Art and culture digital archives in need of a boost

Tiếng Việt

Art and culture digital archives in need of a boost

The Vietnam Art & Design Archive (VADA) Forum held by RMIT University shone a spotlight on the critical importance of digital archives for the preservation and development of art and culture.

Part of the Vietnam Festival of Creativity & Design 2021, the VADA Forum brought together insiders from the local and international art and culture scene to share their experience with digital archives, focusing on key issues like best-in-class digitisation practices, intellectual property rights, accessibility of collections etc.

Experts at the forum agreed that demands for digital platforms have become more pressing than ever amid the COVID-19 pandemic. A big concern is how to create and maintain accessible platforms for archiving that are technologically feasible and appealing to audiences, as well as financially sustainable.

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Vietnamese and international speakers at the Vietnam Art & Design Archive Forum represented museums, art spaces, archives, as well as the artist and academic communities.

In fact, digital archiving has been carried out by some museums and cultural institutes in Vietnam for several years, with a focus on traditional cultural heritage. A case in point is the Vietnam Institute of Cultural and Arts Studies (VICAS). VICAS Deputy Director - Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Thi Thu Phuong revealed that her organisation has been digitising over 800 intangible cultural heritage collections and archives from communities across the country since 1997, as part of Vietnam’s National Target Program on Culture.

Another example is the Digital Heritage website disanso.vn run by Associate Professor Dr Le Thanh Ha and his colleagues at the Human Machine Interaction Laboratory, University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University – Hanoi. Using technologies such as motion capture and high-resolution 3D scanning, this project is creating a multimedia database of Vietnamese culture with images, sounds, videos, 3D still models, 3D animations, and more.

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An illustration of the motion capture and 3D animation technologies employed by the Digital Heritage project (disanso.vn) to digitise around 90 basic dance moves and performance clips of the Vietnamese performance art chèo as well as several traditional dances. (Image credit: Associate Professor Dr Le Thanh Ha, Vietnam National University - Hanoi)

Associate Professor Dr Le Thanh Ha remarked: “The collaboration between the art and culture sector and the technology sector is currently inadequate, leading to fragmented and infrequent digital transformation. Besides, art and culture digital archives tend to serve the purpose of preservation. The archived works have not yet been put to good use in other industries.”

This has prompted Associate Professor Dr Ha and his colleagues to develop a solution called Trealet to connect public users, content creators and the GLAM sector (consisting of galleries, libraries, archives and museums). Trealet uses a cloud database, and applies technologies like blockchain and digital watermark to protect copyrights.

In the contemporary art scene, several digital archiving projects have also received support and sponsorship from local and international organisations. One notable example is the Vietnam Art Archive (ViAA) initiated by independent art space Heritage Space in 2020 and funded by the International Relief Fund for Organisations in Culture and Education of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut, and other partners.

ViAA is expected to officially launch in December 2021. Its main mission is to archive and display contemporary Vietnamese artworks from the 1990s until now. It will be accessible for free to the public via a website.

Heritage Space Artistic Director Nguyen Anh Tuan said: “Contemporary Vietnamese artists are very active in their practice, yet their works tend to be publicised in a sporadic and unsystematic manner. Thus, the audiences are lacking a comprehensive view of the art scene. This is a big shortcoming. Amid the constant streams of creativity, technology and knowledge that we are navigating, it’s important to have a proper archiving system to contribute to Vietnam’s art history of now.”

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Heritage Space Artistic Director Nguyen Anh Tuan gave a presentation of the Vietnam Art Archive (ViAA), scheduled to launch officially in December 2021.

RMIT lecturer and co-chair of the VADA Forum Dr Emma Duester hoped that the connections born from the event will boost the development of an ecosystem for art and culture archiving in Vietnam.

“In a smart future, Vietnam needs a common, accessible and sustainable online platform for the display of major works of art and culture. Such a platform would be available to public users from both Vietnam and abroad, as well as cultural professionals, educators and researchers. By doing that we can promote the smart development of Vietnam’s cultural, creative and design sectors,” Dr Duester said.

Story: Ngoc Hoang

Communication and design

12 November 2021