About the Archival Engine
Contemporary cultural workers have been reflecting on the profound shift in forms of labor and production, and a knowledge system deeply entwined with neoliberalism. In the face of virus’s dreadful spreadability, a performative antithesis is formed by expansive isolation and confinement. Hyperconnected yet barred from productive gathering, the contrasting experience evokes the Derridean notion of “dénégation”—inspired by the Freudian Verneinung—and suggests the counteractive and imaginative potentials of an archival engine made for the lost, denied, excluded, or erased histories, while accentuating their transmissive affect in hope of reenactment.
Examples include the canceled or interrupted events regardless of their de facto impact, disregarded thoughts and happenings due to violent suppression or collective obviousness, unknown lineages of artists and artworks in techno-social relations, and abandoned or rejected inventions and concepts in progress.
an automaton who ponders how its body is writing about itself, MMA, Making Marvels, Nov 2019.
Concept
Antonin Artaud’s seminal essay, “The Theatre and the Plague,” has been widely echoed in the emerging field of virality studies in the past decade, and further revived by the transmissive potential of digital media. An essential contradiction, however, lies in Artaud’s theorization against the contagiousness of the essential theatre and instead, acclamation of its capability to bring forth latent perverseness of human mind like the plague, a vision leading to his enthusiasm for radio plays, notably To Have Done with the Judgment of God that was scheduled to air in 1948 yet canceled.
The denegated events, concepts, and organizational entities are yet always desiring, activating the formative openness instead of merely satisfying a determinate want. The Ancient Greek origin of “archive,” meaning “town hall,” perhaps proposes a kind of engine that, in addition to accumulating sealed records, works to monitor and regulate its content in realtime, as an archive of its own. The structure of this archival engine thus resembles pathogenic mechanisms reaching for the ultimate efficacy that the messenger and the message are becoming one. The infinite reenactment of formally elastic records renders the artistic authorship oscillating between independent, co-operative, symbiotic, or tied yet mutually repelling relationships; both bodies, or sometimes antibodies when reproduced and re-contextualized, shift between a host and a transmissive agent, a self-constituting subject or a voluntary medium in connected spheres. The archive thus works as a constant compromise and amalgamation of the recorded past and anticipated future.
Ongoing Research
The initial phase of this research has been focused on artist collectives and co-ops active during the 1970s and ’80s, specifically in upstate and downtown New York. Their activities concern a broad spectrum from the emergent medium of video and audiovisual experiments, to socially engaged art and alternative spaces that tackle the socioeconomic crises and geopolitical conflicts, to the claim of women’s place in the art world through gallery cohorts and innovative curatorial endeavors. At the junctions of these histories and the current institutional narrative—meanwhile, under the rising influence of digitized network and neoliberal economic order—points of contact are hopefully activated and mobilized, and gaps and systems of knowledge identified.