User:File on a/research proposal

I am interested in the archive as a tool of constant collecting and also as a testimony of history. In fact, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, most of contemporary existence is collected and then archived. This is evident in our social media timelines and the repository of random digital matter in our devices. I would like to explore the concept of the archive philosophically and academically. Using this concept, I want to expose themes that are invisible or rendered invisible. I specifically mean: hidden off-shore accounts of cash reserves, invisible labor(ghostwriters), and lost indigenous history. I want to produce a conceptual digital archive, in the form of a website or wiki, highlighting these invisible themes. Taking these as tangents, I am interested in exploring who lays claim to this cluster of hidden “archiving.” I am also interested in questioning whether the archive has always been some form of database structure. Can anecdotes, passed on from generation to generation within a family, be an invisible archive? In rendering invisible things into an archive, but also asking whether an archive can be something invisible… I want to posit an archive/archeology for the future… since the future itself renders methods/practices of current digital archiving obsolete.

The personal and profession choice of using the archive as an artistic practice comes from the urgency of being indigenous. This idea of being “indigenous” is rooted in a mindset of preservation(nature), but this preservation is also one of invisibility (from modernity, capitalism). I have always been interested in the hypocrisies of visibility. Additionally, I am interested in the actual invisible functions within capitalist history (all those offshore accounts of billionaires that resist to be accounted/archived). I would like to reference the following:

• Walter Benjamin, A Short History of Photography
• Gerhard Richter’s Atlas
• Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
• Giorgio Agamben, The Archive and Testimony
• Hal Foster, The Archival Impulse
• Charles Merewether, Archives of the Fallen
• Spivak, An Essay on Reading the Archive
• Jayce Salloum, the video installation as an active archive
• Northeast India Archives
• Radical Archives

I realize that this proposal is dense right now but hoping the research phase condenses these ideas further. I feel like I would succeed if I am able to produce something digital(a prototype website) and engage with all the mentioned media/excerpts above

---

Set outcome(s): will you produce essay(s), annotations, a wiki, a website, a zine, a podcast, jointly authored texts? Website (archiving future invisibilities[?]) // of things rendered invisible… archeology for the future[?]

Identify key themes. Note: you might want to develop the research strands you were following last trimester. You might want to develop the form you worked on previously. The concept of invisibility, an archive that has remained silent.

Articulate a relation between your interests as a practitioner (the projects you are making) and the central concerns of your research proposal. Professional interest in the video installation/archives of the future of an invisible “people.” Interested in documenting ghost-writers/indigenous folk… cultural and capitalistic invisibility.
Set your own criteria for the success and failure of your research proposal. Simply put: what do you want to get out of your proposed research? What will make it successful for you? How can it fail, by your own standards? Success: construct a database-type structure of what to include Success: engaged with all the mentioned media/excerpts above Success: condensed a structure/script for a video installation Success: a website design/prototype Success: reinterpret existing archives and current video footage as well. Failure to launch site/read text

Archiving is a verb in the present tense Represented in an archive Representative like a lawyer// Representation as series of images Invisibility of money Invisibility of representation Invisibility of the archive itself The archive as constantly being there

A close reading of our own work

(mediated representations)