The Mattress Factory is an installation art museum located in Pittsburgh that is developing an "active archive" to better document and share their site-specific temporary installations, exhibitions, and history. They are digitizing over 13,000 images, 300 videos, 500 audio recordings, and other materials from their archives. With help from an archivist assistant and community grants, they are building a relational database to connect data about exhibitions, artists, visitors, and more. Their goal is for the archive to not only preserve their history but to also allow visitors to engage with and contribute their own experiences through features like profiles, uploads, tagging, and crowdsourcing stories.

1. Hi. We’re Lindsay and Molly from the Mattress Factory.

3. The Mattress Factory is a research and development lab for artists

4. Site-specific installations

5. Usually temporary

7. Based on this image… How would you know that inside this box…

8. …and this view?

9. …and this view at different times?

10. Or that this…

11. looks like this from the floor below?

12. How do we show that both of these pieces are in the same spot, 17 years apart? 1993 2010

13. How do we share the stories of the creation process? In process photo of Sarah Oppenheimer?

14. Or the experience of being in an installation?

15. How do we share the stories of the years when… …we were a theater.

16. Or when the building next to the Mattress Factory caught fire…

17. And in 1993 artist Winifred Lutz turned it into “The Garden”

18. …or that people get married in “The Garden”?

19. …or that Performance Art occurs in the garden?

20. …or that Rolf Julius sound art plays in the garden?

21. How do we share that the Mattress Factory was once…. …a vegetarian food co-op?

22. Or that back in the day… …the 1414 gallery building was a bar?

23. Images of eastern eu show Or that artist’s intention… …involves a time-dependent process of decay?

24. p{art}ticipate: An Active Archive

25. We need solutions that help us share the sense of experience that is paramount to installation art with the world…

26. The MF + Deeplocal are currently building & refining a relational database using open source collections software

27. We want it to connect data about… Exhibitions Museum History Staff Artists Scholar Web Developers Visitors Web Surfer Museum Founders Critics Researchers

28. 13,000 still photographic images 300 video tapes (including 3/4" analog tapes, Beta tapes, VHS tapes, and mini-DV cassettes); 500 CDs and audio tapes; 90 linear feet of paper file folders with letters, faxes, related printed material, and drawings; 100 boxes of flat material; 1,000 drawings, artists’ prints and installation-related materials; and 763 three-dimensional objects related to temporary installations. Phew.

29. We are digitizing data left and right …with the help of archivist assistant Lucy T. Jones, mummy lover. (Supported by the Google Community Grants Fund. Thank you.)

30. …when she’s not licking bones, she breaking stuff in the archives office.

31. An ideal interface would be physical and digital.

32. The interface can be simple or complex. Idea 1: Elevator showcase Idea 2: Window into the past

33. One way we hope to use the data.

35. Users can upload photos, videos, audio

36. Tagging

38. We want the world to share their insights with us.

39. Just one of the 675 videos visitors have shared with us.

40. Lindsay O’Leary Active Archive Project Manager email: lindsay@mattress.org twitter: @MattressFactory Molly Tighe Archivist email: molly@mattress.org www.mattress.org