The Live Archive
As part of my masters in Curatorial Practice I have been conducting an online work placement with Arika, a political arts organisation based in Edinburgh. They have had no public programming during my placement, and so it seemed like a good opportunity to delve into what was already there - the archive. This has been a fascinating and sometimes lonely experience, and has raised questions for me about what happens when you preserve live events through digitisation, and what the life of the archive is in the present.
Traditionally1, archives privilege material remains over the immaterial because the immaterial is seen as fleeting and mutable. Material objects, on the other hand, are treated as if they are fixed representing some undisrupted past. This idea is problematic because it disregards the ways in which the immaterial remains differently2, and the ways in which objects are performative in their own way. Digital technology tampers with the binary between the material and immaterial in archiving, since live performances are able to to be captured as data, and can be revisited in a seemingly fixed form. Yet there remains an ephemeral quality to live events that can’t be fixed: the smells, light, gestures, connections, disruptions that haven’t been captured. These are now absent, or merely suggested in the retrospective experience. Similarly, the digital problematizes the idea that material remains in a fixed form. Due to the accelerated development of technology, data which does not get tended to quickly becomes ancient and inaccessible. There is, therefore,
Archiving practice was developed according to a Western, white-cultural logic which adheres to the notion of linear time. Linear time sees past, present and future as separate and clearly definable spheres of existence. 1
Rebecca Schneider’s article Performance Remains (2001) looks at how performance transmits cultural knowledge and how the immaterial remains in different ways to the material. 2
a politics of which data gets looked after and by whom. Therefore, the digital needs to change in order to remain.3
Photograph from Moved by the Motion, a performance by boychild, TOTAL FREEDOM & Wu Tsang at Epidode 9 Other Worlds Already Exist (2017)
So, the digital archive is both fixed and changing. Delving into Arika’s archive I have experienced a sense of longing. After more than a year of varying degrees of lockdown, the yearning to gather with a room full of people is strong - the desire to feel the temperature of the room, to watch the faces of the audience and be present together in both space and time. There is an apparent “nowhere-ness of the digital archive” (Taylor, D., 2010: 9) which at times has felt to me both freeing and disconcerting. In the videos I have watched, the conversations have been preserved, but
Diana Taylor’s article Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies (2010) looks at how digital technology changes the way we remember and produce knowledge in relation to archives. 3
some quality of the experience is missing. It is the very liveness of the event, which, in this retrospective experience, gives the feeling of not-being-there. But, as Diana Taylor says, place behaves differently in the digital realm - “We are all seemingly ‘here,’ live, now, online — no matter where the ‘here’ might be.” (Taylor, D., 2010: 9) It’s interesting that the experience of visiting the past should make us feel ‘no-where’, when in a sense it is the past that is visiting us here.
It felt apt that I should be focusing on Episode 9 - Other Worlds Already Exist. This Episode occurred in 2017 at Tramway & Kinning Park Complex & Many Studios, Glasgow. Taking place over four days, this series of events invited science fiction writers, prison abilitionist poets, sex workers, transfeminist revolutionaries, and more, to explore the possibilities of occupying other words and other ways of being - something which takes on new meaning in the digital realm. Technology offers vast opportunities for developing other worlds. In Public Sex, a discussion between Samuel Delany, Jackie Wang and Huw Lemmey, they spoke about the ways in which architecture dictates the kind of interactions that can occur in its space. Samuel Delany spoke about the way sexual contact is facilitated by the intimacy and similtaneous publicity of porn theatre spaces. Huw Lemmey also spoke about how Grindr functions as a one-on-one interactive space, which doesn’t facilitate collective discussions, or the ability to call out discriminatory language in a communal way. Without certain spaces, sex and the conversations around it can become increasingly privatised. Perhaps this is also the case with digital archives - as it is a space which is difficult to congregate in. While it is not a physical space with walls, it is a space nonetheless.
Photograph from Public Sex, a discussion with Jackie Wang, Huw Lemmey and Samuel R. Delany at Episode 9 - Other Worlds Already Exist (2017)
So what kind of encounters does the online archive facilitate? As a space which primarily holds records of live events and performances, Arika’s archive contains a contradiction - the live event which is no longer live. While pastness is a fundamental quality of archives, this feeling is somehow enhanced through visiting the live archive, in that it preserves something which refuses preservation. However, at the same time, the records take on a different life through being digitised. Documenting events and publishing them online makes them more accessible, and the archive exists as a rich resource which we can continue to learn from, and attend - within different spaces, times and contexts. By featuring live events in the archive Arika extends the reach of their programme and of archival practice. Performance holds space for things which are not categorisable, and which contain multiple meanings. Further, in the context of Arika’s programming style, Episodes are informed by previous discussions, so viewing the archive is a way of engaging with
the evolution of a conversation, or a way of thinking. So, it is through the public programme that the archive becomes present.
In my own research I have been looking at peat bogs as a metaphor for anti-capitalist practice and non-linear ways of remembering. The bog’s potent pulp preserves matter and evolves slowly over thousands of years, bringing us into contact with other times and other lifeforms. I find bogs useful to think about in relation to archives, which similarly preserve other times, but they are selected to tell specific cultural narratives. Bogs, on the other hand, represent forgotten, abject4 histories, which fester and horrify the senses as they present us with processes of death and decay. When thinking about cultural memory, it is important to consider the hidden or boggy parts of the archive. What sits hidden in the dark - and what remains even though we cannot see it? The archive is riddled with absences, including the things that get left behind.
Archiving live events raises interesting questions about the binaries of material/immaterial, and live/pastness. Often, archives represent the illusion of an uninterrupted past, while ignoring the present context in which they are represented. Arika’s archive is live in the sense that it is in dialogue with, and informing, the public programme. Retrospectively attending live events creates interesting contradictions of experience, and disrupts the traditional hierarchy of material over the immaterial in archival documentation. White supremacist culture sees written histories as more
Julia Kristeva writes in Power of Horror (1982) that the abject refers to the sensation of horror caused by the break-down of symbolic order, such as a corpse which reminds us of our own materiality. 4
legitimate than oral histories5, and so it is important to center performance and the ephemeral6 in archives to subvert the existing hierarchy of cultural knowledge production.
Diana Taylor’s book The Archive and the Repertoire (2003) looks at performance as a site of cultural knowledge transmission and production. 5
José Esteban Muñoz’s essay Ephemera as Evidence: Introductiory Notes to Queer Acts (1996) looks at the importance of acts and performance as a site of worldmaking 6
Bibliography
Arika (2017). Public Sex - Huw Lemmey, Jackie Wang and Samuel R. Delany. Available at https://arika.org.uk/archive/items/episode-9-other-worlds-already-exist/public-sex [Accessed 14.04.2021]
Esteban Muñoz, J. (1996) ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’ in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. vol. 8:2. p 5-16
Schneider, R. (2001) ‘Performance Remains’ in A Journal of the Performing Arts. vol 6:2. p 100-108
Taylor, D. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press
Taylor, D. (2010) ‘Save As… Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies’ in Imagining America. vol 7. available at https://surface.syr.edu/ia/7/?utm_source=surface.syr.edu%2Fia%2F7&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages [accessed 14.04.2021]