Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday

by Gabriella Giannachi

Overview

How the archive evolved to include new technologies, practices, and media, and how it became the apparatus through which we map the everyday.

In Archive Everything, Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also artworks, installations, museums, social media platforms, and mediated and mixed reality environments. Giannachi tracks the evolution of these diverse archival practices across the centuries. 

Archives today offer a multiplicity of viewing platforms to replay the past, capture the present, and map our presence. Giannachi uses archaeological practices to explore all the layers of the archive, analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution project, a digital archive of feminist artists. She considers the archive as a memory laboratory, with case studies that include visitors' encounters with archival materials in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She discusses the importance of participatory archiving, examining the “multimedia roadshow” Digital Diaspora Family Reunion as an example. She explores the use of the archive in works that express the relationship between ourselves and our environment, citing Andy Warhol and Ant Farm, among others. And she looks at the transmission of the archive through the body in performance, bioart, and database artworks, closing with a detailed analysis of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Infinity Engine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262335423
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	11/18/2016
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	8 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gabriella Giannachi is Professor of Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter. She is the coauthor (with Steve Benford) of Performing Mixed Reality (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xv

1 A Brief History of the Archive 1

Archives 0.0 and 1.0 2

Archives 2.0 9

Archives 3.0 and 4.0 15

2 Archives as Archaeological Sites 27

Digging up the Archive 28

Archaeology, the Punctum and the Archive 30

Archaeological Toolbox 33

Media, Archaeology, and Remediation 36

Lynn Hershman Leeson's IW.A.R. 37

Toward an Archaeology of the IW.A.R. Archive(s) 52

3 Architecture, Memory, and the Archive 57

Memory, History, and the Archive 57

The Plurality of Memory 61

The Witness and the Archive: Remembering the Holocaust 64

Replaying Blast Theory's Rider Spoke 69

The Distributed Archive: Mapping, Memories in the Archive 76

4 Diasporic Archives 93

The Transformational Power of Diasporic Archives: Looking at Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album / Look at Me; 1890-1950 94

Diaspora and the Archive, the Case of Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR) by Thomas Allen Harris 100

Toward a Fluid Ontology: The Case of "Creating Collaborative Catalogues" 107

I've Known Rivers: The Museum of African Diaspora Stories Project 113

5 The Art of Archiving 123

The Curiosity Cabinet 124

Archival Art: The cases of Marcel Duchamp's La boîte-en-valise; Robert Morris's Card File: July 11-December 31, 1962; Andy Warhol's Time Capsules; and Ant Farm's Citizen Time Capsule 131

Citizen Archivists and the Power of Replay: The Case of sosolimited's ReConstitution 144

6 (A)live Archives 153

Embodying the Archive: Musée de la Danse If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse? 154

The Smartness of Things 160

Database Art: George Legrady's An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (1993), Pockets Full of Memories and Pockets Full of Memories II; Natalie Bookchin's Databank of the Everyday; Eduardo Kac's Time Capsule; Christine Borland's HeLa and HeLa, Hot; Lynn Hershman Leeson's The Infinity Engine 162

Afterword 181

References 185

Index 203

What People are Saying About This

Natasa Milic-Frayling

Insightful and thought provoking. Giannachi's book appeals equally to information professionals facing the deluge of digital artifacts in modern digital archives and to those inquisitively searching for meaning of history, art, identity, and social engagements in our digital era. Promoting an archive apparatus that ' we want to be produced by,' Giannachi renews our sense of empowerment and connection with the very process that captures our present and makes it an integral part of our future. She makes superbly flowing arguments, interweaving scholarly frameworks with rich examples of past and contemporary practices. Her book offers a soothing canvas for the unfolding drama as, on one side, we combat a digital amnesia due to technology obsolescence and, on the other, seek to rebalance social values within a digital economy, concerned with personal digital footprints, digital identity, and the right to be forgotten.

Oliver Grau

The future of art archiving and its impact on us—a great read.

Michael Shanks

A superb book. The archive is everywhere—information storage, manipulation, retrieval and access, ways of dealing with memories personal and cultural, at the heart of senses of self as well as systems of regulation and control. Tracing the deep history of archival practices through the lens of a series of provocative works in contemporary art, this book offers sharp focus on a pervasive and growing aspect of everyday experience. As the world becomes an Internet of everything, this is an original and powerful statement about something that matters to us all.

Endorsement

Insightful and thought provoking. Giannachi's book appeals equally to information professionals facing the deluge of digital artifacts in modern digital archives and to those inquisitively searching for meaning of history, art, identity, and social engagements in our digital era. Promoting an archive apparatus that 'we want to be produced by,' Giannachi renews our sense of empowerment and connection with the very process that captures our present and makes it an integral part of our future. She makes superbly flowing arguments, interweaving scholarly frameworks with rich examples of past and contemporary practices. Her book offers a soothing canvas for the unfolding drama as, on one side, we combat a digital amnesia due to technology obsolescence and, on the other, seek to rebalance social values within a digital economy, concerned with personal digital footprints, digital identity, and the right to be forgotten.

—Natasa Milic-Frayling, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

From the Publisher

The future of art archiving and its impact on us—a great read.

—Oliver Grau, Chair Professor for Image Science, Danube University

A superb book. The archive is everywhere—information storage, manipulation, retrieval and access, ways of dealing with memories personal and cultural, at the heart of senses of self as well as systems of regulation and control. Tracing the deep history of archival practices through the lens of a series of provocative works in contemporary art, this book offers sharp focus on a pervasive and growing aspect of everyday experience. As the world becomes an Internet of everything, this is an original and powerful statement about something that matters to us all.

—Michael Shanks, Professor, Stanford University

Insightful and thought provoking. Giannachi's book appeals equally to information professionals facing the deluge of digital artifacts in modern digital archives and to those inquisitively searching for meaning of history, art, identity, and social engagements in our digital era. Promoting an archive apparatus that 'we want to be produced by,' Giannachi renews our sense of empowerment and connection with the very process that captures our present and makes it an integral part of our future. She makes superbly flowing arguments, interweaving scholarly frameworks with rich examples of past and contemporary practices. Her book offers a soothing canvas for the unfolding drama as, on one side, we combat a digital amnesia due to technology obsolescence and, on the other, seek to rebalance social values within a digital economy, concerned with personal digital footprints, digital identity, and the right to be forgotten.

—Natasa Milic-Frayling, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom