GLAM/Newsletter/April 2025/Contents/Switzerland report
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FemNetzCon 2025; GLAM Meeting Biel/Bienne; Digi Archive
FemNetzCon 2025
The FemNetzCon is the yearly women conference in the German language Wiki world that was realized at the local community space called temporärhaus in Neu-Ulm offering lots of workshops, from ceramics and soldering to electronics and a stitching machine. After discussing what editgroups need and how that can be improved an online editing group where people from FemNetz can participate was found. User:S.v.Mering who works with wikidata at the natural science museum explained how plants were called after women and how they researched items for the Women Genera Project. The international network of scientists helps collecting and adding missing data as women and minorities had been overseen. The colonial conext is just at the beginning of exploration. User:S.v.Mering presented the concept of Linked Open Data and showed how she worked with it in the GLAM field.
GLAM Meeting Biel/Bienne
The regular meeting focussed on how we perceive faces. As face recognition is now used everywhere including mobile phones we were talking about how behaviour patterns are changing. Artificial Intelligence is not a future model but already used and changing how we perceive each other. What does it mean to work virtually and how is it changing the way we talk with collegues? Thinking about face expressions and geometry we were discussing how face masks during Covid changed private and work lifes. Faces today are also subject of operations. People try to look perfect and take the risk of operations changing their eyes, lips or skin. The French artist Orlan shows surgery operations as her art. What does it mean to change one's appearance? How does the perfect illusion of the face shape our everyday lifes? Do we need to be aligned to the pefect symmetry with perfect proportions? Symmetry with perfect proportions is linked to the golden ratio, a mathematical method of calculation.
Digi Archive
Archiving means organizing documents and make them available for research. Switzerland has lots of records on the second world war that help understanding and reconstructing the history. The last decades in Europe have been marked by the absence of wars until 2022. In all these years a huge body of art could develop that might be relevant to future generations containing research and insights on humanity. At the end of their lives artists leave their body of work behind. Well known artists are shown in cultural institutions and collections but all the other artists that also have a great body of work are forgotten. Some art work might not be able to be shown in institutions as for Example landart or art in public spaces. The idea of creating digi archives for contemporary art is to also safe art work that is not shown in cultural institutions.
