Sounding the city’s real times
It was 9am Sydney time on August 15 1945 when British Prime Minister Clement Atlee announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. “The last of our enemies is laid low” he said. “PEACE!” roared The Sun. In downtown Martin Place, massive crowds spontaneously gathered, to dance and make whoopie in celebration of the...
Diversions or Diversity?
I used to worry a lot about media diversity. I don’t so much any more. But I do still worry about diversions. This piece was published some years ago (2006) for Metro Magazine. Metro Article
George St gets a makeover: 1906 to 2030
Publishing street level film archives online can lead to some interesting results. While the Powerhouse Museum have been exploring new uses of high-res images published from the Tyrrell Collection, I’ve also spotted a recent montage by Dan Hill which uses some of the film footage published through Sidetracks on Architect. Peering into the flow of...
On making Sidetracks
Apparently it’s not very easy to be offered access to the ABC’s TV and Radio archives. This strikes me as slightly odd – with the broadcaster so happy to lecture the Australian public that it’s ‘Our ABC’, and, increasingly ‘the town square’ of Australian media life, it would seem to me that a system enabling...
Sydney Sidetracks
Sydney Sidetracks is a multi-platform initiative supported by ABC Innovation to explore the distribution of the ABC’s audio-visual archive using map and mobile interfaces. The site was launched in November 2008, featuring over 50 stories about Sydney, which represent ‘points of interest’ on a map that users can explore either online or out and about...
Fresh & New(er) interview about Sidetracks
The Powerhouse Museum’s Seb Chan conducted an interview with me exploring some of the ideas and aspirations of Sydney Sidetracks. Excerpts of the interview are pasted below. Q: Sidetracks (re)tells some great stories of our city. How did you choose which stories to tell? Sarah Barns: I was pretty motivated in my selection by finding...
Sidetracks launches
Drum roll… After a period of gestation, Sydney Sidetracks has been launched by ABC Innovation in partnership with ABC Local Radio 702 Sydney. You can read more background information about Sydney Sidetracks on this website here. Here’s some excerpts from the media release of 10 November 2008. Discover history where it happened with ABC Sydney...
Sidetracks collection – highlights
RADIO WAVES VP DAY 1945: Talbot Duckmanton recording the crowds celebrating VP Day, 1945 in Martin Place. While the NFSA has some interesting film footage of these moments, the sound quality is poor. It’s also owned by Cinesound and so re-publishing has some rights limitations. But more importantly, the commentary provided in this piece by...
Jaywalking Sydney
Jaywalking Sydney was a Research Fellowship undertaken through the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research in February-March of 2007. This was an exploratory exercise to identify how archival recordings about specific Sydney locations could be made available in-situ using mobile devices (ipods, mobile phones etc). The essential idea was...
Jaywalking Sydney article
This essay was written in August 2007. It outlines some of the possibilities of working with archives in site-specific ways using digital platforms, following on from my residency at the National Film and Sound Archives. Barns, S. Jaywalking Sydney: Here and Then, or how to locate film and sound archives on a street near you...
British Library Sound Archive: Unlocking Audio
In 2009 I presented the Sydney Sidetracks project to a British Library conference called Unlocking Audio – Connecting with Listeners. Here’s a copy of the presentation plus a bit of a potted summary of what I said. Sydney Sidetracks: Exploring a city of lost sounds View more presentations from Sarah Barns. The central focus of...