Reanimating John Latham through Archive as Event

This research project is about organising the writings, correspondence and other archival documents of the late British artist John Latham at his house in South London. The research will produce detailed descriptions of the archive contents and a newly designed database and classification system that will mirror Latham's theories on 'Events and Event Structures'. Without the presence of John Latham, this research will allow his material to be presented to a new generation of artists and academics in a manner consistent with his way of thinking, promoting new work and disseminating his thinking to a much wider audience.

Since Latham's death in January 2006, a vast amount of unpublished and disorganised correspondence, writings, video, audio tapes and other material have been found at the artist's house. All of the material relates to Latham's life and work and in particular his ideas surrounding 'Events and Event Structures'. In 2007, curator Simon Gould received a one year fellowship from the Henry Moore Foundation and Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts, London to begin to stabilise the artist's house and its contents. A major focus of this has been to make an initial database record of the above material (c.15000 documents). Dr Athanasios Velios has designed and supervised the infrastructure for this using open source software for the database. The information recorded gives only a brief description of each document with very little in the way of subject matter discussed. Overseen by Simon Gould, this information has been entered by teams of volunteers using data fields selected in accordance with international standards for online meta-information as set out in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. This work will be completed prior to the research proposed here.

The proposed research project will capitalise on this earlier work and create a significant archive through in-depth analysis of its contents and innovative classification techniques.

Having worked with John Latham and his estate for 2.5 years, Simon Gould is in an excellent position to undertake this research and to make the detailed descriptions and categorisation of the archive contents in the first phase. This will be the first time that a classification system has attempted to reproduce Latham's theoretical ideas. Gould will consult closely with Latham's family (Barbara Steveni, Professor Noa Latham and Dr John-Paul Latham).

This classification system will rely on the content management tools offered by the open source system Drupal. Choosing suitable models for classifying the archive documents within Drupal will be a large part of the proposed work and will be conducted by Dr Velios.

Independent to this research but relating to it is a new software being developed by Colm Lally, director of E:vent Gallery in East London. Lally has been invited to spend this summer at the Banff New Media Centre, Canada to begin development of a new event-structured software. He has expressed serious interest in sharing this software with the applicants for use with the John Latham archive which would allow new and exciting tools for searching and navigating the archive.

This research takes place inside a larger project to create a John Latham Centre at which exhibitions, artist residencies, screenings and other events will take place, all informed by the work and ideas of John Latham. The archive's presence at the centre of this will help reanimate John Latham within his own home. The digitised archive will be available on-line, encouraging wider research into Latham as well as visits to the house itself.

John Latham lived in the present and his ideas continue to enthuse and inspire. This research will enable that process to continue in a fitting way. An active archive that generates new material, art, performance, events, media or other formsis achievable and appropriate.