Lectures ‘Investigating Indonesia’: Recording the Future

Lecture ‘Recording the Future; archiving everyday life in Indonesia’, by Fridus Steijlen. During November Leiden University Libraries and Studium Generale organise a series of 4 lectures to accompany the exhibition Investigating Indonesia at Leiden University Library. The exhibition is part of the Asian Library Event. With this event Leiden University celebrates the development of the world’s largest research library on Indonesia and the Caribbean. The development of this Asian Library is a result of the merger between the collections of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), KITLV and the Asian collections of Leiden University Libraries.

Recording the Future (RtF) is an unique audiovisual project of KITLV in cooperation with the Indonesian National Institute for Science (LIPI) and independent filmmakers. It is a fascinating project aimed to record daily life in eight places in Indonesia in a systematic and well-argued way by visiting the locations every four year; repeating specific recordings and adding new ones. The ambition is to create an audiovisual archive for research. The project is now in its 12th year and contains more than 500 hours footage of daily life in Indonesia. In his presentation Fridus Steijlen will introduce the project: its origin, modus operandi, and results. He will discuss serious questions – about ethics, privacy and technology – that come with this kind of projects. And he will reflect on how the RtF recordings are used up to now and can be in the future. Of course this presentation will be larded with footage from the Rtf-archive.

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