The 1001 Politics of the Archive
Networked digital media have already transformed the shapes of archives and their social, political, cultural significance. Not only have they brought along increases in access to archives and the tools of archiving, which traditionally were rather located behind the doors of institutions. Archival practices themselves have changed shape with the expansions in collaborative and distributed archiving, real-time archiving, " raw archiving " (the storage of unedited recordings), and continuous appropriations among data reservoirs. These shifts in the practices of archiving call for a fresh evaluation of the politics of archiving. As the work of Foucault makes forcefully clear, the archive has traditionally played a big role as part of disciplinary and regulatory regimes. With the spread of extra-institutional practices of archiving, the politics of archiving also comes to be associated with heterogeneous practices of critique (monitoring power and its abuses) and the re-configuration of collective memories (the archive as a site for the enactment of diasporic cultures). Here the activist tradition of relying on archives for investigative purposes, of which the human rights movement is a most well known example, becomes particularly relevant. More generally, as media consumption relies more and more on information technology, archives such as Google's index of the Net become key hubs of everyday culture. As such archives currently s offer forceful platforms for political contestation. But at the same time the notion of " the emancipated archive " remains a very fragile one, as data always remains appropriatable.
Panel discsussion with:
- Andrew Orlowski, investigative technology reporter, writes for The Register and lives in San Francisco.
- Ted Byfield, is co-moderator of the nettime mailing list, co-editor of ICANN Watch, and the 2002 Journalism fellow of the Design trust for Public Space.
- The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification (SAHC - Julia Meltzer & David Thome) works with existing collections of historical documents to produce projects that examine formations of power, political subjectivity, and collective memory.
- Tilly Vriend- coordinator of databases at the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women's Movement.
- Richard Rogers - Researcher and theorist, University of Amsterdam / Govcom.org
- Neerjai Sahay, is an independent filmmaker. He has been involved with 'Gujarat Shared Footage Group' in intensively documenting the aftermath of the violence in Gujarat since March 2002
Chair: David Garcia