Sunday 18 January
-4°C and Broken Clouds
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The internet is a ubiquitous part of our lives, but contrary to popular perception, websites are far from permanent. They are fragile, and they can be easily modified, or they can rapidly disappear offline. Web archiving is an important step to mitigate this ephemerality while also preserving web pages as a resource for cultural memory. Web archives make accessible older social and cultural information from different parts of Internet history—that would otherwise be lost—for future generations.
In this conversation, digital artist and researcher, Kaloyan Kolev, and digital preservationist and software developer, Tessa Walsh, speak about their respective practices, research and experiences working with community-based, open-source web archives. What can we do with web archives when access is provided? And what can we learn from the Internet of the past in relation to the Internet of the present?
…the main goal as archivists, as preservationists, as educators, should be to get a lot more people to care about the web, and to give them access to the past, to talk about it more, and to find ways to show it in ways that make it carry the same fidelity, the same weight, and life as the present.
Kaloyan Kolev is a digital artist and researcher based between Bulgaria and New York. His work explores internet culture, nostalgia, and technology in the Balkans, examining how digital tools and online spaces shape collective memory. Working across writing, sound, creative coding, and performance, he tells the stories of defunct websites, obsolete software, and lost music. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.
Tessa Walsh is a digital preservationist, archivist, and software developer based in Montreal. Since 2022, she has worked as a senior developer at Webrecorder, where she works on open source web archiving tools for all, including Browsertrix. She was previously a software developer at Artefactual Systems on the Archivematica and AtoM projects. Prior to switching to software development, Tessa founded digital preservation programs at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Concordia University Library, both in Montreal. Her research interests include web archiving, environmental sustainability of digital preservation, and preservation of complex objects such digital design records.
Portrait of Tessa Walsh. Courtesy of the artist.
Agnes Bytes is a four-part online speaker series featuring conversations between Canadian and international artists, media scholars, and software engineers across topics related to critical themes in digital art and culture. The series asks audiences to think across disciplines and alongside artists to imagine digital futurities that are liberatory, communally responsive and expansively inclusive.
Series curated by Danuta Sierhuis, Digital Development Coordinator
Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University.
