I thoroughly enjoyed the readings for this week and I was particularly inspired by the words of Diana Taylor. Taylor’s work made me reflect on Mexico’s relationship with its Pre-Hispanic history and how we relate to it. In dealing with out past we tend to have a conflicting and contradictory relationship: oftenly rushed and diminished in our primary education; part of our language, cuisine and traditions; exalted by our Government internationally, yet ignored and oppressed by it internally.

And what about the archives and museums? A good part of them were built and conceived with a Colonial mindset that still permeates and reaches many aspects of our lives. How can we reimagine our archives? Is it possible to rebuild these structures in a more organic way where we give the indigenous communities the power to tell their stories?

The Mexican Government owes a great debt to its indigenous communities. Giving them the resources they need in order to reclaim their identity free from Colonial infrastructures is of extreme importance. We should reinvent our archives and we should do it by giving voice and agency to those who have been silenced.

Echoing Lena’s remark that archival material intrinsically requires a re-presenting or recontextualization by virtue of expanding time and space, I want to call attention to Susan Breakell’s understanding of trace and the role it plays physically and metaphorically in art-making. Shannon highlight’s Ann Hamilton’s expanding notion of the archive that takes into consideration the labor practices in archiving and art-making: “the way the body through physical labor leaves a transparent presence in material and how labor is a way of knowing” reminds me of Ernesto Klar’s Invisible Disparities performance project. While Ernesto may be part of the “will to dust” endeavor (Invisible Disparities involved the collection of dust from a number of countries and the subsequent fusion of this collection into one “anthropic rock”), I think there is value in looking at the labor of small units or traces of matter (I’ve also had a class with Ernesto and can attest to his sincerity and anti-elitism!). The idea of traces is also palpable in a Jennifer Reeves film, Landfill 16. Reeves buried the footage underground before editing it, allowing traces of fungi and enzymes to leak through the layers of light and image. These traces of matter and mortality are definitely present in Bill Morrison’s nitrate film work.

From the talk by Susan Breakell, I was drawn to the idea of the archive as both a product and raw material. While archives are a resource for information to be drawn from, it is important to acknowledge that they were created and processed. Mattern describes how the “anti-aesthetic” of the stacks, informs our conception of the archive’s epistemological object” which is enforced through the use of gray, dull boxes and housing (Mattern, 2015). Working in an archive, I have become increasingly aware of how processing materials and writing finding aids is about presenting material in a way that performs objectivity, the intention being to present facts without opinion. I think the material and intellectual objectivity of the archive is what allows for one to have an affective experience. The bland, monotonous aesthetic of the archive enhances the feelings one can have when discovering something seemingly alive and charged in the dusty archive.

The use of archival material and archival (anti-)aesthetics in art brings out not only the content of the material but often illuminates the fact that archival material is not dead or dormant. Despite archival material already having been processed, it is through another layer or method of processing and display that the material gains a new meaning and context. As seen with the various ways artists reveal or uncover previously unseen material, it seems that archival material always requires mediation or recontextualisation. Is it through the different ways of utilising archival material or through different models of the archive itself that the ways we can and are allowed to engage with archival material be changed?

Encountering Zielinski describing the conception of a ‘classic archive’ as, “the externalization of historical consciousness,
thereby documenting a consciousness fundamentally tied to power”, I immediately saw the contrast in Breakell’s conception of the ‘modern’ archive as ‘democratized’. The image of ‘dusty basements’, dismissively so, paints how the general public is often told to visualize ‘classic’ archives. Additionally, our modern understanding that “history is written by the winners” provides us an excuse to keep the basements dusty, coloring any archival work as inherently incomplete, or one-sided. Breakell points out that archivists have been labeled ‘voyeuristic’; shuffling between dusty boxes (the “monotonous gray”, as Mattern points out, appears to us as an “anti-aesthetic”) in darkened underground spaces, this was the image the came to mind from the advent of archiving until the dawn of modern computing.

In a short period of time, the conception of ‘archive’ was completely and radically changed. Breakell herself points out that “archive” had not been used as a verb until the PC-era, and was quick to share her hope that “the original meaning not to be lost in the new”. The new conception of ‘archiving’ seemed a far more active and relatable task: Mattern points out that “a rather small proportion of the population at large has been in an archive”, but nearly everyone has had the experience of archiving data via computer systems. The digital universe seems at once more tangible and omnipresent than the arcane world of the subterranean stacks. The ‘cyberspace’ aesthetic of instantaneous retrieval, and endless digital storage has quickly re-contextualized how we conceive of archives and archiving. Mattern identifies the experience of students physically visiting an archive, “how much of it lives only in material form, and will likely not be digitized any time soon.” If history is written by the victors, does that mean the dusty basements will fall by the wayside to visions of LED-lit server rooms?

With traditional epistemological institutions, there is a level of intimidation towards disenfranchised communities, those who are quarantined into spaces where an expanded cultural knowledge is limited. Pertaining to the theme of “community-driven knowledge”, community practices adapt the current infrastructure and can result in archives that reflect various nuanced cultural perspectives.

Framing an archive from an artistic perspective grants it, I believe, (1) a level of accessibility, an affordance for the audience to participate as much or as little as desired. It also—I believe—constitutes a semi-removal of institutional epistemological speed bumps by displacing the formality of an “archive” with the interactivity of art. (2) In the traditional sense, I feel that an archive is an entity that attempts or aims for objectivity. Though as we discussed last week this oftentimes fails due to the limited perspective of the archivist. Art allows for archived material to be brought into the realm of subjectivity, to take a perspective, or more accurately reflect society.

In reference to the theme of destruction and ephemerality, I found Nam Jun Paik’s statements interesting. Paik did not take steps to archive his work, under the ideology that art is meant to be experienced in its original form, that the aesthetic of preservation changes the original intent. However, not only is meaning changed based on the medium or context in which the work is displayed, but it also changes with time and space. Society influences how art is experienced and interpreted. When art is destroyed it is frozen in time, free from shifting cultural influences. The destruction of the art form is also its salvation.

“Consider a temporary display cobbled together out of workday materials like cardboard, aluminum foil, and packing tape, and filled, like a homemade studyshrine, with a chaotic array of images, texts, and testimonials devoted to a radical artist, writer, or philosopher.“

This opening sentence to Hal Foster’s An Archival Impulse struck me immediately because I had this exact experience last weekend. While on a visit to the Catskills and doing some exploring I happened upon the Pine Hill Community Center in the tiny town (actually a hamlet) of Pine Hill, NY. Inside this building — which was the very epitome of what a community center should be, in my mind, as it contained: a library, radio station, free coffee all day, a bookshop (which was separate from the library?), computer lab, thrift store, dance floor, welding shop, etc., as well as several good humored people who were in deep conversation with one another about various goings on around town (I mostly overheard them discussing the health of various local/favorite trees and I loved it) — there was also a featured exhibition from an artist named Peter Mayer. I took a few photos which are here, here and here.

While the cardboard and aluminum foil were clearly prevalent traits in this work, the artifacts/images/texts were also present but required closer examination. The radical artist they were in tribute to, in this case, was the artist himself. This was a departure from the opening statement that Foster discusses in An Archival Impulse.

Foster’s densely footnoted article* is a survey across many artists and works of theory and criticism, with a focus on those who are drawing on “the archives of mass culture” and using the information artifacts within it to “inventory, sample, and share” in ways that present “a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory.”

I had not been previously aware of Thomas Hirschhorn or the tributes to philosophers via “interventions in public space” he has created in the form of alters and information kiosks. It was helpful to supplement this reading with Shannon Mattern’s presentation on Archival Aesthetics which presented an on-the-ground view on one of these, the Gramsci Monument in the South Bronx. This temporary installation was built in the form of a ‘complex’ near the Forest Houses of the Morissania section of the borough, which Foster would have likely and perhaps problematically categorized as a purposefully chosen host community of “minor status” — which Mattern also addresses. However, not unlike the Pine Hill Community Center, this installation included a radio station and a library, a computer lab and a snack stand, and more — and though this ‘intervention’ may have been built upon some queasy elements, it did have qualities that seemed to impact the host community in a positive way, as noted in the Archival Aesthetics talk.

Though the community in the South Bronx may not have been directly impacted by the actual works of Antonio Gramsci (the philosopher focus of Hirschhorn’s installation) during the duration of the project, Hirschhorn’s artistic motive and his method is quoted to be “to connect what cannot be connected” — a successful pursuit in this case, and an important consideration in the work of incorporating archival impulses into artistic practice.

Also just to quickly say that I loved learning about the work of Tacita Dean and especially the associative links and synchronicity behind Girl Stowaway.

* I intend to return to a lot of what is referenced in here!

“I think it’s a crime that Cage makes tapes at all,” says Nam June Paik as mentioned in Siegfried Zielinski’s AnArchaeology for AnArchives. I really stuck onto the humor and underlying meaning that this statement revealed regarding our tendency to preserve and urge for historical precedence. It reveals the true essence of art, a cataclysmic moment meant to be felt and understood in its present context and state. This is intrinsically tied to the work of Dieter Roth or “Rot”, whose work Insel (1968) is destined to diminish through natural decay, and forced to be felt in the moment. It makes me wonder in regards to performance and installation works, which function solely through the presence and interaction of the spectator, if their memory shouldn’t be preserved through documentation, but solely left to the trail of spectator experience and memory…Ann Hamilton, whose piece Mattering I found particularly inspiring, creates a physical and spacial layering of meaning, material, touch, and interaction. The part performance part installation piece questions the ties between the physical and the mechanical and the negative space these narratives get lost in. While I am captivated by the documentation, I wonder if this negates the ephemeral and performative intimacy that the physicality of the space offered.

As mentioned in Mattern’s Archival Aesthetics, Hamilton reveals her interest “in the hierarchies of our habits of perception”, where we have historically prioritized “the discursive structure of words” and textual information. But words are limiting, and somewhat inadequate at articulating or expressing human intuition and experience. It got me thinking about the impossibility of archiving religious experience or a “religion”, as it is purely created through individual experience. Historically, scriptures, texts and prophecies are perceived has being the primary tell all source of a “religion”, but the very human intuition that ignite those prophecies fall through the cracks, ultimately silenced by words. In Islam, the Quran and its scriptures are typically viewed as being the fundamental guiding source of Islam’s principles and truths. But the Quran did not originally exist in written nor textual form, but solely through a thread of memorized recitation, orally passed through individual practitioners. The Quran is thus stitched and printed through their voices, but are they heard? And how can an individual experience be archived-or even properly conveyed?

It was also an interesting experience to view Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue– with its endless layering of flattened meaning and context, through my laptop screen, yet another flattened plane of personalized layers of “knowledge”, tabs and applications. My own digital landscape became yet another tab lost in the narrative. It made me wonder if the physical space I embody, that which I share with my digital counterpart and the scattered physicality of my notebook, pen, and library book, are stripped of their physicality and dimensionality due to the ultimate reliance of the digital to process and formulate my once physical ideas.

Perec’s awkward foray into thinking through categorization of snow using the problematic term “Eskimos” is an own-goal. He highlights the power imbalances and reductionist processes inherent in any classification system even as he muses on the limitations of codification: which comes first, the thought or the classification?

But he writes that it is “so very tempting to want to distribute the world in terms of a single code.” Is he universalizing this tendency? Just as bias is a feature, not a bug of artificial intelligence, can human intelligence, or even human language function without some kind of categorization? Foucault writes of the unease we feel at the disorder of inappropriately linked ideas not just because it is incongruous but “in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension.” Do we all cling to systems of order to stave off the queasiness of unbounded uncertainty? And if so, is this what keeps systems of control in knowledge organization in place—and their unequal human consequences—in place? When we swap higher ideals of justice for (the pretense of) utopian order, what dystopias have we signed up for?

Where Drabinski highlights that critiques of classification and categorizations have a long history and are not new conversations, Crawford situates why this matters so crucially in our current context. Critical theorists may have been pondering these questions for a while, but data practitioners, whose work has huge implications for us all, have embraced codification and run with it. The scale and scope is unprecedented. Machine learning algorithms function through and inevitably embed biases both on matters of allocation and representation, the latter having more insidious and long-ranging impacts. It matters at an epistemological level then that categories are increasingly applied in attempt to naturalize and essentialize that which we consider the social, relational, cultural.

Foucault, Perec, and Drabinski are all concerned with how a priori classifications not only delineate and form the basis and limits of thinking (as per the way refined description of snow in Eskimo language allow people to think and perceive differently about snow), but can also produce new realities (not just representing it) from the tension between their framing (containing world in categories) and their inevitable overflows. These are very productive frameworks for thinking about classification and knowledge.

When it comes to artificial intelligence/neuro-network, Kate Crawford explains how, depends on how the AI system is “trained,” different patterns of bias may emerge as a result, which is contradictory to how AI evangelists like to sell AI as a post-human “objective” technology. This is, of course, a very relevant and important issue, but I do wonder if the more existential question revolves around the fact that, underlying how humans understand the classifications and biases of AI systems, the neuro-network is more fundamentally like the “culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think.”

In other words, even though the outcomes of neuro-network calculations are made legible to humans, the precise logic appears to be enigmatic even to the developers of the AI. AI seems to produce confounding results all the time, and so far AI scientists seem to explain why except resorting to always calling for more data. The fact that humans have created a machine whose logic is foreign to even the developers who made it seems like a major philosophical as well as a practical problem.

A central problems of libraries is the category — particularly the ones we are accustomed to. They are, Nowviskie writes, “enlightenment-era crystallizations of a singular, dominant understanding,” failing to represent marginalized communities and, on an individual level, “all the other words users might use to describe themselves.” (Drabinski)

I was imagining a library where everyone could have their personal catalog with a preferred set of categories that maps to a shared shelving system (which would be stripped of legible categories or thematic order). It wouldn’t need ‘category words’ that attempt to mean the same for everyone. It could even function without words, arranged visually or spatially on a digital map, or in different ways which, I am sure, others have already pioneered.

I can imagine this library to feel more welcoming for everyone but am afraid it might, at the same time, prevent debate about values that should be shared.

At one point in her lecture, Crawford argues that bias is not an error of certain classificatory systems but a feature of classification itself. For example, she points to Facebook’s expansion of its gender identification choices from two to fifty-six in the span of two years, which, for her, did not solve the problem of under- or mis-representation, as it rests on the same classificatory logic that limited gender identity expression to pre-formed categories in the first place. Crawford suggests that a free-text field or doing away with the gender identification option altogether would have been more effective. However, I wonder whether the latter suggestion is even feasible or desirable. This ties into Drabinski’s argument that we need categories “in order to come into being,” though that “being” can always be contested, subverted, and resisted (103). This also comes up in Foucault, when he argues that “fabulous” animals are not impossible “because they are designated as such,” rather, it is their proximity to “real” animals that is impossible (2). To what extent does designation or classification make something or someone real or call them “into being”? How important to the process of resisting and re-making categories is the ability to call out their biases? In the same way that there is no way to permanently correct classificatory systems, is there any way, let alone any point, to permanently erase them?