Succession: A generative approach to digital collections

Succession is an experimental digital gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) project developed in 2014. Succession was also influenced by an emerging strand of digital GLAM practice that takes a poetic and playful approach to collections, offering serendipitous samples and chinks of algorithmic insight. Succession uses combinatorics, the procedural combination of specific formal elements. In Succession, the rules for compositing elements are also authored, tailored around the idiosyncrasies of the sources and the poetic aims of the work. Succession’s approach exploits-and depends on-both the scale of digital collections and their distinctively uncurated or computational quality. Succession is also enabled by aggregation, another key emerging feature of digital collections practice. Succession demonstrates some of the novel forms of creative re-use that are enabled by digital collections and their computational tractability. Succession demonstrates a set of generative techniques that transform digital heritage artefacts into unforeseeable composites.