Introduction to Black British Artists on the Web: Becoming Archive

When does the work of artists become archival material? 5 years? 10 years? 50? And does that change if the work is online? Having been active in the so-called Black British creative arts scene over the last ten years, I have had the pleasure (and maybe some displeasure) of meeting hundreds of Black artists practising every medium imaginable. A consistent pressure loomed over us all. The pressure of creating at a rate that is borderline unsustainable to feed the ever increasingly powerful algorithms. This, along with the slow car crash we call the British economy, has meant many of us have had little time to think about the afterlife of our work. Terabytes of our art have been uploaded to platforms like Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, and even our own websites. However, with no guarantee that these sites will last for the next 5, 10, or 50 years and marginal institutional support, we as Black British artists must start asking ourselves some difficult questions.

 If we lost access to the internet today, how much of your art would be lost forever? If we lost access to the web today, how would you share your art with the world? What do you want to happen to your work when you die? 

This is but the beginning of a long list of questions we must all start to ask ourselves if we think our art is important and worth preserving for the future. Because I believe the work of those around me was and continues to be important, as part of my year-long fellowship with Archiving The Black Web, I will be working to web-archive the work of Black British artists. 

Alongside the collecting process, I will conduct research that will support the contextualisation and interpretation of the collection through oral history interviews with artists about their creative practice and their use of the web. The goal of this collection is to provide future and current researchers with insight into Black British artists whose productions exist on the web. I believe the work done by these artists is an essential part of the history of Black Britain during the 2010s and 2020s. The work documented demonstrates a unique convergence of artists from across the African diaspora collaborating with each other, local communities and global corporations in the moulding of the Black British cultural and identity. The collection and the subsequent research may form the basis of a written project and or an exhibition. If the Collection becomes significant enough, I may donate it to a larger archive for long-term preservation.

Would you or someone you know be interested in submitting your work for web archiving? Contact me at weylandckenzie@gmail.com