Archiving with Whimsy
/ Article by Eugene Koh, on behalf of Centre 42
The word ‘archive’ is not one that people would usually connotate with fun. Perhaps the first association that might come to mind are the various functions to archive posts and messages on Instagram and Whatsapp. Material that people feel are no longer relevant to them now and best deemed as a relic of the past. A more traditional association might be the idea of the archive as a musty collection locked in a basement somewhere, perhaps something like the Vatican Secret Archive. In both cases, the archive is a place with limited access to artefacts that are not really particularly relevant to our day and age.
However, the Centre 42 Archive of Singapore Theatre felt markedly different from the usual concept of the archive. For starters, as a digital archive, we aimed for it to be readily available and accessible to everyone. More importantly, we decided to utilise the power of the internet to make hyperlink connections across all the content on the archive. Clicking through links would bring you from a production to an organisation's profile, which can lead you to another production, which can lead you to a person’s profile, and so on.
Putting all the material together is no walk in the park. It is a tedious and sometimes grueling work of keying in data and squashing the neverending bugs. Despite all that, there is something whimsical about this process of archiving. After going through multiple productions of the same company, many names start to become familiar: not only recognisable artists, but also people who’ve worked as production managers, stage designers, even front-of-house staff for a few years or even more.
There’s always that sense of wonder reflecting on the history of our community. And it was this sense of wonder that we wanted to share with everyone when we launched the archive.
It was then that an idea popped into mind. It was an idea roughly sketched out with a few bullet points with the idea of a choose-your-adventure game behind it. Using the connections that were found throughout the content on our Archive, we could simulate that experience of going down the rabbit hole. Better yet, we could provide a guided tour of doing just that.
With that, we started coming up with the story, characters, and the face of our campaign. In dealing with the many errors and bugs that building a website spits out from time to time, this cloud with a sad face shedding a single drop of tear would appear alongside a text that said we had indeed encountered an error. Perhaps we had seen it one too many times that we felt it was almost a part of our team, sympathising with us whenever we faced a new obstacle. And with that, we decided to adopt this digital cloud as one of us.
We decided to name it Archie the Archive Cloud, for obvious puntastic reasons.
We shaped it up to be an excited intern who has a penchant for collecting programme booklets of the theatre shows it’s watched. After all, we’ve all done that at some point. It’s a true theatre nerd, one that could endlessly fawn over the countless trivia about the history of our theatre that it discovered along the way. But, we’ve also made Archie out to be a little scatter-brained, reflecting a bit of the dizzying effect the amount of work has on the team.
We brought back Rexter too, our other beloved mascot from our Late Night Texting event. His role in the story is to chase Archie down so that they can unlock the Archive together. Archie’s tendency to be lost in the cloud, figuratively speaking, is reined in by Rexter having to bring it back on track. In doing so, Rexter becomes the main tour guide that we interact with in the short tour, presenting the features and functions of the Archive. As we launched the Archive and sent out the links to the little humble experience we’ve created, the warm reception made the work that went into the Archive and the tour worth it. While the Archive is still a trove of information we hope artists and researchers alike can peruse with ease, ultimately we do see it as a tribute to the history of our community, open to contributions and interaction with the very people who are represented on the Archive. Just like how the tour is only the beginning, the Archive itself is new and will continue to grow. Do check out the Archive at centre42.sg/archive and jump into the rabbit hole with Rexter, Archie, and the team at Centre 42!