New Stuff

February 2nd, 2011 § 0 comments

I’ve posted our Reading Response schedule here.

I also wanted to encourage some of you to make use of The New School’s own archives, Kellen Archives, in either your Institutional Critique or your final project. Kellen’s archivist, Wendy Scheir, has offered several exciting project proposals:

  • You’re welcome to contribute to Kellen’s forthcoming Radical Shifts exhibition (March 23 – April 8), which track’s Parsons’s famous Interior Design program’s reinvention as Environmental Design — a shift that broke “institutional barriers to expand design’s role as an agent of social transformation.”
  • Archival collections are traditionally differentiated by creator (as opposed to subject or other categories). Conceive, and defend, re-shufflings of Kellen collections, producing new combinations of materials according to variety of categories.
  • Interrogate the “content=content=content” no matter the form, “content-agnostic,” point of view vs. the “archival material as evidence” (its evidential as opposed to informational value); some say archivists fetishize “stuff” and the traditional archives is outmoded – does that hold true for a design archives?
  • Consider how various appraisal theories and real-world events/approaches/circumstances affect what is collected, and what ends up in the institutional/historical  record?
  • Investigate the often-repeated trope of archives as holding “buried treasure.” Is this a useful metaphor? How do institutional history/structure/etc. affect, capitalize upon, inhibit and/or promote archival access?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *