Metadata Ecologies. Translational Struggles in “Intelligent” Archives

In our workshop "Metadata Ecologies—Translational Struggles in “Intelligent” Archives from 2–4 March 2026 at the saai | Archive for Architecture and Engineering, we will kick-off a research initiative investigating how metadata—whether painstakingly crafted over time (“slow”) or generated and adapted by algorithms (“fast”)—shapes the architectures of knowledge in archives past, present, and future. The initiative positions metadata as a dynamic and contested site of experimentation—a medium in its own right, shaping how archives are made, accessed, and reimagined. By developing vocabularies, methods, and prototype systems, the project aims to inaugurate a sustained research agenda around “intelligent” archives: responsive, critical, and inclusive metadata architectures attuned to translational struggle and ecological complexity.

For the workshop, we want to probe the processes in and around archives not from abstract meta-positions, but from within; at stake is not only the circulation (and hence re-enforcement of bias and epistemologies) of metadata across systems, but also the practices of translation that sustain or unsettle them. Besides scholarly exchange we will also test strategies and approaches on and around objects with an object hackathon, each participant engaging their respective approach and expertise to extract, project, describe or define metadata of shared archival objects.

List of Speakers: Damjan Kokalevski (Architekturmuseum, TU München), Wim Lowet (Vlaams Architectuurinstituut), Felix Mittleberger (ZKM), Iris Ranzinger (Architekturzentrum Wien), Tomás Rodríguez Rivero (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Rafael Uriarte (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence), Melissa Vincent (London School of Economics), Albena Yaneva (Politecnico di Turino), Maddy Young (University of Manchester), Jonas Zilius (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie)

This event will take place in person at the saai | Archive for Architecture and Engineering in Karlsruhe.