From 2–4 March 2026 Saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau, organizes the workshop Metadata Ecologies—Translational Struggles in “Intelligent” Archives. One of the speakers is Wim Lowet, senior archivist at the Flanders Architecture Institute (VAi).
The workshop kicks-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.
The workshop tries 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 test strategies and approaches on and around objects will be tested with an object hackathon, each participant engaging their respective approach and expertise to extract, project, describe or define metadata of shared archival objects.
