The Intangible Archive

The Intangible Archive, developed by art and design historian Jeanie Sinclair and sound artist Philip Reeder, combines locative technology with site-specific audio to create a hybrid method for the research and dissemination of the oral history archive. Often difficult to access, this paper hopes to demonstrate creative ways in which oral history can be relocated outside the archive. This research examines notions of St Ives’ ‘creative community’, rather than ‘art colony’, to describe the links (and disjunctions) between diverse creative practitioners, communities, places, and spaces in which they operate. Using the Memory Bay oral history archive in St Ives (a collaboration between University College Falmouth, Tate St. Ives, St. Ives Archive, Leach Pottery and Porthmeor Studios) has been a catalyst for on-going research exploring how art and cultural practice, past and present, connects individuals and communities, and how memory and identity is intertwined with and performed through space and place.