a community among participation and connection between users due in part to the confusing hybrid format of the conference itself that resulted in stilted discussion.

What I could see in this workshop reflects the complex interplay between digital technologies and curatorial practices that aim to facilitate users’ interactions. The challenges faced in this hybrid format highlight the importance of designing platforms that can seamlessly integrate multiple modes of interaction, such as recording or audio responses, filling out forms and using the chat function during the workshops, allowing users to engage both individually and collectively. The workshop underscored the necessity of creating digital environments that not only facilitate access but also foster collaboration and community-building among participants. The option of being on a Zoom call took away from the interaction on the pad and platform; users reverted to more passive modes of interacting, watching rather than adding to the digital archive. Just presenting digital artefacts does not lead to interaction even for an audience that engages with idea of art and the image. This workshop underlined the level of effort it takes to facilitate participation and engagement with the digital archive.

5.5 Resisting Recuperation: Articulating the Unruly Politics Of Artists’ Archives Through Open-Source Practices Workshop

In the final workshop, participants moved from the BRCA platform to pulling out elements of the platform and the form of speculative fiction questions and applied them to an online collection of a Fluxus artist that is held across multiple international institutions [see Ref 11]. Artemis and I were asked to run the workshop as part of“Resisting Recuperation: Articulating the unruly politics of artists’ archives through open-source practices” as part of a larger research project initiated by Dr Judit Bodor and Adam Lockhart at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee. Their overall project aims to explore challenges andapproaches of how we could care for and interact with the ‘unruly’ online archives. The audience for this workshop were curators and archivists that deal with The Attic Archive and the dispersed collection of Fluxus artist Peter Haining. We planned the workshop to move from the designed BRCA platform to their digitised online archive that participants looked at through a series of PDFs. As facilitators, we guided participants through co-writing exercises on the platform and on a co-writing pad, asking participants to extract the questions and utilise the forms of interactions that the BRCA platform facilitate to be applied to their own distributed online collection.

In this workshop, more than any previous workshop, the participants were professionals in the art world and largely familiar with the Attic Archive artwork in the digital documentation. Once the users had tried the BRCA platform and co-writing pad they were asked to use the speculative questions to engage with museum objects. Participants thought that these types of questions would help them find their own interpretation and to observe the object better and force one to think and engage with the object. On the co-written pads participants discussed whether the speculative question worked in both digital space and in the galleries. The users decided they could be applied to both on and offline artworks. One described how the questions in the platform made them think that this is how they looked at things in a gallery space and relate to them without realising. The prompts made visible the forms of interaction that they might already have with art objects that they had encountered.

The users were put into pairs and asked to consider the same object from the online Attic Archive collection. Users took turns asking and answering questions about the objects. Most of the written questions related back to the offline object despite all previous parts of the workshop dealing with the objects as digital. The type ofquestions that users posed where “how would you try to hold this work in the archive?”, “should we let visitors enter the tent while lending this piece for an exhibition?” (in an image of an installation that included a tent structure), and “Where would we like to locate this piece in space and what feeling would we like to provoke for the audience?” These types of responses seemed to reflect the users’ own involvement with the care and display of the offline collections. This group’s approach to responding to the material or curatorial demands of the objects is in line with how educated or sophisticated visitors approach the museum exhibitions: responding to the curation, the interpretation and the museography of the display and with less focus on the subject-matter of the material presented (Dallas, 2004, p.7). The speculative questions were more effective when the users were less familiar with the offline collection.

The workshop with the Attic Archive collection demonstrated the challenges of getting museum professionals to engage with the materiality of digital objects. While the professionals in the art world found value in the speculative questions and the interactive platform, the tendency for participants to revert to discussions centred around offline objects raises questions about the effectiveness of getting users from institutional contexts to engage with their digital collections as digital things. This discrepancy highlights the need for further exploration into how digital curation strategies can effectively translate to the institutional context, particularly in addressing the emerging considerations between archives, collections, and public engagement. To make this work, several measures are needed. First, there should be dedicated training programmes for museum professionals focused on digital literacy and the unique affordances of digital objects. This would help professionals appreciate the materiality and significance of digital artefacts in their own right. Second, the development of more intuitive and engaging digital platforms that seamlessly integrate speculative questions and interactive features could enhance engagement. These platforms should be designed to encourage users to explore digital collections. This could be supported by institutional policies and practices that prioritise new forms of digital engagement and highlight successful case studies of digital curation and public interaction. The workshop underscored the broader issue of how to navigate the tension between institutional stewardship and public involvement in shaping the meanings and futures of archival collections. While speculative questions offer a promising avenue for fostering new dialogues and interpretations, their ultimate impact may hinge on bridging the gap between digital and physical modes of engagement within the online archival domain.

In building a new designed online platform I wanted to create a space for a more engaged public to interact with the online collection. One of the barriers for entry for the public was users’ familiarity with the tools such as co-writing pads used in workshops and navigating the platform. During the workshops skills such as typing speed were factors in whether participants could be part of a developing discussion on the co-writing pad; they could add text at any time, however the attention of the group and perhaps the focus on the exercises might have already moved on. The audio guide role had another set of skills required by users to participate, including uploading files and a familiarity with free and open-source audio recording software and databases. In the smaller workshops the participants struggling with the technical elements could be engaged to help guide through the steps but this necessitated two facilitators so the group could move forward. Those who encountered the platform outside of the workshop format, if frustrated with any technical hurdles, would then not engage with the platform, foreclosing future engagement.

There was a high threshold for even the initial entry into the platform. Finding and entering the site meant that this was not a truly public or accessible platform. Users needed an email address to register for an account. This decision was made as I am the only one moderating the platform and with no sign-in conditions spam would overrun the site. If the site was not moderated, new users might be intimidated or put off by spam content, and it might look like the platform is not cared for or tended to. Once logged in, the next steps for some users were obtuse. With user feedback we added more explicit instructions and graphics of how to negotiate the site and what their first steps to engage with the digital material could be. The instructions were then reiterated in the workshops and exercises for participants. However, the conditions for entering the site precluded some potential users.

The responses from the workshops began to have a life outside of the platform. One LSBU student wrote two speculative fiction stories and posted them to a fan fiction site based on the sketch of a story she started in the fortune teller role. This phenomenon exemplifies the concept of “remix culture”, where users take original content and recontextualise it, creating new works that extend beyond their initial creation (Lessig, 2008). The intention of the platform is to generate outcomes and other online curated projects that will live across and outside the designed platform. Drawing from Henry Jenkins’ theory of “convergence culture”, these activities highlight how users actively participate in the creation and dissemination of content, blurring the lines between producer and consumer (Jenkins, 2006). This participatory approach fosters an interconnected digital space, where archival materials continuously change through user engagement and reinterpretation.

The designed platform is not meant to be an online archive or storage of the digital work; it does not function as a type of preservation strategy. The designed platform underlines the fluidity and mutation of the constellation of digital images. It could be used as inspiration for an audio sketch or writing prompt generator, considering what narratives might extend the life of this combination of digital objects outside of the institution. The platform functions as neither artefact or an exhibition, but as a form of collective praxis on a small scale (Rito and Balaskas, 2020). It is a method for exploring how an online collection archive might become a living and lived in thing.

There is a process of the public unfolding of the research practise, through the workshops and interactions of the collaborators who test and reframe some of the intended design of the platform. The platform needed the workshops to activate the digital archive collection. The intention when designing the platform was to encourage active participation, which shifted the intention from illustrating information about the digital objects to demonstrating how the immaterial systems of participation operate (Graham et al., 2010). Although there were users who tried the platform outside of the workshop, the most significant interactions came through the workshop format. It took a lot of effort to find users, prepare them for the workshop, and guide the groups through technical and ideological processes with concessions and workarounds being made when participants used unexpected tools or methods to access and contribute. For users to participate it took a great deal of effort across the design of the platform, workshop, and narration.

The series of workshops presented a nuanced exploration of user engagement, collaboration, and interpretative practices within the context of the online Borough Road Collection Archive. The workshops, conducted primarily through the MediaWiki-based BRCA platform, were strategically designed to navigate the challenges and potentials of the online format, particularly given the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants’ familiarity with online communication tools and the varied selection of open-source and proprietary platforms influenced the collaborative environment, introducing distinct modes of interaction. Through the diverse range of activities, the workshops aimed to cater to a broad audience, transcending age and experience disparities often encountered in traditional museum-related events.

The evolution of user interactions on the co-writing pad and the BRCA platform demonstrated a shift from initial structured activities to a more playful and collaborative environment. The workshops successfully fostered a sense of community, with participants contributing to shared narratives, building upon each other's ideas, and engaging in dialogues that transcended individual responses. The challenges posed by silences in the collaborative writing process and the initial unfamiliarity with the digital tools gradually gave way to a momentum characterised by active engagement.

The choice of speculative fiction and embodied looking questions on the platform played a crucial role in shaping user responses, sparking discussions about the nature of the digital object and its potential futures. The speculative approach provided a unique lens through which participants could reimagine the role of the digital object, challenging traditional notions of provenance and envisioning unfolding narratives.

The subsequent workshops, focusing on the creation of a polyvocal audio guide, further expanded the ways that users could interact with the collection. The collaboration with artists like Bill Daggs and Artemis Gryllaki brought in diverse perspectives, enriching the auditory dimension of the digital archive. The audio workshops not only experimented with unconventional soundscapes but also highlighted the potential for digital intimacy, bridging the gap between participants across space and time. In this context “digital intimacy” refers to the closeness and connection fostered between participants through digital means, specifically through the creation and sharing of audio content. This way of working suggests cultivating a more egalitarian and non-critical rapport, nurturing an inclusive conversational environment where visitors can assume the role of storytellers while the museum acts as the listener (Marini and Agostino, 2022). This sense of intimacy suggests a deepening of connections facilitated by digital technologies, allowing for interaction and collaboration despite being mediated through digital platforms.

The inclusion of professionals in the art world in the final workshop, as part of the larger research practise on artists’ archives, brought insights into the applicability of the speculative questions beyond the digital space. The discussions revealed the potential of these questions to enhance offline engagements with artworks, emphasising the value of imaginative interpretations and shared experiences.

When reflecting on the platform and workshops to locate where user interaction increased, there was an element of the platform being over-designed. Some of the most impactful moments of interaction came from the workshops. These workshops could have been run with a shared pad and links to existing digital images. During the workshops users had to navigate between the chat in the shared pads, the platform, and other interfaces if they were collecting audio. Perhaps the moving between platforms and tabs became overcomplicated for some users. The outcomes of the user-generated prompts, responses and audio files could have been stored in a more legible database; a shared drive that users could access, upload their own interpretations, and edit other users’ contributions. In a way the Wikipedia Editathon was more straightforward, using existing platforms while pointing out how users could change the record and, by using hyperlinks, could extend the networks that the profiles interacted with. The workshops could have pointed to where the digital images or archival material already existed rather than creating and curating another designed intervention to frame the material.

In retrospect, the workshops were crucial catalysts for activating the digital archive collection. The designed platform, while not serving as a conventional preservation strategy, proved instrumental in illustrating the fluidity and mutation of digital images. The workshops provided a means for the public unfolding of the research practise, testing and reframing the initial design intentions, and highlighting the importance of active participation in shaping the material systems of the digital archive. The workshop series contributed to the growing discourse on how we might activate digital archives and user engagement but also underscored the potential of online platforms in fostering collaborative, participatory practices within the realm of cultural heritage. The multifaceted interactions and outcomes generated through these workshops lay the groundwork for future endeavours aimed at exploring the living and lived-in nature of digital collections.