Mobilizing the Archive

The Mobilizing the Archive interest group examines contemporary initiatives and projects that seek to radically remodel traditional notions and practices of media and performance archives. In particular, the group considers new types of archives and related practice-based projects that have emerged in the slipstream of cultural heritage digitization. This comprises projects that deploy digital techniques to defy traditional practices of recording, documenting and capturing that ’domiciliat[e]’ archival data (Derrida 1996, 10) and instead develop alternative ways of engaging with and creating meaning that are multi-authored, open source and in perpetual movement. Thus, the type of projects that interests us challenges traditional, authoritative documentation of media documents and performances as still objects that can be rendered intelligible and expand conditions for recreation, exchange and transmission of archives by setting knowledge in motion. A key affordance of such projects is to create awareness about the exclusions and absences in our existing systems of knowledge and invite a reconsideration of the role that (digitized and born-digital) archives play in them. Following this interest, the group fosters interdisciplinary dialogue between artists, archivists and scholars with the aim of developing critical understandings of the layered meanings of digitized, archival collections. In doing so, Mobilizing the Archive aims to create the conditions for a dialogue, that may facilitate new connections and collaborations, and to report on research-in-progress in these areas.

Project: The Sensory Moving Image Archive (2017-2020)  Website

Contact: We invite experts and practitioners from other disciplines and artistic research areas to connect and to contribute their perspectives on these and related topics. The public seminar series of Transmission in Motion offers a regular opportunity to meet. In addition, we aim to organize a seminar session tailored to Mobilizing the Archive’s themes and topics as part of the Transmission in Motion events programme of 2020-2021. For more information on this event, and to join this group, or for opportunities to collaborate in the development of research projects, please contact Laura Karreman and Christian Olesen.