Archiving the art: Lekha, an online archival platform for artists – gives them a space to build memories

By Dhruva Gowda Storz and Upendra Vaddadi

Recently, the Indian Sonic Research Organisation (TheISRO) held a launch event for Lekha – an online archival platform for artists. Lekha was conceived by the Software Design Research Group at TheISRO. The idea for such an archival platform came about during the pandemic, based on a realisation that there are no simple and affordable tools for artists and institutions to archive their work online. Existing archival tools are expensive and often difficult to use, as they predominantly cater to clients in museums and large institutions.

This dissuades many individual practitioners who might want to archive their work. With the support of the Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Bengaluru, Lekha was built to address this problem by being the only easy to use, affordable, and open source archival platform that is tailored through artist feedback specifically for their archival needs.

What is an archive anyway, and why would one want to archive their work? An archive can be considered a repository of memory. Archives contain records of every process associated with making a work. As for why an artist should archive their work, it’s because we are drowning in our own files. Most artists and cultural institutions, as well as other creatives and cultural workers have hundreds of files on their hard-drives representing documentation of works, the trajectory of their projects and artworks, and the ideation process of making them.

Lekha makes it easy to compile and display this plethora of data which ends up being helpful not just for the artists themselves, but also for other artists, students and researchers looking to access bibliographic information of certain artists and their artworks. Moreover, for the future versions of Lekha, there are also plans to include curatorial features, where curators can curate their own collections that would be online and accessible for public view. This would help artists get their archived material out there in the hands of curators and other interested parties if they choose to make your archive public.

While individual archives for artists is a core focus for Lekha due to the lack of affordable options for these users, the platform also offers institutional archives. The advantage for institutions to archive their works, events and exhibitions on Lekha is that they will be a part of our Lekha social space, allowing their archived content to exist together with other institutions on the same website, and giving their content the same level of visibility to curators and other individuals navigating the Lekha website.

TheISRO aims for Lekha to not just be an isolated space to house your archive, but an entire community of practitioners and institutions. During the early development stages, the focus was primarily Bengaluru and Germany. But the long-term goal is to create an online community of artists and institutions around the world.

Keeping the artist community in mind, TheISRO also follows participatory design approaches for developing Lekha. As opposed to top-down design approaches that are usually followed by commercial corporations, Lekha is being developed in constant dialogue with its community of users. Lekha is seen as a continuous work-in-progress, and was made open to users right from the beginning. The idea was to involve practitioners and institutions in the Bengaluru art community from the early stages of Lekha, and to get them to start building their archives on it.

Accordingly, TheISRO organised two volumes of Archive Parties, where many local practitioners and students gathered to build their archives and discuss areas for improvement – in terms of interface and design, and features they would like to see in future editions, as well as concerns regarding intellectual property.

The feedback received from these early users during the two volumes of the Lekha Archive Party has helped shape the development of Lekha’s user interface, as well as its technical features. This feedback based development is at the core of Lekha’s philosophy and anyone is welcome to share their feedback to help us develop the platform.

(The authors are researchers at The Indian Sonic Research Organisation, a Bengaluru-based sound research laboratory dedicated to the proliferation of experimental music and sound art. )