Author: Maris

The Library v The Archive

MarisOne Comment

 

Reading the interview with Kate Eichhorns where she discusses the scope of feminists movements use of the archive and written materials and how the shifting approach towards ephemerality in these materials as the movements conditions changed was fascinating to me.

That at the beginning of the first wave of feminism most of the materials were so ephemeral both to the movement and the public that an archive wasn’t started until well after is indicative to me of what the various movements understanding of the permanence of their actions and their control over their own narrative was at the time. And later in the second wave where Eichhorn talks of the intention of small presses and zines intently having smaller distribution since “reaching an audience with shared political goals was often more important for these women than reaching a mass audience”. That  the ability to accumulate materials and control these materials in itself was representative of a working goal of the movement makes the archive appear much more inherently political.

Archives holding the ability to provide future context to the ‘blind spots’ that marginalized groups encounter in their times from lack of access or funding to publishing or other channels of getting information out shifted the lens of how I had been thinking about the act of creating and maintaining archives.

Eichhorn also stated that ‘the library and archive are active in the production of a somewhat different regime of truth’, libraries representative of information that navigated through social channels and was able to get published, and archives holding the unpublished materials.

This makes me think of the archive as more of a treasure map or collection of unanswered clues to future queries, where contrasted with the published or ‘library’ version of accounts, one can see what ultimately the material representation in an archive is indicative of; what the people making it were working against, since the published account would be the version of truth that the public (or at least the publishers segment) had accepted as one, whereas the archive material didn’t have that cultural traction yet.

This is substantiated by Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez’s discussion of the accents on the language in his work on the Argentine Dirty War; the computer programs hadn’t been programmed to accommodate an accurate conveyance of the names or information of the victims, because this wasn’t important to them. The advice he ran into from the coders or ‘mainstream’ to just alter/erase/scrub these details out in order to move forward towards a published account that was more accommodating of the already existent understanding of the information shows how mundane the act of conformity to power dynamics is.

In many ways these readings brought a lot of the concepts of this course full circle for me, in that they were illustrative of how an archive can be measured against the larger power systems and how instrumental controlling peoples archives is for future political reasons.

Classified is a tease

MarisOne Comment

This week readings were refreshing to me in how they showed archives being reactivated again from different perspectives.

One topic that struck me was of ‘classified’ information that Stolers talks about in her essay on Colonial Archives.  I found it to be an interesting insight into how cultural cohesion (or not) within the organization of an archive is important.  Stoler discovered in her research of Dutch colonial archives that ‘classified’ information wasn’t so much a secret but information that was unclassifiable, ’not necessarily secreted truths about the state, but promises of confidences shared’.  Or information that couldn’t be agreed on in terms of how or why a particular thing occurred, which seems to suggest that schisms in terms of interests for how an event should be archived and remembered is what creates these sensitivities.

Wikipedia defines classified as ‘material that a government body claims is sensitive information that requires protection of confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people’

Is ‘classified’ then a term that reports are labelled with when the information doesn’t line up with the archives overarching cultural narrative or risks undermining and restructuring parts of it?  And what would allow for something to be omitted altogether instead of being considered ‘classified’ within a political archival framework?

That these secrets may ‘index the changing terms of what was considered “common sense,” as well as changes in political rationality’ reminds me of how often conspiracy theories spring from the knowledge that certain information has been classified.  Ultimately that classification, if noted by the public, has the effect of announcing itself as something to speculate on instead of making the topic go away, which seems like a strange side-effect of classified information.

Knowledge commons of the Internet

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MarisOne Comment

In an attempt to understand the implications of the upcoming decisions on repealing net neutrality laws in the USA, I reread Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostroms piece ‘An Overview of the Knowledge Commons’ from the Ecologies of Information week and Susan Leigh Stars piece ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’  to glean  what kind of commons this act will change the internet into, and where it currently falls in terms of its definition of subtractablilty and excludability.

With net neutrality there has been low subtractability and excludability thus far, but with further privatization of the infrastructure it could soon become a high subtractability and excludable space.  Besides the larger economic control that providers will have on the ‘infrastructural highways’, how will this changing shape of the internet alter peoples behaviors?

Several years ago the Scientific American published an article looking at how our users had adapted to internet use.  The outcome that this article and others have found is there there is less reliance on other humans for information, or traditional ‘hard’ copies of knowledge, and more on the ability to ‘find’ via the internet the answer. What will the shift from users having had open range or *algorithmic*  access to information and data to it being privatized do to peoples cognitive patterns of storing and accessing information?  Does this tightening of access to knowledge signify that the era of individuals ‘attention as products’ use (‘If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold’) is changing?

 

 

Sound

MarisOne Comment

What struck me in this weeks readings was the handling of decay and ‘dematerialization’ of sounds discussed in Alvin Luciers piece.   It reminded me of how similar personal memories are subject to disintegration, the inevitably of fading of certain parts and amplification of other parts until they can be completely obliterated or forgotten if there isn’t some sort of structure or distinct outcome.  And also the reason that we tell stories or memories to one person, but not another seems to function in an equally selective way as to who gets to have access to things that are important, or can only be understood in certain circumstances.

It seems natural that presentism of evaluating an objects impacts access to them, but that sounds have the added layer of needing secondary access through another device or transference makes them seem much more fragile.  Like personal memories, if the person disappears, like the technology, they will be gone forever, whereas with an object, it will forever exist in some form, even in a less perfect way.

Photography

MarisOne Comment

What struck me throughout several of the readings this week was not just the dilemma and ongoing discussion of how to theoretically classify photography itself to be and where it should go, but how the choice of language becomes paramount in this labeling process in dictating their context longterm.

Vestberg called it the third typical problem, the ‘for whom’  access to a photograph is intended for.  That this decision dictates the kind of engagement to a photograph seems most apparent in the examples of how access through digitization has become reliant on word-searches to turn up information. Which makes the question of how the language and semantics are applied to bring up these searches seem much more political to me.

There was a tangram game that I played growing up where one person had to convey to another person through language the pictorial layout of a tangram composited geometric house or penguin, etc. that they had in front of them . We’d give relational descriptions that the pieces had to one another for them to recreate the exact image. Both people were looking at the exact same scaled, colored and shaped pieces but figuring out how to communicate how these things were arranged in relationship to one another on a flat plane, was incredibly challenging.

That the task of translating what a photographic image is in terms of scale (in multiple ways), color, complicated content is then dealing with an understanding of so many more variables, though single searchable words seems obvious.  I am curious about the hierarchical structures that the people labeling photographs then see as more important, per their audience.

Vestberg uses this quote, by Wilder ‘by stripping away some of the “photographic” traits of the photographs (author, type, origin, date)’ in favour of information pertaining to the objects they depict, photographic archives have relied precisely on the same illusion of a transparent medium, the technicalities of which are (presumed to be) irrelevant to the users of its products.’

It seems like Instagram plays with these exact same ideas to see how hashtags and labeling create more links or likes between users.  They’ve eliminated their automatic geotagging and now make it an optional choice for users, even if the image is taken nowhere near where they’ve tagged it. The connection between the words and the image is established though, creating a translation of understanding of a place to an image even if it has no physical basis.

This also reminds me of Hito Steyerl’s essay ‘In defense of the poor image, linked here:

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Epistemological Aesthetics

Maris

For my presentation I chose to look at several artists that examine the ideas of the Anarchive, the archive and the library in their work and how that work has functioned in the discipline of art.

Zielinksi termed the AnArchive ‘the utopia, the non-place, which in an ongoing process reshapes and reinterprets the materials from which memories are made. Anarchives necessarily challenge, indeed provoke, the archive: otherwise, they would be devoid of meaning.’

The artist On Kawara’s explored this idea of the non-place that was able to then be reshaped through different contexts both during his lifetime, and after.  Kawaras work was the deliberate and consistent chronicling of the daily processes that he found value in but was stripped of noted value other than that they existed to others by their time stamps, noted course on a map or with use of other basic technology at the time. These tracings bundled together and viewed in relationship to the fine-art industry, specifically contemporary art, they show analysis of intent.

Joselits proposes that art work must have a proposition. This proposition ‘functions like a score, which can generate a profusion of enunciations or remain without issue, as pure potential.’ This is the question that Kawara asks throughout his projects—the work itself behaving very much like a score,  a basic tracking of his existence—what is an archive vs. AnArchive and letting the audience decide by how they engage with the work.

Registration of time throughout the work offers the audience an access point that is malleable. Collectors of his work pick paintings off significant dates in their lives, birthdays, anniversaries, a mnemonic tool that comes from a place of another person’s making. This ties the audience and artist together in a web that Candida Höfer investigates in her documentation of the collectors placement in his Today series date paintings.

Höfer, who looks at ideas of cultural identity and ownership through monuments in her work, travels to various collectors’ homes and looks at how these patrons put Kawara’s project into their space. As both a nod to the art, but also a critique of the ‘International style’ that Joselits discusses. Joselits looks at how the ‘elastic’ nature of international style is about ‘the enunciations made within this language in relation to particular places and times’. These ‘enunciations’ are the grooving of the work into collectors’ identities, the ownership now of a part of Kawara’s lifetime, a reification of time between Kawara and the owner of the work through their painting and its placement within their home, that hundreds of other people now also have in their homes.

The same addressing of ownership is seen in Höfer’s other projects of libraries, archives and museums, primarily in Western cultures. She examines the recognizability of the spaces and the monumentalism of the structures themselves. The scale of these spaces is overwhelming and vast, representations of the accumulation of information within the culture, but at the same time questioning what all the content is. The architecture is magnificent, but is also indicative to the elitism that comes with feeling both comfortable or uncomfortable being in the spaces that she shows.

Water Towers, Bernd and Hilla Becher

The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf is where Höfer studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, well known for their work documenting the structures of industrialization in Germany in the 1950’s and ’60’s. Bernd has been quoted saying he photographed because he “was overcome with horror when I noticed that the world in which I was besotted was disappearing”.  Their work was an investigation and fascination with the onset of new buildings that represent a different kind of visual world. Architecture represents to the person who doesn’t go in, or have access to the interior of a space or system is how most people interpret the content of interior material or action of a structure. This seems to be a large part of Höfers work, not just the architecture of the building, but also the architecture of the books themselves. Almost metaphorically, the books are the buildings and the structure of the building is the landscape that systemically allows for the books to be accessed, or not.

The idea of access to books being political is seen in the work of Marta Minujín in her project Parthenon of Books. The project, originally done in 1983 in her native Argentina, was a response to the collapse of the Argentinian military dictatorship. During the dictatorship there was a ban on books, primarily Marxist works and others that had references to political structures and philosophies. Once the dictatorship collapsed, Minujín gathered the banned books and placed them in a structure shaped as the Parthenon. The reference to the Parthenon, the Grecian temple dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and freedom, establishes a timeframe for the importance of the passing on of knowledge through literary channels. Three months after the project in Buenos Aires was built the structure was tipped and the public was given access to the books. Minujín recreated this project in the 2017 art fair Documenta where she requested banned books from around the world to be added to the structure, both speaking to the idea of global knowledge and the collective need for engagement in helping each other in different spaces to have access to knowledge and ideas, especially those that have been suppressed.  After the show closed, these books were redistributed to the public.

All of these artists are playing with the ideas of either national, cultural or personal distribution of information.  In doing so, they each look at how access to information is nested within the larger structures of access to libraries, archives, anarchives and technologies.