Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Flavia Caviezel
(Basel Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland)
Selena Savic (University of Amsterdam)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-09A29
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how post-digital perspectives on digitization can contribute to the refusal and de-instituting of colonial relations in archival practice and institutional knowledge—by discussing the technology’s transformational requirement to recompose different ways of seeing and representing.
Long Abstract:
The panel aims to explore how post-digital perspectives on digitization can contribute to the refusal and de-instituting of colonial relations in archival practices and institutional knowledge. Digital preservation of knowledge depends on its permanent migration between systems of record keeping, media substrates and modes of representation. This infrastructural mutability creates openings for redressing the violence of certain ways of seeing. The term ‘decomposing the colonial gaze’ (Chérie Rivers Ndaliko) evokes such potential to disassemble the colonial worldview. Digital technologies are often portrayed as inherently able to do so with their promises of access, transparency and multiperspectivity.
We invite contributions that attend to such efforts, their challenges, successes, and failures in digital archives in public institutions and processes of knowledge production and organization. We are also interested in ways in which decomposing techniques can in turn inform development of tools, practices and protocols for digitization. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches to archives, and contributions that incorporate critical archival practices, artistic in-outs, media theory and digital culture approaches, and that focus on the following topics
_Since the digital realm comes with its own mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination, how are those risks mitigated to make archives more inclusive and accessible?
_Tools that enable critical taxonomies and categorization
_The digital and the concepts of time and memory in relation to the promise of preservation
_What role can artistic approaches play in developing critical archival practices?
_How can we undo the binary reduction of colonial past as producing colonizers and the colonized, and pay attention to the in between realities of ‘contamination’ and people of mixed origin, having multiple worldviews?
_If preservation is achievable only through performance, practice, and permanent migration of records through different media, what institutional structures/interventions might be proposed to accomplish its sustainability?
Formats: Papers, artistic in-outs, workshops, dialogues, collective contributions
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The talk gives an insight into the experiences and challenges associated with the educational workshop “Decolonizing Digital Archives” which focuses on modes of digitization of collections and the discourses of decolonization by assembling transdisciplinary approaches to archival issues.
Paper long abstract:
Developed as a program for continuing education at the Academy of Art and Design Basel FHNW the «Decolonizing Digital Archives» workshops created space for reflection and discussion in a network with shared interests and the possibility to address questions and projects relating to the individual professional environment of the participants.
As organizers, we offered inputs on approaches to archival issues from artistic research, art history, media studies and digital culture with the aim to bring together modes of digitization of collections and the discourses of decolonization. These inputs encompassed artistic and archival approaches to experience the incompleteness of digitization in archives; nomadic profiles in digital archives; alternative modes of representation of ‘object biographies’ in collection’s archives; confluences of efforts to decolonize and simultaneously digitize art collections; decolonizing and digitizing initiatives as a decarbonizing practice.
The discussions on the ways how post-digital and decolonizing practices may support digitization efforts that meet contemporary and future complexities were complemented by the participant’s project workshops, excursions to institutional archives and collections (Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden Basel), initiating re-examinations of one’s own conceptions, terminologies and archival practices.
In my talk I will expand on the experiences and challenges we encountered during the workshops conducted in 2023 as well as on the international network created with interested participants. In the best case those possibilities of a mutual exchange create a possibility to decompose and transform our own and the practices of the institutions involved.
Paper short abstract:
"Object biographies" established in collections and linked with their archives will be addressed as a concept mainly of the Global North. Current representations in online archives as well as alternative formats are discussed leading to the question of how to handle appearing gaps.
Paper long abstract:
How to trace and narrate object’s “biographies” or provenances has been debated in different fields of the Humanities (as cultural studies, ethnology, museology, archaeology, literature etc.). The framework of New Materialisms/Critical feminist posthumanism provide the basis to open up on the complex ecologies and relationalities of objects in space and time, socially, economically and ecologically by reflecting the entanglements in more-than-human contexts and hybrid constellations of agency (e.g. Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Astrida Naimanis, Karen Barad).
The archives of the collecting bodies are linked to their collections, objects and artefacts. Object biographies are part of the archives and contain different degrees of elaborated knowledge about the object’s traces and historical backgrounds.
In this talk, "object biographies" will be addressed as a concept mainly of the Global North. Constructing object biographies raises questions about the situatedness of knowledge and appearing gaps: Which kind of knowledge is saved? What is left aside, is missing?
I will focus on modes of tracing objects and artifacts, on current representations of these biographies in online archives as well as alternative formats. This will lead to the questions of how to handle appearing gaps and how a multilocal, multivocal and multisensory artistic practice may contribute.
Paper short abstract:
Chinese Cyberfeminism Archive (CCA) preserves censored Chinese cyberfeminist projects from the late 1990s to today. Using a slow archiving approach, it explores an alternative historiography of Chinese cyberfeminism, advocating for resilience against censorship-induced data loss.
Paper long abstract:
Chinese Cyberfeminism Archive (CCA) is a semi-public digital archive dedicated to preserving censored Chinese feminist accounts, projects, and social media groups from the late 1990s till nowadays. Embracing a slow archiving approach and the cyberfeminist spirit of hacking, it envisions an alternative historiography of Chinese cyberfeminism and advocates for resilience against censorship-induced data loss.
The development of Chinese cyberfeminism has intertwined with the transformation of the Chinese Internet since the latter's introduction in the mid-1990s. The early 2010s witnessed a rapid growth of the cyberfeminist movement, with the arrest of the Feminist Five in 2015 marking a drastic shrinking of offline space. Since then, feminist actions and advocacy have increasingly migrated online while online space continues to tighten. Our archive investigates the post-censorship Chinese Internet and salvages feminist fragments.
We began our archive with six prominent feminist and queer websites from our initial research. Following a snowball approach across the sites’ hyperlink networks, we collected over 100 additional sites. These sites cover a wide range of topics, corresponding to feminist discourse in post-socialist China and its rapidly changing socio-political context. Using the Wayback Machine as the primary repository, we then developed a web crawler program to preserve snapshots and media files of the archived sites. We artistically present our collected data as a public web archive and a distributable semi-public database. The first version of the web archive (released in July 2024) presents 38 cyberfeminist and queer sites (est. 1996~2013), many of which are no longer accessible as of today.