All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the ‘miscellaneous’. Everything has been set in order and order reigns. Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place. (Perec P.191) As soon as I read this passage,… Read More »
Until I read The Industrial Library, I didn’t even think of how people find or meet books they need. And I was impressed by the card catalog systems that librarians created. Anthony Panizzi worked at the British Museum introduced a subject catalog that no one had ever tried to create such kind of classification. “Panizzi… Read More »
In An Archival Impulse by Hal Foster, hes illustrates archival aesthetics by giving examples of three artists. He focus the work of art which sources are drawn from the archives of mass culture, but they can also be obscure. Thomas Hirschhorn’s work change my idea of archival art. For me, when I hear “archival art”,… Read More »
I want to process an idea that isn’t completely formed yet – it’s somewhere at the intersection of Joselit’s aggregates, the curiosity cabinets in Stewart’s article, and the notion of the ‘flaneur,’ which we discussed with Kate Eichenhorn a few weeks ago. Kate mentioned that the flaneur wandering through the archive, discovering lost knowledge among old… Read More »
These reflections are from the previous couple of weeks. The ‘will to archive’ or ‘reason to archive’ creates a fast moving flow that caught my attention in couple of readings: “The archive fever is the attempt to return to the lived origin, to the everyday experience which are the sources of our distorted and refracted… Read More »
During our readings for this week I kept being reminded of our discussion from our last class, specifically the idea of understanding the archive by reading with and against its grain. This concept seems important to me in understanding the context of an archive or collection, its place within a culture, society or… Read More »
Last week’s visit to the new york Municipal Archive was an eye opening experience for me. It was an opportunity to actively engage with the process of archiving and see how it is relevant in today’s society. To begin with I had always considered archiving to be akin with the arts and literature, an archive… Read More »
This week’s readings brought up a new concept for me, the repertoire. In Diana Taylor’s “The Archive and the Repertoire” she states that the repertoire is the “ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e. spoken language, dance, sports, ritual” in other words, “embodied memory,” an experience that is not based in the written language but “requires… Read More »
This week’s readings reminded me of one of the reasons I first became interested in the Media Studies program, while still a lowly college undergraduate. During the Republican primary debates in 2011, a lot of – to be technical – weird stuff was being said. Factually incorrect stuff, taking political spin to new levels, and stretching the… Read More »
While I was home just a few months ago I discovered an old box full of memorabilia and souvenirs I’d saved over the years. Among the items were old cards, movie stubs, school projects, and even several journals. As I sifted among theses I items I began to reread some of these journals (well let’s… Read More »