Ackama attended the FACT Symposium at ACMI in Melbourne. FACT brought together artists, archivists, technologists, designers, researchers and cultural leaders to unpack how technology intersects with culture, creativity and institutional practice.

Many of the conversations around digital preservation and cultural platforms reflect work we’ve been involved in, including RNZ’s Pātaka – a large-scale digital archive designed for long-term public access. With institutions across GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) grappling with similar technical and operational challenges, our Ackama principal designers attended to contribute to the conversation, and would like to share some of the highlights.

The conference opened with a very engaging keynote from Jason Scott, a historian and archivist associated with the Internet Archive. Scott spoke about what it means to preserve evidence of the present in a world where so much culture exists digitally, on platforms that shift or disappear rapidly. An interesting project he mentioned was ArchiveBot, an IRC bot that lets anyone request archival of smaller websites that might not get picked up by the Wayback Machine’s regular crawls.

Jessica Walthew, a conservator and PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, raised some trickier questions about archiving unusual digital objects. Her example was a virus souvenir CD from the Smithsonian’s collection – with which she discussed what they grappled with when trying to preserve such a digital object: how do you store something inherently dangerous without putting your own systems at risk? She also pointed to the Malware Museum as a useful timeline of malware history. She also raised some interesting points about the best way to preserve objects like this: are they purely an object and a record, or should they be presented more as a performance? That thread continued in a discussion from contemporary electronic artist Amamelia (Amelia Berry) and Michael Brown (Music Curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand), discussing the process of recording video of the process of creating complex electronic music using modern tools and plugins, rather than just archiving the final output.

Ruby Justice Thelot, a cyberethnographer, artist and designer, delivered a keynote provocatively titled “Is AI Making Us Cyborgs?” His talk explored how the age of AI is mistaken for the age of intelligence, when in fact it’s the age of data. He shared his experience using the Friend AI companion in a museum setting. It really drew attention to the often large disconnect between the assumptions of Silicon Valley tech companies and the realities of how real people actually want to use technology in their life. He also made a broader point about how we’ve become so focused on collecting data to optimise our experiences (fitness trackers, smartwatches and the like) rather than just noticing results and acknowledging them.

Later, Creative Australia also previewed upcoming research into the state of culture in Australia, including questions around AI use, which will be worth reading when it’s published to help understand both how other organisations are using AI in their work, and also the general opinion of the public about AI.

Lastly, the benefit of attending the conference at ACMI was the ability to get access to their wonderful Game Worlds exhibit, which showcases so many great video games with wonderful curation and exhibition design. Getting the chance to play Minecraft with eye tracking technology was a highlight!

Our key takeaways

Our biggest takeaway was that there is a clear split in how cultural institutions approach digital – the essential, often unglamorous work of archiving and digitisation on one side, and experimental, high-cost uses of technology like interactive installations on the other. The former is becoming more accessible through shared tools and services, but the latter remains largely out of reach for smaller organisations. There is a real opportunity for agencies like Ackama to partner with the GLAM sector to develop pragmatic solutions to help their day-to-day operations.