In the context of our collaboration with QWIEN, we were introduced to Wolfgang Reder’s personal holdings. Reder’s holdings in QWIEN encompass 72 binders (ca. 200 pages each), many artworks (mostly printed and framed analog and digital collages), a hard drive with slightly over 1TB of data, and a mid-size acid-free box containing documents, letters, and drawings made by his daughter.

While we initially planned to tend to all of them, our inquiry started and ultimately ended with the set of binders, which Reder filled, most likely throughout the 1990s, with elaborate image-based queries and drafts of collage works, featuring images representative of mainstream gay pornography, interspersed with visual material of AIDS-awareness campaigns and fashion ads. We started the digitization process with the binders, as they seemed in the most dire need of restoration or preservation: they consist of paper cut-outs from books and magazines, glued onto paper, each of which is stacked in a plastic cover. Since scanning each page would likely destroy some of the collages, we used a digital video camera instead, placing it on a table and filming overhead, as we flipped through each binder, page by page.

Having exported the recorded footage into multiple documentation videos, we started the process of isolating stills, one pair per each double spread, as TIFF files, and later converted them into PDF files so that the text, handwritten by Reder and imprinted in the layout of many images, could be searchable. This material will be, by the end of our project’s run, transferred to QWIEN and will be complemented by the transcripts of our oral history interviews with Wolfgang Reder’s family, friends, and other people who met him in other contexts.

The digitized folders were organized in the same way as they are displayed in QWIEN’s archive, ordered alphabetically. In each folder one finds (0) the original recording, (1) the single exported frames, (2) the exported PDF file with its respective InDesign file, and (3) an edited video file of the original recording with small corrections.

The folders compiled by Wolfgang Reder, as well as their digitized versions, can be consulted, respectively, at QWIEN’s Archive and at the working stations at QWIEN’s Library. In order to do so, one has to send a request and arrange a visit. For a comprehensive description of the different collections held by the archive, visit QWIEN’s website.