PROCESSING POST 2 – OCT. 15
In another class I had yesterday, We had a guest presentation from a documentary archival researcher. Her first piece of advice, which seems the most obvious and counter intuitive coming from a professional archival researcher, carried through to every other point she made. She said, “don’t make the mistake of thinking you can do it alone… every archival has too many quirks and eccentricities.” While she was merely advocating for consulting the librarians and archivists or each specific institution for help understanding their organization method, this point seems more relevant after reading about the Warburg and Prelinger approaches classifying materials to mimic subjective mind flow.
As I just moved to a new apartment this Sunday, Perec’s guide to sorting one’s books seems pertinent. As I figure how to reconfigure all my things in a new environment, I attempt to predict how I plan to live a fulfilling home existence in this space… I did not place my “cookery books” in the kitchen because it is too small and I only have three of them. But these ways of thinking applied to every other thing I had to find a place for in a small studio apartment. Though a few drawls have been reserved for the hard to define “known unknowns” that I will wait to deal with later.
All these approaches focus on the importance re-contextualizing knowledge and questioning more traditional organizational structures “expos[ing] unexamined fallacies in our culture’s ubiquitous rhetoric of efficiency.” In the case of Prelinger, his personal fascination with with the road has driven a geographical approach classifying unusual materials. My experience with Prelinger archives has been with the online component on archive.org. In all cases, I feel that its strength has been been in helping find something that I didn’t know I was looking for. An early 60s Promotional film for a newspaper in Long Island, became a fascinating piece of media examining the link between suburban sprawl at the birth of expressways and the current gentrification of the outer boroughs.
In another outside presentation with Sensory ethnographer and documentary soundscape designer Ernst Karrel I went to yesterday, he talked about trying to break free from a tradition approach to sound design that prioritizes the human voice above every other aspect of the sound environment. In his film “Sweetgrass,” the story of a herd of sheep traveling to summer pasture doesn’t prioritize the shepherd’s voices above the overwhelm noise of sleep bleating. This leaves the viewer with a wealth experiential knowledge (sights and sounds) of herding sheep in Montana, even if they can’t articulate facts and figures of their new knowledge about this vocation. This is the organic flow of how my mind has processed these readings and its seem related to the idea questioning the fallacies of how we think of classifying knowledge. Prelinger’s idea of allowing people to get lost in the library of audio visual images of forgotten materials seem with linked Karel’s soundscape designs.