Archive & Memory

Archive & Memory

An archive is a collection of documents and records, such as letters, official papers, photographs, recorded material, or computer files that is preserved for historical purposes. As such, an archive is considered a site of the past, a place that contains traces of a collective memory of a nation, a people or a social group. Artists have always shown an interest in archives, either as inspiration for their own work, or to use and re-appropriate material. An archive has therefore become a site of reproduction. Although often not recognised as archives, commercial sites like YouTube and Facebook are examples of this: documents are posted and reposted all the time in these environments. Previously regarded as tedious repositories of the past, with the additional stereotype of archivists as spinsters who were picky, hardworking, standoffish, and, by most accounts, pitiable enforcers of orders and structures, today the image of archives is changing. They are becoming exciting places where one can adapt and appropriate through processes of cut-and-paste.

An archive was once a place to preserve the past, to build legacies as well as to remember and recognise the roots from which to grow. However, as Michel Foucault reminds us, memories and archives do not survive by chance but are constructed to serve structures of power. Thus, the shape of an archive constrains and enables the content it encloses, and the technical methods for building and supporting an archive produces the document for collection. After all, the word ‘archive’ is derived from the Greek arkhē, which means government or order, origin and first place. However, digital technologies have changed and altered the status and meaning of an archive. The creation of documents and their aggregation into all sorts of different – especially online – archives has become part of everyday life. Archives are now being collectively built. As Arjun Appadurai asserts in his text Archive and Aspiration, ‘we should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Rather than being the tomb of the trace, the archive, is more frequently the product of the anticipation of collective memory.’

It could be argued that whether the archive is composed of print, photographs, film and/or digital media, the technologies used to organise, search and share documents have taken over the purview of a state, with the crowd acting as the control mechanism. Digital archives have changed from a stable entity into flexible systems, referred to with the popular term ‘Living Archives’. But in which ways do these changes affect our relationship to the past, present and future? What are the implications for this mode of forgetting, for memories, as well as for what is suppressed? Will the erased, forgotten and neglected be redeemed, and new social memories be allowed? Will the fictional versus factual mode of archiving offer the democracy that the public domain implies, or is it another way for public instruments of power to operate?

These and other questions will be addressed and discussed from the perspective of both lens-based and networked media, by looking at different topics that relate to archive and memory, from database to narrative, time, and the glitch, and through the works of (among others) Johan Grimonprez, Chris Marker, Geoffrey Bowker, Lynn Hershmann, Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, Rosa Menkman, Graham Harwood, Thomson & Craighead, David Lowenthal, Etoy, Walter Benjamin. There will be additional visits to Beeld & Geluid (home of the National Broadcasting Archives and owner of unique audio-visual collections), Hilversum; Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam; and Netherlands Media Art Institute (an institute dedicated to video and media art), Amsterdam.

Thematic Seminar taught by Annet Dekker

Annet Dekker is independent curator and researcher. Subjects of interest are the influence of technology, science and popular culture on art and vice versa. Currently she works as webcurator for SKOR, as researcher on the project ”Born Digital art in Dutch art collections” for SBMK, VP, NIMk and DEN, as lecturer at Piet Zwart Institute for the thematic project “Archive & Memory” and new media theory at Rietveld Academy. In 2009 she initiated aaaan.net with Annette Wolfsberger. At the moment they organise the Artist in Residence programme at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam and they produced Funware, an international touring exhibition in 2010 and 2011 about fun in software (curated by Olga Goriunova). Since 2008 she is writing a PhD on strategies for documenting net art at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, under supervision of Matthew Fuller. http://aaaan.net

Schedule

Unless otherwise specified, the Archive & Memory Seminar will take place on Tuesdays.

January 10: 10:00-18:00 General introduction. + Student presentation by each student of max. 10 min of your work and expectations you have of the Thematic Project.

January 17: Archives

10:00 - 12:00 Discussion of texts below

examples: Prezi [1]

13.00 - 17:00 Screenings by Simon Pummell

reading:

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. And the Discourse on Language. New York: Vintage Books (1972 - edition 2010) Introduction (pp.3-17) The historical a priori and the archive (pp.126-131)

Jacques Derrida (1995) Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. pp. 9-21. [2]

additional reading: Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge: Archaeology and the history of ideas (pp.135-140) and The original and the regular (pp.141-148) Contradictions (pp.149-156)

Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Aspiration. In Information is Alive, edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder 14-25. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, pp.14-25 (2003) [3]

January 24: Databases

10:00 - 13:00

reading:

Briet, Suzanne (1951, English translation 2006) What is Documentation? Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press Inc.

Lev Manovich (2007) Database as Symbolic Form. In: Database Aesthetics. Art in the Age of Information Overflow, edited by Victoria Vesna. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, pp.39-60.

examples and screening:

Prezi: http://prezi.com/-axqaycnmcxq/databases-artists/

Francoise Levie, The man who wanted to classify the world.

14:00 - 17:00

guest: Dominic Gagnon + screening RIP (2009).

January 31:

visit: Richard Wright 14:00 – 15:00

February 7:

reading:

Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey (2012) Advisable Techniques for Super-Hubs: The Topological Machinery of Abstraction. In: Evil Media, by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (The MIT Press: forthcoming)

Adrian MacKenzie, More Parts than Elements: How Databases Multiply (online 2 November 2011)

additional:

Andrew Goffey (2008) Algorithm. In: Software Studies. A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp.15-20.

Wendy Chun (2011) Deamonic Interfaces, Empowering Obfuscations. In: Programmed Visions, Wendy Chun. Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp.59-95.

February 14: Assessments every student needs to prepare a presentation of 10 minutes about the project that she/he is working on for the end presentation on 3 April.

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>> everything below is preliminary and subject to changes <<

February 21: memory, past present future:

reading:

David Lowenthal (1998) ‘Fabricating Heritage’. History & Memory Volume 10, Number 1, pp. 5-24.

Wendy Chung (2008) Enduring Ephemerality

Geoffrey Bowker

Aristotle

February 24: Time >> additional date, visit to Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam

February 28: Spring Break

March 6: reading:

Liam Buckley (2008) Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial Archive. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 20, Issue 2, pp. 249 – 270.

Clay Shirky (2005) “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.” http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Wolfgang Ernst (2004) Beyond the Archive. Bit Mapping. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/mapping_and_text/beyond-the-archive/

additional:

Sabine Niederer, Wisdom of the Crowd or Technicity of Content? Wikipedia as a socio-technical system.

Lev Manovich (2005) Remixability and Modularity. www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc

March 13: Assessments (t.b.c.)

March 20: Glitch: loss & forgetting

March 27: Documentation & Performativity

Walter Benjamin, ‘The task of the translator’ (introduction to a Beaudelaire translation, 1923) http://www.scribd.com/doc/12733233/Walter-Benjamin-the-Task-of-Translator

Becky Edmunds, Enjoy the Gap

Olia Lialina (2000) Ein Link Waere Schone Genug, http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/du.html

Visit NIMk, Amsterdam

April 3: PRESENTATIONS

References, Resources and Links

Bill Morrison, 'The Film of Her' 1996, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwKSi9iOucc

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(ad) exhibition: a library as memory - http://www.gabriellemaubrie.com/web.php?mode=article&langue=fr&id=63

The dominance of digital media as the primary place for information exchange has fundamentally changed the place of the written word and books in our culture. Once the central place for both formalizing current discourse and preserving ideas books have become something more iconic often representing the need for some kind of collective memory that is more physically tangible then images on a computer screen. The artists in this exhibition all use the idea and image of a book in an idiosyncratic way which links shared cultural information with personal memory or interpretation challenging the singular voice of an author as well as examining the book as an iconic object versus a container for text.

Richard Artschwager, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Joseph Havel, Leslie Hewitt, Nelson Leirner, Christian Marclay, Theo Mercier, Marco Rountree, Allen Ruppersberg, Ian Wallace, Richard Wentworth

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(ad) Tips for Transmediale programmes that are connected to the theme:

http://www.transmediale.de/festival/twentyfive

- Re-enactment Videospiegel, 31 Jan.

- Web.video the new net.art, 1 Feb, 15:00: If net art is cashing in on the utopian promise of video art, what dream does net art have left for itself? Has it come full circle? Is net.art now at its end? With Constant Dullaart (nl), Petra Cortright (us) and Igor Štromajer (si). Moderated by Robert Sakrowski (de).

- Videomakers Unite!, 2 Feb, 11:00: An open conversation about video art and net culture, media collectives and counter-publics. With Kathy Rae Huffman (us/de), Eckart Lottman (de) and Pit Schultz (de). Conceived and moderated by Florian Wüst (de).

- Transmediale Unarchived, 5 Feb, 11:00: With presentations by Dieter Daniels (de), Thomas Munz (de), Rudolf Frieling (de/us), Susanne Jaschko (de). Moderated by Baruch Gottlieb (ca/de).

- Search for a Method, 5 Feb., 14:30: Discussion with Inke Arns (de), Wolfgang Ernst (de), Jussi Parikka (fi/uk) and Siegfried Zielinski (de). Conceived and moderated by Timothy Druckrey (us).

Other Highlights:

Exhibition Dark Times, uneasy energies in technological times

Keynote by Graham Harman, Everything is not Connected

Keynote by Matthew Fuller, Knotty Problems in the Fables of Computing

For those outside of Berlin, most of the programme is also live streamed - check the website: www.transmediale.de

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(ad) Additional reading for those interested in Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet and their connection to the present see: Ronald E. Day, The Modern Invention of Information. Discourse, History, and Power. (Carbondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press).

I have a digital copy of the book (it can also be downloaded from scibd) so let me know if you like a copy.

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Notes-on essays

• Notes on Foucault Archaeology Knowledge: Introduction; The Historic a Priori and the Archive
• Notes on Derrida - Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

24 Jan

• What is documentation?
• Lev Manovich - Database as Symbolic Form