Reanimating John Latham through Archive as Event

This project is about organising the documents of the late artist John Latham: a vast amount of unpublished and disorganised correspondence, writings, video, audio tapes and other material found at his house in South London. The research will produce detailed descriptions of the archive contents and a newly designed database and classification system that will mirror Latham's theories on 'Events and Event Structures'. Without the presence of John Latham, this research will allow his material to be presented to a new generation of artists and academics in a manner consistent with his way of thinking, promoting new work and disseminating his thinking to a much wider audience. This classification system will rely on the content management tools offered by the open source system Drupal. Choosing suitable models for classifying the archive documents within Drupal will be a large part of the proposed work. This research takes place inside a larger project to create a John Latham Centre at which exhibitions, artist residencies, screenings and other events will take place, all informed by the work and ideas of John Latham. The archive's presence at the centre of this will help reanimate John Latham within his own home. The digitised archive will be available on-line, encouraging wider research into Latham as well as visits to the house itself.