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- Convenors:
-
Flavia Caviezel
(Basel Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland)
Lucie Kolb (Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW)
Karolina Sobecka (FHNW)
Selena Savic (University of Amsterdam)
Bernhard Garnicnig (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
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 contributions:
Session 1eugenia morpurgo (Iuav University of Venice)
Short abstract:
This contribution intends to present the experience of developing a critical digital material library, titled Syntropic Materials Library, which serves as a tool for fostering an agro-ecological polycultural approach to material use and design, from the perspective of the design discipline.
Long abstract:
This contribution intends to present the experience of developing a critical digital material library, which serves as a tool for fostering an agro-ecological polycultural approach to material use and design, from the perspective of the design discipline.
The library, titled Syntropic Materials Library (SML) is conceived as an archive of materials catalogued also through the species from which the biomass used to make them originated, rather than only through their functional characteristics, like other material libraries do. The simple act of adding this extra data allow to reorganise the content based on the climatic conditions in which the species grow. This allows the user to browse and comprehend the information archived under the logic of species coexistence, allowing him/her to start forming, in theory and practice, materials ecologies. Rather than being a simple repository of data, the platform functions as a filter and re-directory to information already published on and offline. Its primary objective is to centralise content facilitating the creation of novel and meaningful connections. SML consciously addresses the colonial past of materials libraries, which, rooted in economic botany collections, have traditionally fostered extractives practices, and attempt to flip it on itself by directly connecting material information to agro-ecological practices.
Yvonne Zindel (Freie Universität Berlin)
Short abstract:
Curatorial work that focuses on mediation rather than objects must ideally develop the concept and design of low-threshold digital forms together with the target groups. I would like to propose experimental curating as a tool for the development of critical archival practices.
Long abstract:
Archives depict collection practices and thus reflect the collecting institution and its employees as collectors. In this way, bias is also collected - and social injustice is reproduced. Transferring archives to digital often appears to be a solution for more participation and diversity. However, as described by Flavia Caviezel (et.al.), the digital realm comes with its own mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination. I would like to propose the method of experimental exhibiting as a tool to critically question the taxonomies and categorisations of archives. With small, experimental exhibitions of archived works that otherwise often remain invisible, curators learn both to know their archives in new ways, to work in interdisciplinary teams and to assess the needs of potential users. Because in order not to leave the transformation of society through the digital to its own logic, but to intervene in a formative way in the sense of digital literacy, reflexive knowledge about the logic of digital forms of knowledge must be made available. In addition, in a digital society, knowledge collected and processed in infographics, visualisations or databases must first of all reach the users.
I work with digital communication techniques in my current exhibition "Sport. Mass. Power. Football under National Socialism". Data visualisations on interactive maps, responsive audio guides and participatory storytelling on the exhibition website are just some of the approaches that follow the paradigm of human-centric digitalisation. I would like to share my experience of visualising through innovative exhibition tools.
ephemeral:data /
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.
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.
Phase one of the project (scheduled for release in July 2024) archives approximately 30 feminist groups from douban.com, many of which already shut down. Douban, an interest-based social platform and review site for books, films, and music, once stood out for its diverse and liberal environment among its profit-driven and propaganda-obedient rivals before its forced "rectifications," which is roughly simultaneous to the forcible shutdown of around ten radical feminist groups in 2021. Using Wayback Machine as the primary repository, we, the archivists, developed a web crawler program to locate feminist groups and preserve their snapshots. We then artistically present our findings as an interactive website, drawing visual inspirations from the anti-censorship Internet language culture prevalent among Chinese netizens.