Analogue Twins and Special Collections

This event explores what it means to archive in an age of both paper and pixels — where analogue and digital records coexist, overlap, and diverge. Through conversation and demonstration, the session will showcase how to deposit work in UCL Special Collections, while opening a broader dialogue on the values, tensions, and ethics of preservation.

Jo Baines and Simon Farid, together with Kara Blackmore, will consider what is at stake when we choose how and where to store knowledge — asking how archives can remain living, accessible, and responsive in an increasingly hybrid world.

Simon Farid is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centres on drawing as an investigative and performative act. Whether tracing bureaucratic systems, re-mapping urban infrastructure, or visually interpreting data flows, Farid uses drawing to render visible the invisible frameworks that govern identity and public life. His work frequently combines traditional draftsmanship with digital processes and speculative cartographies, using drawing as a critical tool to investigate systems of power and representation. Farid has presented work at institutions including Tate Britain, the Barbican, and international performance festivals. 

Jo Baines is an interdisciplinary archivist who leads academic engagement with Special Collections at UCL East, where she collaborates with educators, artists and curators to develop creative engagement with heritage material and consider what it means to collect, preserve and support mediated access to material in today's world. Recent work includes extensive support for MA Public History students throughout their programme, co-developing a BA Creative Arts and Humanities module where students make films using rare printed material and archives, and co-leading Wikimedia strategy across Library Services. Alongside creative pedagogical practice, Jo is an accredited trainer for Wikimedia UK and is the Chair for the 2026 UK & Ireland Art Libraries Society annual conference. 

The Memory Workshop is a collecting and digitisation project within the UCL Urban Room. Using the idea of lab-based learning, the workshop records oral histories within London and on campus. Students and users of the workshop can digitise vinyl records, VHS and cassette tapes as well as edit their own digital materials. This work is part of Urban Room’s commitment to supporting impactful student research and developing collaborations with artists, residents and organisations around the Olympic Park where UCL East is located.

Discover more Memory Workshops within the Just Imaginaries Exhibition programming at the UCL Urban Room.

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