Tag Materiality

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Matters of Radical Media

Jan 29, ’12 5:27 AM

by JasonMunn: http://bit.ly/sb6erV

If someone were to ask me to list a dozen adjectives to describe myself, “radical” would not be on that list. It’s probably because I teach at a school bursting at the seams with self-professed radicals — and I often find myself somewhat alienated by the provocateur orthodoxy. Nevertheless, I’ve been asked to talk about “the materiality and aesthetics of radical media” next month at “Being the Media: Designing a New Rrradical Media,” an event celebrating the 30th anniversary of Paper Tiger Television.

There’s a panel discussion — with folks from the Center for Media Justice, the Yes Lab, Colorlines, and Women in Media & News – on the evening of Friday, 2/10. Then the next day is a full day Media Intensive + Design Challenge, which kicks off with a few short presentations — including mine — and an afternoon workshop in which teams design prototypes for a new radical media. Chosen pieces will be shown at Fortnight 2012: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film.

I’ve posted a draft of my not-fully-fleshed-out presentation notes below:

Mattern_MediaMateriality_PPTV

[SLIDE 2] Define Materiality

  • Colloquial understandings:
    • [CLICK] Artefacts, stuff
    • [SLIDE 3] materialism (both in the colloquial sense of acquisitiveness, and in the Marxist sense)
  • [SLIDE 4] Something that exists in the space in-between people and things
    • Materiality, and its perception and use by a user, generates affordances and constraints
      • [SLIDE 5] Not determined entirely by the matter constituting the object – thus, even the digital, the virtual – things we can’t see or feel – can be thought of as having materiality
      • [SLIDE 6] Particular significance of the invisible or intangible: “The less we are aware of them, the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behavior, without being open to challenge. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so.” (Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction” In Materiality (Duke University Press, 2005): 5)
        • Something like software fits this description perfectly

Materiality is Deeply Political.

  • [SLIDE 7] Marxism rooted in humanity’s capacity to transform the material world through production, and in the process, to create a mirror of ourselves
  • [SLIDE 8] Materiality implies different ways of existing in the world – different ontologies – and different ways of interacting with the things and people we share the world with
  • Recent interest in new ascriptions of agency – e.g., theories that propose the dissolution of the separation of subject/object; Actor Network Theory; object-oriented philosophies – non anthropo-centric models

[SLIDE 9] Relevance to the PPTV Project at Hand?

How is this not purely a semantic or academic problem?

  • [CLICK] Because materiality implies, or embodies, politics. And if our goal here is to think about what constitutes radical media, the materiality of that media matters very much in shaping its politics. Radicalism does not reside solely in a medium’s content. It resides in its material properties, too.

[SLIDE 10] Must acknowledge the non-radicalism of my own media. PowerPoint is not a radical medium. Garamond is not a traditionally radical font.

[SLIDE 11] Where Do We Find Materiality in Media?

  • [CLICK] N. Katherine Hayles: materiality is “the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies” (“Print is Flat, Code Is Deep” Poetics Today (2004)).
  • [CLICK] Bill Brown: frames, folds, borders, margins, authorship and authority, typing and printing, gathering and dispersion, size, style, color, opacity/transparency; paratexts (Bill Brown, “Introduction: Textual Materialism” PMLA (2010): 24)
  • [CLICK] Appadurai: embodiment of social relations
  • [SLIDE 12] Bill Brown’s “multiple orders of materiality”: “the phenomenological account of the interface between user and technology, an archaeological account of the physical infrastructure of the medium, and sociological account of the cultural and economic forces that continue to shape both the technology itself and our interactions with it” (“Materiality” In W.J.T. Mitchell & Mark B.N. Hansen, Eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago 2010): 59-60)

I propose that we consider the MATERIAL DIMENSIONS OF VARIOUS MODES OF THE PRODUCTION CYCLE

  • Caveat: no parallel structure to the following lists

[SLIDE 13] Materiality in the Production of Media

  • Walter Benjamin, in his 1934 “Author as Producer” lecture, encouraged progressive creative techniques that embrace new technologies and transcend “specialization in the process of production.”
  • [SLIDE 14] [CLICK] Choice of modality itself – e.g., politics biases (see Innis) inherent in decision to publish a magazine, make a video, make a crowd-sourced map – and format (e.g., video file format; Flash or HTML5)
  • Review/adjudication process, selectivity of content
  • How authorship is ascribed, how credit is attributed
    • Giving credit to technicians, designers, copyeditors, etc.
  • How intellectual property is conceived
  • Funding & business models
  • Production models & work-flow
  • [SLIDE 16] Selection of Production Tools
    • Professional, “prosumer,” or consumer tools
    • Affordability, portability, hackability, etc.
    • [SLIDE 17] Politics of manufacturing your tools of production: made how, by whom, using what parts
      • E.g., Apple + Foxconn
  • [SLIDE 18] Choice of proprietary or open-source software
  • Physical infrastructure of chosen media:
  • [SLIDE 20] Decision to make “the guts” – the inner workings – opaque or transparent, and to what end?
  • Even choices that we might reduce to subjective aesthetic choices, are political: typeface, color, leading, kerning, paper weight, overall style

[SLIDE 21] Materiality in Distribution/Exchange of Media

  • [SLIDE 22] [CLICK] Material networks and labor of distribution
    • E.g., File-sharing site, Wikileaks, Creative Commons, Archive.org – or hand-to-hand exchange in specific physical sites among particular communities?
      • Politics of selective distribution – not always elitist
    • [CLICK] Ownership of conduits of distribution
      • Must consider whole “stack” of distribution
  • [CLICK] Fully-open, public access, or limited distribution?
  • [CLICK] Cost for consumer purchase of goods or services, or costs involved in distribution that the consumer never sees?
  • [CLICK] How well the object lends itself to user-directed exchange beyond the initial purchase, download, viewing, etc.?
    • [SLIDE 23] E.g., Distribution libraries, like International Public Space Library

[SLIDE 24] Materiality in Consumption of Media

  • Informed by many of the choices made during production – just as the media maker’s desire to cultivate a particular media-consumption experience informed the choices they made in the creative/production process
  • [SLIDE 25] [CLICK] Phenomenological experience of reception – [CLICKS] informed by form, dimension, material, color, style, etc. of the medium – and cultural contexts and situational context in which it’s consumed
    • E.g., 900-page Hillel Schwartz book – imposed limitation on variety of places in which I can experience this book
    • Are you distributing your zines in bar bathrooms? Slipping them in-between the pages of the National Review at Barnes & Noble?
  • [CLICK] Social experience of various types of consumption activity

[SLIDE 26] Also “radical” is a recognition that these aren’t necessarily three distinct phases presided over by three distinct classes of people.

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Biblio-Melancholia

Jan 22, ’12 11:22 PM

Todd Pattison, Little Library, via http://bit.ly/8TAOjA

I’m writing an article on “little libraries” for a journal — but, as usual, I’ve got way too much material, and the resulting article has turned out way too long. I’m prepared to have to do some painful pruning. I’ve already decided that my intro had to go, so I’m posting it here:

Illustrator and comic book artist Adrian Tomine is perhaps best known among the general reading public for his New Yorker covers, which usually depict people’s public engagement with books. In one, an independent book shop owner catches his neighbor accepting a shipment from Amazon; in another, a teenage girl atop a double-decker tour bus ignores what has so captivated her photo-snapping parents and chooses instead to focus on her novel; in still another, a motley crew in an airport lounge reads, independently yet in unison, while they wait out a snowstorm; and in yet another, a pair of attractive young singles, sitting in passing subway trains, shares a glance through the window and discovers they’re reading the same book. In each of these scenes, the book lives at the center of a social world, either connecting or disconnecting people, informing how they interact with their material surroundings. And in each, there’s a hint of preemptive nostalgia for what’s about to be lost, and an unease about what’s to come. Will the snow stop and the airplanes take flight again before these would-be travelers exhaust their reading material? Are the boy and girl in the subway fated to meet again? How will the shop owner and his neighbor greet one another on the street after this awkward encounter – and will his bookshop beat the odds and survive the Amazon onslaught?

A more recent Tomine cover illustration raises a related set of issues. Depicting a bookstore display of canonical-author paraphernalia – bobble-head dolls, hats, posters, t-shirts – opposite a selection of e-readers, it calls into question the material futures of the book and reading. As the text itself becomes virtual, will these literary souvenirs become the only material trace of print culture? We’ve wondered, and worried, for decades now about the futures of our bookstores, our libraries, our books, and the future of reading itself….

And off I go…

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Artist as Typographer

Jan 12, ’12 5:19 AM

Simon Evans, Letter to the Future, 2011 @ James Cohan: http://bit.ly/x11ieh

I have a long list of article and book ideas — definitely more than I could even hope to accomplish in my lifetime. Near the top of that list — which means it’s been there for a long time — is “do something about Dexter Sinister.” That sounds mildly threatening — but by “do something” I don’t mean “call the authorities on them” or “have them evicted.” I mean “write something.” I’ve been admiring Bailey and Reinfurt for years; I go to their events, buy their books, see their shows and performances. I think they — along with James Bridle and Craig Mod and a handful of other critically engaged designers — offer some of the most provocative and compelling ideas about the future of print, the book, the document, writing, reading, distribution, circulation, etc.

When I found out that DS were among the artists that Tom McDonough would be discussing tonight in his Hilla Rebay lecture at the Guggenheim, I was totally psyched. A lecture titled “The Artist as Typographer” would’ve piqued my interest regardless of the artists it focused on — but the fact DS that were among McDonough’s case studies was certainly a draw.

I’ll attempt to synopsize the lecture below. My writing hand is terribly out of practice, so I often found myself falling behind with my note-taking this evening — which means I inevitably missed some bits. But, for my own benefit — and perhaps for others’ — I’ll recount as much as I can:

*     *     *     *     *

McDonough is interested in language as a material form in contemporary art. In recent years there’s been a proliferation of artwork that employs typography and print — e.g., the work of Shannon Ebner (about whom McDonough wrote a great piece in Artforum in 2010), Adam Pendleton, Matt Keegan (and Ron Terada, whom McD mentioned only briefly at the end — and whom I happened to have discovered at the MCA in Chicago last week!). These artists are interested in language’s “material realization.”

Historic precedent — Herbert Bayer, Karel Tiege, Bauhaus, Dada, Fluxus, etc. See also Mary Kelly, Renee Green (both of whom, it seems to me, are interested in systems for organizing texts)

Recent work explores language and materialism — sign as a physical form, language as object. The artists McD features are “practitioners of wild semiosis.” Overview of Saussure — focus on arbitrariness and relational nature of language and meaning; sign as merely a “psychological entity.” S’s model notably omitted vision — the graphic (he regarded writing as a signifier of the signified, speech); the “mode of inscription” of the sign is irrelevant.

These new artists attend to vision — and space. They prioritize the mode of inscription.

Ebner, Landscape Incarceration

Parallels between the work of Shannon Ebner and Ed Ruscha.

From Benjamin’s One Way Street:

Script — having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence — is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form. If, centuries ago, it [writing] began to lie down, from the upright inscription to the manuscript lying on the slanting desk, in order to be finally bedded flat in print, it now begins just as slowly to lift itself up from the ground again. Already the newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal; film and advertising finally push writing into the dictatorial vertical position.

This new art, in a sense, makes language rise again. McD suggests, if I understood him correctly, that this “hard schooling” leads to print’s “return to public significance.” [If you follow the Benjamin passage a bit further, he talks about how the "card index marks the conquest of three dimensional writing."] McD suggests that these new typographer-artists call attention to, or perhaps revive, this three-dimensionality and materiality by focusing at times on the “material evidence of the hand’s crafting of language” (see Evans’s embroidery at the top of this post.)

Ebner, Strike and Risk, 2010

Dexter Sinister's shield, via Walker Art

McD then turns to Ebner’s interest in the slash, and draws a parallel to the slash in Dexter Sinister’s heraldic shield. Brief history of DS.

DS represent a new conception of publishing — perhaps anti-Fordist, collapsing the Fordist division of labor. Their alternative form of production, just-in-time printing,…

run[s] counter to the contemporary assembly-line realities of large-scale publishing. This involves avoiding waste by working on-demand, utilizing local cheap machinery, considering alternate distribution strategies, and collapsing distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity (via MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies).

They coordinate print production operations on a “horizontal plane.” [I want to think about how their Serving Library (an exhibition of which I visited last month) fits into all this.] Are they importing post-Fordism into graphic design? Given their description of their design process in terms of references to efficiencies (?) and feedback loops, one might think so — yet McD argues that their goal is not to promote efficiency but “autonomy” and a measure of self-sufficiency.

Pendleton, Black Dada, via Art Documents: http://bit.ly/wnYEEj

McD relays how DS’s David Reinfurt critiqued Adam Pendleton for his use of Arial, “a half-resolved typeface, a debased Helvetica at best, produced in the service of IBM and Microsoft! Come on.”

[I'm afraid I was too busy catching up with my note-taking to pay proper attention to McD's discussion of Pendleton.]

Keegan, It's Not You...

Much of Matt Keegan’s work features messages of negation — “no no no,” “nothing to declare,” “it goes without saying,” “it’s not you, it’s me”… McD focuses on the work’s sculptural qualities.

[I think using only art historical models and thinking of the dimensionality of Keegan's work -- of any of this work -- as sculpture, means that we miss an opportunity to look at it as media. I mean, just look at Don't Worry: it's a folded sheet of pink paper. That's significant. I'd imagine Keegan didn't choose pink paper, and fold it, simply to highlight paper's sculptural qualities. He chose it because of its particular properties as a medium. It seems obvious to me that Keegan's thinking about medium specificity; consider his Picture Perfect, below.]

Finally, why the “typographic turn” (oh, another turn!) now?

  • Builds upon a critical design history that was established in the 80s
  • Responds to digital technology’s transformation of our print production and reading practices
  • Reassesses of the legacy of conceptual and post-conceptual art (with particular reference to Lawrence Weiner) — employs techniques of foregrounding the materials and “backgroundng” the author
    • Links back to concrete poetry and forward to Liam Gillick

Gillick, via GMS: http://bit.ly/zE65Rm

McD concludes by stating that much of this work exmphasizes the fungibility of language [,which I'll buy] — and the capacity to transform this fluidity into the formation of new collectivities [,which I'm not so sure about; I really don't see that here. Thanks perhaps to relational aesthetics, It seems that all art anymore has to somehow promote the creation of "new collectivities" or "new forms of sociality." I really don't think everything's about the social. Sometimes, I think work is often, and just as validly, about the material -- the stuff in and of itself.]

And I’ll leave it there.

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Media & Materiality, Round 2

Dec 19, ’11 3:46 AM

I’d been working on my Spring 2011 “Media & Materiality” syllabus all weekend, and took a break today to see Krapp’s Last Tape at BAM. It was a fitting distraction, since the play — actually, much of Beckett’s work — is concerned with the materiality of language — its inscription, performance, and repetition. From The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940:

Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as, for example, the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence?

Oh, that I could some day write so beautifully! For now, though, my energies are focused on creating a syllabus that’s comely and clever, if not beautiful.

This spring will be the second time I’ve taught “Media & Materiality,” the first being a year-and-a-half ago, in Fall 2010 (and I suppose the “Textual Form” class I taught at Penn in 2002 was a language-focused precursor to this class). The first time around I wasn’t sure what my students would be interested in, or what they’d need to help them complete their final projects: online exhibitions of media objects. This time around, I have a better sense of what structure needs to be put in place, but I still don’t want to presume that I know their topical interests. So, once again, I’ll be building in a few weeks for “plug-in” lessons — lessons that respond to students’ interests, which I’ll gauge through their project proposals and, perhaps, through a poll distributed sometime mid-semester.

via Erik Hartberg on Flickr: http://bit.ly/vQDYwH

Here’s the draft syllabus as it currently stands. The course description reads as follows:

Ours is an existence characterized by cultural flux and political economic flows, by the virtualization of place and the acceleration of time, the disembodiment of labor, the fluidity of identity, the “conceptualization” of art, the etherealization of communication. Yet even these financial flows and digital networks rely on physical supports, on material storage devices and infrastructures, and embodied interactions with human actors. This seminar examines media as material objects, as “things,” as symbolically charged artifacts, as physical supports for communication. In the first third of the semester we’ll explore various theoretical frameworks and methodologies – from “thing theory” to media archaeology to object-oriented ontology – that can be useful in studying the material culture of media. The second third will be dedicated to topical or theoretical “plug-ins” that pertain to students’ research interests. And in the final third, we’ll focus on the creation of online exhibitions of material media – an endeavor we’ll approach as a form of “multimodal scholarship,” an alternative means of performing and publicizing academic work. The particular format of our projects will also provide an opportunity for us to think through the central concepts of our class: what does it mean to mediate the materiality of media objects, and to create a virtual exhibition that addresses their physicality?

And here’s our schedule of lessons:

  1. Week 1: Introductions + Overview
  2. Week 2: The Myth of Immateriality: I’ll have them read a little “immaterial scrapbook” I’ve created, which contains textual, audio, and video excerpts addressing “immateriality” in physics, geography, economics, art, etc. I’ll talk about two relevant exhibitions: Jack Burnham’s Software show at the Jewish Museum, and Lyotard & Chaput’s Les Immatériaux from the Centre Pompidou
  3. Week 3: The Persistence of Materiality: Here’s where we start to see the material “flip side” of all those “dematerialization” prognostications of the 20th century. We’ll read some Bill Brown, Kate Hayles, Vilém Flusser, and Rosalind Krauss.
  4. Week 4: Material Culture and the Social Lives of Things: Here’s where we explore more “material culture” studies, anthropological, and sociological approaches to the study of “objects.” We’ll read some Schlereth, Appadurai, and more Brown. And we’ll begin to discuss our class’s possible involvement with the Vera List Center’s “thingness” programming.
  5. Week 5: Objects, Assemblages & Ecologies: Here’s where we talk about actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and Jane Bennett’s “thing power.” We also consider possible tie-ins with Jamie Kruse’s “Thingness of Energy” project, supported by the Vera List Center.
    • This week we also have the Paper Tiger TV / Vera List Center “Designing a New Rrradical Media” conference, in which I’m participating, and which will feature discussions on the materiality of media and politics, as well as workshops where participants can materialize their own “grassroots media prototype for the digital environment.”
  6. Week 6: Media Archaeology + The Gears In Your Hard Drive: Since I teach an entire separate class on media archaeology, we won’t spend much time on the “what is media archaeology”-type texts: Huhtamo, Ernst, Zielinski, Parikka, etc. We’ll focus instead on Lisa Gitelman’s and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work on inscription, forensics, and mechanics.
  7. Week 7: An Immaterial Exhibition of Material Media: Because my students will be creating online exhibitions, I’ll bring in two or three curators and/or exhibition designers — creators of both online and on-site projects — to present their own work, to talk about the exhibition as a “medium,” and to help my students prepare for their own projects.
  8. Week 8: Plug In: This is one of those weeks that we’ll structure in response to student interests. I’ve created a few potential “plug-ins” — on topics ranging from the typewriter, to e-waste, to recorded sound, to the Internet of Things, to wirelessness (they’re all listed on the syllabus, and some are available on my Fall 2010 course website) — that the students can choose from, or they can propose their own.
  9. Week 9: Wax & Wire, Emulsion & Electricity: Material History Through Edison: This week we take a field trip to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, NJ, to marvel at the array of physical objects systems that gave rise to our modern media culture. We read Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne, and Thomas Elsaesser in preparation for our visit.
  10. Week 10: Plug-In. Another week addressing student interests. We’ll also do a little “design development” with my Tech Associate, who can help the students start thinking about which media platforms they’ll use to execute their final projects.
  11. Week 11: Pecha Kucha Peer Review: We’ll break into two groups of ten and run two simultaneous, adjacent, Pecha Kucha sessions, where students will present their design concepts and solicit peer critiques.
  12. Week 12: Tech Lab: This week my Tech Associate, Sepand, will host a hands-on workshop in the computer labs.
  13. Week 13: Our Final Plug-In Lesson
  14. Week 14: Final Presentations
  15. Week 15: Final Presentations

And here are the assignments for the semester:

  1. Exhibition Review: ” Because our final project will be an online exhibition, we’ll spend some time at the beginning of most classes reviewing and critiquing some exemplary exhibitions, both onsite and online, encompassing the world of art, history, and science exhibition. Each student must present one review over the course of the semester. For the first few weeks of the semester, I will identify particular exhibitions that are pertinent to the week’s reading and discussion, but in later weeks, I’ll offer some options; you’re encouraged to choose an exhibition that both raises practical questions that we’ll need to address as we curate our own exhibition and pertains to the readings for the week.”
  2. Individual Exhibition Proposal: self explanatory
  3. Exhibiting Arguments: “Even though our final projects represent an alternative to traditional text-based scholarship, text (written, typed, audio- or video-recorded, etc.) will still be an integral component of our work. Your exhibition text will still have to adhere to the standards of written scholarship (e.g., based on rigorous research, citing sources properly, etc.), but it should be written to serve our distinct purposes and audiences (e.g., do we want dozens of distracting footnotes, or an extensive lit review?). Please share with me via Google Docs, no later than April 30 (earlier is better!), a 900- to 1200-word sample of text that you’ll be using in various segments of your exhibition – in the overall introduction; in the introductions to and transitions between various sub-sections; or in navigational cues (particularly if you’re designing a structurally complex project)…”
  4. Final Exhibition + Self-Assessment

I also plan to organize some optional field trips to relevant exhibitions, like the Print/Out show at MoMA, which looks fantastic. I’m particularly excited to see that Andrew Beccone and the Reanimation Library are organizing a related studio.

So that’s what I’ve got. Any suggestions, complaints? Praise? Please share.

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Books, Barges, Bones & Material Biographies

Dec 15, ’11 4:28 AM

Over the past month I’ve seen a number of exhibitions and attended several events that seem to have grouped around a few themes — namely, the aforementioned books, barges, bones, and biographies.

First, books:

In early November I went to Artists Space to see Dexter Sinister’s Serving Library and Identity projects. I’m really curious about this whole Serving Library thing.

“[It] comprises two collections, of books and artifacts, both drawn from ten years and twenty issues of Dexter Sinister’s house journal Dot Dot Dot. Each one of the artifacts served as original source material for an illustration accompanying an essay in an issue of the journal, and the bound books collate the most frequently cited works in Dot Dot Dot” (via).

I’ve been following, and admiring, their work for years, and I’ve availed myself of the many pdfs they make available on their website, which is regarded as part of the new Serving Library. I still don’t think I fully get what they’re going for here — particularly with the physical space — but I’m going to keep trying; I know there’s something there to get.

The Serving Library

The Identity piece, which “charts the emergence and proliferation of graphic identity since the turn of the twentieth century, with particular reference to contemporary art institutions,” wasn’t what drew me in initially, but I found it quite riveting. Rob Giampietro posted a lovely talk, related to the exhibition and to Artists Space’s own graphic identity, that he was invited to give a couple years ago.

Identity

Then this past weekend my husband and I went to the the New Museum to hear Paul Chan’s “proposition,” “What is a book?” I had heard him speak briefly about his Badlands Unlimited project at the Triple Canopy “On Artists’ Publications” panel discussion this past summer, so I was looking forward to hearing him contextualize his work within a larger discussion of “the medium.” No such luck, unfortunately. He started off promisingly, referencing a little scholarship on the history of the book, but spent the majority of his time portraying publishing as a vanity pursuit driven by nepotism and extreme privilege. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy the work, but I’m not sure that I can valorize his process.

And just last night I went to Storefront, on a whim, to the “On Architecture and Publishing” salon. As often happens in discussions that dare to predict the future of print, the conversation at times descended into generalizations and essentialisms: print is tactile and therefore better able to embody the “craft” of architecture!; “we read differently today,” so we need new publication forms to accommodate this new reading!; by the time something’s printed in a magazine, it’s old news!, etc., etc.  Storefront’s director, Eva Franch, who remembered me from the Critical Futures event back in March, asked me to say something, so I did. Eva herself made some astute comments regarding the temporal dimensions of publishing and reading in various media. I ran into my friend Robert Kirkbride there, and he and I had a lovely, if brief, after-event conversation with Benjamin Prosky, one of the panelists and Assistant Dean for Communications at Harvard Graduate School of Design. I found many, many parallels between last night’s salon, the Critical Futures panel, and some of the ideas I was playing with in my “Click/Scan/Bold” article.

Okay, now on to barges:

There’s really only one event in this category, but it was sufficiently memorable to deserve its own space. Last Monday night, after I taught my lecture class in Tishman Auditorium, the Vera List Center hosted, in the very same space, a screening of Allan Sekula & Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space.

The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete (via).

The Forgotten Space Trailer from The Forgotten Space on Vimeo.

It’s no small feat to convey the unfathomable complexity and overlapping scales of global capitalism — and, in the process, to portray this actor-network as simultaneously gorgeous and hideous, as sublime. The film does precisely this.

We might say that The Forgotten Space unearths the physical and virtual “skeleton” of global transit and trade — so we’ll transition into our third theme: bones.

Last month I attended part of the Forensic Aesthetics conference, co-organized by the Vera List Center, Goldsmiths, Bard, and Cabinet. Here’s the official explanation for this provocatively titled event:

…[T]he emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains (via).

I missed the first evening’s events, a panel on osteobiographies (which would’ve made for a lovely transition into my fourth theme, material biographies — but alas) at Cabinet, but I was able to enjoy the first two panels — on “Forensic Architecture” and “Constructed Evidence” — on Saturday. The concreteness of these two panels made them extraordinarily compelling. While Norman Weiss (a fantastic presenter!) talked about the restoration of Fallingwater, we held a piece of FLW concrete in our hands. While Arne Svenson discussed his portraits of forensic heads, Linda — a bespectacled head with quite a head of hair — stared at us from the center of the table. The set up of the conversations — speakers surrounding a round table strewn with the objects under consideration; chalkboard at hand for impromptu illustrations; audience ringing the table — made for a palpable intimacy befitting forensics‘ etymological connection to “the forum.”

Arne’s portraits also served as a means of constructing biographies for — perhaps, as his gallery suggests, “bring[ing] back to life” — unidentified victims whose only material existence is through the form of a sculpted head.

Which brings us, of course, to my fourth category: material biographies.

This week I saw three exhibitions that captured, through media of multiple formats, the intellectual and creative lives of three fascinating individuals. The Private Collection of Rauschenberg, on display at the uptown Gagosian, displays art-objects and memorabilia that Rauschenberg traded with, or was “gifted” by, his friends and colleagues. In the Times, Roberta Smith referred to the exhibition, appropriately, as a “self-portrait collage. Nearly every item here is a glimpse of a connection between Rauschenberg and the artists he felt close to, as well as the various aesthetic ancestors from past generations and across cultures that he wanted present in his life in some way.” It’s a touching show, and there’s beautiful work here — much of it by many of my own favorite artists. Cy Twombly drew “Bob” several portraits of flowers as an expression of thanks for his frequent hospitality. I found the musical scores, especially John Cage’s Haiku, particularly beautiful.

And today I saw “Resonance: Looking for Mr. McLuhan” at the Pratt gallery near my office. McLuhan’s own ideas were so expansive and encompassing that pretty much all art mediums could be said to illustrate one of his “probes.” Perhaps for this reason, the show didn’t gel for me. It contained some interesting work (I can’t not  appreciate text or typographic art, and there was some of that here), but it relied a bit too heavily on some McLuhan cliches — there were quite a few references to the TV set as form — and was so wide-ranging that it needed a little more contextualization.

And finally, this past weekend I saw “The Study of Kabakov” — Ilya Kabakov — at Edelman Arts. The exhibition featured, in one half of the gallery, several works on paper, and in the other half, a “white glove” library of reference books on Kabakov. Through published work and primary documents — drawings — we are invited to piece together biographies, not only of Kabakov himself, but also of the “10 Characters” the artist portrayed in drawings he collected into “albums. And thus the writing of material biographies brings us back to the book. And so I stop.

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And Now *This*! No Thing Unto Itself – Thursday, 10/20, 7pm @ CUNY Grad Center

Oct 19, ’11 1:04 AM

It’s been a very CUNYfied week! Tonight with the Digital Humanities Initiative, Thursday with the Center for the Humanities! Here’s what’s going down:

144 Empty Parking Lots, from Jenny Odell’s Satellite Collection - via Things Organized Neatly: http://bit.ly/qR3q7w

(Reposted from the Vera List Center)

No Thing Unto Itself

Thursday, October 20, 2011, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 9207
Free admission

On occasion of the exhibition And Another Thing at The James Gallery at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the Vera List Center and the James Gallery presents a panel discussion featuring artists, scholars and writers on the subject of “thingness.”

What are the political and ethical implications of considering all objects—whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, even whether animate or inanimate– equivalent and thereby interchangeable? Moderated by the exhibition’s co-curator Katherine Behar, sociologist Noortje Marres, media scholar Shannon Mattern and urban designer David Turnbull discuss how this kind of perspective changes the conversation around sustainability as well as human interaction. What happens when technology reaches the scale of cities? Can an object bear responsibility that has previously been reserved for humans? Beginning with the artist’s sometimes contentious relationship to material presence as a platform for the examination of these questions, this panel considers the constellation of disciplines including architecture, ecology, global geography, urban studies, and anthropology that are tackling these questions.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Participants:
Noortje Marres, Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor, Media Studies, The New School for Public Engagement
David Turnbull, Professor, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union

Moderator:
Katherine Behar, Assistant Professor, Fine and Performing Arts, Baruch College, The City University of New York

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Paper, Ash & Air: Material Remembering

Sep 9, ’11 1:17 AM

Tonight at The New School, as part of the 9/11 Forum on Memory, Trauma, and the Media, I’ll be saying a few words about the material memory of dust, scraps of paper, and other ephemeral media:

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Lorenzo Ciniglio, Corbis/Sygma

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall. (DeLillo)

At the beginning of his novel Falling Man Don DeLillo describes a scene that looks and feels and smells familiar to many of us. Even if we weren’t here on September 11, we’ve seen it in the videos: the South Tower falls apart around the floors where the plane impacted, its crown topples, and the building cascades to the ground. In some videos, when other structures stand between our videographer and the World Trade Center, it takes a few seconds until we can see the cloud of debris rising above the rooftops – and, sometimes, a few seconds more before it becomes apparent just how massive that cloud is, and how rapidly it’s approaching. [See first 35 seconds of the below]

[See 1:58 – 2:26 of the above.]

A few videographers, perhaps unable to run fast or far enough, or perhaps willing to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of capturing these scenes for posterity, plant their feet and allow the cloud to envelop them. As we watch and prepare for the wave to hit, perhaps you, like I, draw in a breath and hold it. But then we’re taken aback to see flecks of luminescence preceding the grey.

Gulnara Somoilova, Untitled

They ran and then they stopped, some of them, standing there swaying, trying to draw breath out of the burning air, and the fitful cries of disbelief, curses and lost shouts, and the paper massed in the air, contracts, resumés blowing by, intact snatches of business, quick in the wind. (DeLillo)

globalsecurity.org

The wind prevailed toward Brooklyn that morning, carrying many of these documents into and even well across the harbor. Writing in the New York Times just three days later, Jane Frisch and David Rohde described how what seemed like a “sweet and peaceful snowstorm” of paper [see Figure 7, below] “floated past the windows of the old P.S. 142 building on Henry Street, metallic pieces catching the glisten of the sun. Some blew into the open classroom windows, where, one administrator said, teachers and students examined it ‘in wonder.’”

Erich Scholz: http://bit.ly/pODIeR


 That “wonder,” I imagine, emerges in part from the realization that, until 8:45 on Tuesday morning, those very same sheets of paper represented the most pressing reality of the thousands of folks already at work in Lower Manhattan. And within minutes they had been made uncanny; they had become records of a bureaucratic normalcy, an existence, since lost. Yet in contrast to the amorphousness and inscrutability of the dust clouds and “the pile” at Ground Zero, these documents retained their form and legibility. Their status as “records” was clear. The students at P.S. 142 knew the value of what they had; Frisch and Rohde report that the teachers and students decided that the documents they intercepted “should be given to the police.”

Via WTC Environmental Organization

Meanwhile, the “cloud of dust” elicited not wonder, but terror – in part because of its inscrutable composition. Writing in a recent commemorative double issue of New York magazine, Steve Fishman says of the dust cloud:

It was one of the indelible images of 9/11: a dark cloud chasing people up Broadway as they fled the collapsing Towers. The cloud turned out to be an aerosolized mix of poisons, thousands of them: silicon, Freon, PCBs, asbestos, lead, pulverized concrete, and on and on. It covered panicked survivors, coated buildings, seeped into ventilation systems, and hinted at the larger problem to come. The acres of rubble quickly became, as one CDC official on site at the time recently explained, ‘a hazmat situation.’” (125)

Indeed, many workers were afflicted with “WTC cough” or diagnosed with RADS, reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, or even cancer linked to prolonged exposure to the toxins on-site.

Dealing with the dust was an ethically charged issue. Workers on the pile were required to wear respirators, but, as Fishman reports, “many resisted. Some felt guilty: After brother firefighters gave their lives, worrying about one’s own health seemed disloyal” (128). These choices determined how one would materially remember what had happened there. Firefighter Adrienne Walsh reported that, amidst the rubble, “I didn’t see victims. They were dust. And I was inhaling them” (58). The material memory of the lost was thus literally internalized by the Ground Zero workers, “archived” in their bodies.

Archival work has long involved the internalization of material records, according to historian Carolyn Steedman. In Dust: The Archive and Cultural History she writes of Jules Michelet’s conviction that he was reviving records in the National Archives of Paris by breathing them in: “these papers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no better than to be restored to the light of day… [A]s I breathed in their dust, I saw them rise up” (quoted on 1171). As a consequence, Michelet, much like those who later breathed in the lives lost at Ground Zero, contracted what Steedman calls “Archive Fever Proper,” sickness brought on by exposure to the dust of organic matter – animals skins, byproducts of human labor – that is an integral part of the archive.

Block/AP

Neither Michelet nor those working on “the pile” in the days after September 11 could have known what they were breathing in. The pile in particular resisted attempts to identify its components. This heap of…what was it? rubbish, detritus, ruins? had collapsed into a pile of indistinguishable materiality. “The towers of the World Trade Center were made of steel, concrete, asbestos, wood, plastic, and glass,” Marita Sturken writes; “they were filled with desks, computers, tables, and paper, and, yet, they crumbled into dust.” They were of course filled with people, too. And as Patricia Yaeger says, “…to think of the bodies of the dead mingling with this debris, to think of the results of the 9/11 explosions as detritus, gives one pause” (187; emphasis added).

Peter Ginter, Science Faction/Corbis

We cannot count on the formal integrity of the objects that once occupied this site. The boundaries between one object and another – and their very material constitution – are called into question. We don’t know how to name them, sort them, classify them, where to store them away in our memories. How do we sift the ashes from the dust, the remains from the rubble? Folklorist Kay Turner writes of Ground Zero as a “frozen zone” where “sudden annihilation had transformed the seemingly permanent into the definitively ephemeral: buildings became dust; work became millions of tiny scraps of paper floating in the air; and people, a total of 2603 of them, became bits and pieces of body parts, traces of DNA, or disappeared altogether, incinerated” (163).

Angel Franco, New York Times

Bill Biggart (1947-2001)

Yet in order to process our grief, to remember, we often need some material trace or some symbol to hold on to. I’m going to quote Turner at length here:

[Ground Zero’s] harrowing ephemeralities of dust, bone, and smoke – ephemeralities of disaster and death – were in stark contrast to a different version of the ephemeral that then prevailed at Union Square. If, as Camille Paglia and Ingrid Sischy suggest, in an instant two of the primary symbols of 20th century modernity – the airplane and the skyscraper – were used as weapons against each other, our first response to that catastrophic collision was a return to the usefulness of ephemeral, and hence incorruptible, symbols. The fragile beginnings of recovery from annihilation – an experience of stopped time, a feeling of the end of time – was initially felt in the human impulse to store time and memory in mundane material objects and simple yet universal symbolic images that could be seen, experienced, and interpreted by all. (Turner 163)

Richard Baker, Corbis

Peter Turnley, Corbis

Seth Cohen, Bettman/Corbis

We see evidence of such an impulse in the “missing” posters that blanketed the city for weeks after September 11; in the flowers and candles marking spontaneous shrines, particularly at Union Square; in the presentation of urns filled with Ground Zero dust to families who had lost loved ones; in the marking, each year, of the Towers’ voided footprints by beams of light. Through these acts we masked the odor of death and destruction emanating from Ground Zero; we reintroduced “flashes of luminescence” into a gray landscape; we gave form to the missing, the dematerialized.

Elena del Rivero, “[Swit - Home: A CHANT” @ The New Museum; photo by me, 9/8/11

Xu Bing, The Dust Project; photo by me, 9/8/11

These acts were in part attempts to sort through and make sense of those inscrutable piles of rubbish and clouds of dust. What we might not have realized at the time was that the dust, toxic and uncanny though it was, may have been an ideal representation of, or medium for, how we would remember the tragedy. As Sturken and Steedman remind us, dust is not “about refuse or rubble so much as it is about a cyclical materiality. It is a reminder of continuity, a vestige of what was that continues to exist” (Sturken 314).

Cynthia Lin, Dust Drawing, 2004

 

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“9/11: One Day, Ten Years” New York Magazine Special Double Issue (September 5-12, 2011).

Eichhorn, Kate, “Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces” Invisible Culture 12 (2008):

Fritsch, Jane & David Rohde, “After the Attacks: Relics; Trace Center’s Past in a Sad Paper Trail” New York Times (September 14, 2001).

Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

Steedman, Carolyn, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust” The American Historical Review 106:4 (October 2001): 1159-1180.

Sturken, Marita, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero” American Ethnologist 31:3 (2004): 311-25.

Turner, Kay. “September 11: The Burden of the Ephemeral” Western Folklore 68:2-3 (Spring 2009): 155-208.

Yaeger, Patricia, “Rubble as Archive, or 9/11 as Dust, Debris, and Bodily Vanishing” In Judith Greenberg, Ed., Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2003): 187 – 94.

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Objects: Taped, Tracked, Theorized

May 29, ’11 7:05 PM

Before catching the bus to Boston on Thursday afternoon, I decided to do a quick loop around Chelsea to catch some shows before they closed. Chris Marker’s Passengers was eh, but Ellen Kooi’s photographs were quite enchanting. I knew nothing about her, but surmised, based on her work, that she’s either Scandinavian or Dutch; I was right: she’s Dutch.

I had high hopes for Carter Mull’s The Day’s Specific Dreams, but I found the execution less compelling than the conceptualization. According to the press release, “The exhibition’s title takes its cue from Stéphane Mallarmé’s essay, Un Spectacle Interrompu (An Interrupted Spectacle), in which the author proposes that major cosmopolitan cities’ newspapers should chronicle the dreams of their population. This is a fitting proposal for Mull, who breaks apart the newspaper into temporal poetic fragments, erases differences between found images and ones of his own making, and buries the indexical potential of the photograph in favor of its ability to capture the abstract and elusive ruminations of our cultural imaginary.” The show was just as much about image-making as it was about newspapers. I appreciated the juxtaposition of this Photoshopped image of a printer, drawn from Diderot’s Encyclopedie, and 1,800 metallic prints, scattered across the floor, each featuring a frame from an iPhone 4 commercial. The images feature lots of splotches and bleeds — a skeuomorph of the analogue “glitch”?

I’m not sure if it was considered an “official” part of the show, but Sara and Gerald, a broadsheet that Mull co-edits, was free for the taking in the gallery. I always like a show with tangible take-aways; I have a few boxes in the basement that are full of postcards, posters, trinkets, and other ephemera I’ve picked up at various galleries over the past 15 or so years.

I was surprised to discover inside, just today, this fitting hauntological (are we using this word anymore?) reference:

Then at bitforms I saw Tim Knowles’ Recorded Delivery, in which he tracked, via photography and audio recording, a package along its 902-mile journey from London to the Isle of Barra. This piece reminded me a lot of sensor-driven projects, like SensibleCity Lab’s Trash Track, but Knowles’ work, from the point of view of the package itself, is more a manifestation of object-oriented ontology (creating an interesting ontological resonance with Mull’s broadsheet).

I wish I knew how to make sense of this:

Finally, my favorite of the afternoon was Simon Evans’ Shitty Heaven, in which he “assembles prosaic materials, such as scraps of paper, scotch tape, pencil shavings and correction fluid into diagrams, maps, flowcharts and diary entries that obsessively catalogue the fragments of a life.” I’m a complete sucker for this kind of work. It’s an obsessive — almost outsider-art-ish — mapping of the comical or the absurd:

These supposedly function as “yantras,” or visual energy diagrams. And of course the material object itself makes one conscious of the physical energy expended in copying the text and assembling the work:

And this reminds me of a more tactile, egocentric version of a Mark Lombardi chart:

Then we were off to Boston, where I caught The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, which I was so excited about last year that I pre-ordered the catalogue. I knew I’d never made it to NC to catch the show at Duke’s Nasher Museum, and it was a lucky coincidence that it was in Boston while we were in town. Lots of great stuff (and some of my favorite artists) were here, playing with the record as both a sonic and physical resource.

And then to wrap it up, I was very grateful to have had the opportunity to meet two fantastic object-oriented comm/media colleagues on our “Design and Communication: The Philosophy of Objects, Systems, and Spaces” panel at the ICA conference. I’m glad to know more about Liz Moor’s fantastic work on branded materials and Christine Harold’s exciting work on the “makers movement.”

In short, an object-filled week!

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The History of Universality, Technological Determinism, and Other Deep Thoughts

Mar 27, ’11 7:49 PM

This weekend I attended the “Media Histories: Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality” conference at Columbia. Now, when I say “attended,” I mean to say that I was physically present, in room 501 Schermerhorn Hall, for most of the sessions. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend Jonathan Crary’s keynote on Thursday evening. I also missed Joseph Vogl’s keynote on Friday, because I went downtown for Diana Taylor’s keynote at the Memory conference at The New School. And I just couldn’t make Saturday morning happen, so, sadly, I missed Erhard Schüttpelz, Weihong Bao, and Marilyn Ivy. Even though I was bodily present for all the other panels, I can’t say that I was mentally all there. As I explained a few weeks ago, in regard to my experience at SCMS, there’s a limit to my concentration — particularly when the object of concentration is a 45-minute scholarly presentation…or two or three in succession. I found myself much more engaged with the first presenter on each panel, and a little less attentive to the second and third presenters. Regardless of the order of presentation, however, several of the presentations seemed to me much better suited for the page than the ear (a valid observation at a conference on epistemology and materiality, I’d say!); I would’ve much preferred to read these papers, and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to do so at some point.

Those presentations that most stuck with me were Adrian Johns’ “Unpacking the Universal Library: The Morals of Massive Research Collections, 1810-2010″ and John Durham Peters’s “Two Cheers for Technological Determinism.” I was also inspired by Jimena Canales’s “A Tenth of a Second”; her book has been on my “wish list” for a while, and I’ve finally decided to order it. And Mary Ann Doane’s “Lost Time: Technologies of the Gap” reinforced my admiration for her earlier writings on time, indexicality, and cinema.

Job Koelewijn's Mobius bookshelf via BoingBoing: http://bit.ly/hv9ipz

Johns’s presentation was particularly satisfying because he essentially covered, in 30 minutes, much of the same terrain we’re covering in my “Libraries, Archives & Databases” graduate seminar this semester; it served as a welcome reassurance that I did a pretty good job of constructing that syllabus! He called for a historicization of the concept of universality. The dream of the universal library of course has a long history — but various epochs’ notions of universality are tied to their distinctive understanding of how books work; of the economics of book production, distribution, and consumption; of how reading takes place (i.e., what does it mean that, today, books are scanned not to be read by people, but to be read by machines?); of how aspirations toward “placeless” information are perhaps paradoxically tied to the construction of library places.

The Q&A after the presentations, led by Ben Kafka, raised interesting questions regarding the significance of ordering and classifying library materials; these are not only epistemological concerns, but also moral ones. And what of the new librarian for the digital library? Is she a human or an inanimate aggregator? According to Johns, librarians advocate for themselves as professionals who perform important skills-based, critical educational roles. We’d all agree that this should be the case — that librarians should serve as “information mediators,” and patrons should rely on them as such — but will this be the case? Or will patrons simply turn to aggregators whose algorithms for selection we don’t understand? These questions of “library morality” have long been woven into library history; just look at the Progressive Era library and its aspiration to serve as an instrument of uplift. How the library aspired to function, and how patrons used it, are two separate issues.

As a closeted McLuhan sympathizer, I was especially psyched by Peters’s “Two Cheers” polemic. Peters traced the history of “technological determinism” — particularly its use as an insult (calling someone a technological determinist, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young says, is akin to saying he likes to strangle puppies!) or its invocation as a preemptive disclaimer (“Of course I do not mean to lapse here into technological determinism!”). He traces the concept through Thorstein Veblen’s use of the German technik (see also this), to 20s and 30s debates about economic history, to Lucian Febvre, to Mumford’s technic, to McLuhan, to SCOT and actor-network theory. Peters argues that fear of technological determinism rests in part on a “suspicious subject/object distinction,” a failure to recognize that human are “always-already technical beings.” We often fail to realize that “to say that technology creates possibilities is not to say that it causes them.” Fear of technological determinism “hinders big thoughts.” Media studies is necessarily interested in media shape, form, delivery, etc., and to resist exploring and arguing for these factors’ potential roles in influencing social change or shaping history, is to “giv[e] up critique.”

An immensely inspiring talk.

Redeeming McLuhan?

 

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We’ve Got the Archive Fever… Achoo!

Mar 26, ’11 2:32 AM

Awww! via Aureusbay on Flickr: http://bit.ly/fOX2Ih

My plan was to try to bounce between three great conferences happening in the city this weekend: the Media Histories: Epistemology, Materiality, Temporality conference at Columbia, the Memory conference at The New School, and the Mapping New Media symposium at the Bard Graduate Center. Alas, I missed the mapping symposium (thanks to the wonderful Tanya Toft for generously sharing her notes with me!), which left me to spend two days thinking about universal libraries, archives, drawings, paperwork, medium-specificity, seriality, temporality, memory, preservation, epistemology, materiality, and myriad related “ities.” What a luxury! It’s rare that I can spend a whole day — let alone two — thinking about the ideas that most captivate me. Still, I must admit: all that archive fever is enough to give one an archive headache! (groan)

But wait: it’s actually such references to “archive fever” that trigger a slight uneasiness. Over the past couple years I’ve noticed that a lot of people are appropriating Derrida’s phrase to refer to a supposed infatuation with archiving — a passion for assembling and sorting and storing; a compulsion to do things like organize houseplants in retired card catalogues (which I’d totally do, by the way, if I had a card catalogue sitting around); a tendency to refer to our hard drives and junk drawers as “archives.”  ”We’re cuckoo for collecting!”

But that’s not what “archive fever” is about, really.

via pcorreia on Flickr: http://bit.ly/eC2Z2o

 

Derrida’s lecture is titled Mal d’archive, which, Carolyn Steedman argues, would be much more appropriately translated as trouble…, misfortune…, pain…, hurt…, sickness…, wrong…, sin…, badness…, or evil of the archive, rather than the “faintly comic ‘fever’ of the English translation.”[1] But even if that off-the-mark title translation escapes us, Derrida’s description of the mal d’archive in the book’s Exergue should clue us in to the fact that this mal isn’t some cutesy fad: it’s an “irrepressible desire to return to the origin” — one linked as much to the pleasure principle [2] as it is to the death drive.

Not so cute. I’m not cuckoo for that.

X

[1] Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust” The American Historical Review 106:4 (October 2001): 1159-1180.

[2] Side note: principle/principal are homophones that lend themselves to funny mix-ups. Consider, for instance, what a Pleasure Principal would be. I bet that’d be a popular job :-)

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