Circus Oz Living Archive

BACKGROUND Circus Oz is an internationally recognised innovator with unique performance values that encourage a sense of shared community. This project extends this milieu to bring performance beyond the limitations of time, space and location. Circus Oz Living Archive emerges from the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities. Digital virtualisation of an archive enables the organisation and management of one's own collections, moving archive-making beyond professional practice and formal frameworks to making archiving a distributed, democratic phenomenon. Open source software and coding languages build interfaces so social media such as YouTube and Flickr have transformed the very concept of archive. Carlin spearheaded the concept and project CONTRIBUTION A participatory living archive, this work is a repository of performance and rehearsal videos that also drives innovations in repertoire development, performance research and audience interaction. It provides new tools and enables new methods for performance studies scholars to systematically analyse circus performances on the micro-scale of act, skill and gesture as well as macro-iterative development of act types and performances across time. A core innovation is the development of a granular data model where the search unit of the video database is a clip. Clips (video fragments), and collections of clips, can represent acts within a show, a set of times that a particular performer appears on stage, a group of music segments, or even periods of applause. This enables users to search, retrieve and view in many ways, giving flexible video annotation adaptable to a range of contexts including research, choreography and study of human movement and interaction, e.g., it allows new rehearsal techniques that analyse and interact in real-time with video- documentation of performance. SIGNIFICANCE ARC and Australia Council funded. Carlin was keynote speaker, 2013 UK Arts Marketing Association National Conference.