Check-in: Archive Bomb

Archive Bomb met Tactical Media, whose manifesto shares some desired qualities with the concept:

• involved parties manipulate media "in a continual process of questioning the premises of the channels they work with"
• activism characterized by mobility and flexible response (hit-and-run). The ability to move through different entities of "vast media landscape without betraying their original motivations"
• results are "temporary reversals in the flow of power"
• "an aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking... Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike."
  

This match revisits the concept of artists being new archivists. Beeld & Geluid (B&G) can be the supplier for material for such interventions, and can facilitate participation on three levels:

1. insider
   B&G can allow the broadcast system to be hacked. In a context where A/V will already be setup, for example an event in a public square during museum night, B&G can ensure the "back door" through which underminers can participate.
   
2. hacker
   A team of archivists, dedicated to showing multiple perspectives can use the system themselves, as they are most familiar with the state of the collection. They could assume an anonymous identity, with a hidden link to B&G (Kounter Beeld en Geluid?).
   
3. mentor
   B&G can encourage or participate in interventionist workshops, with specialized knowledge of broadcasting and A/V archives. Cooperation with historians could also be possible. (Hooray multi-disciplinary collaboration!)
   

Amalgamated Concept #1: historic re-enactments tying into current events
B&G can set up a platform that works with activists for the purpose of exposing patterns in media or social commentary, such as with the methods listed above. Through a combination of performance and A/V bombs, the public can be confronted with past events:

• Purely analog (ex: performance troupe that translates a hate crime into a staged conflict on the train)
• Augmented flashmob (ex: streaming old broadcast on the speaker system in addition to participants with previous instructions)
• Techie dream (a disposable projection grenade: looks like a soda can, but it releases smoke onto which a one-time projection is displayed). While the "grenade" is still a few steps away (compact portable projectors are available, but definitely not disposable), a "landmine" could also be implemented: the material and structure are there, but detonation is triggered by a coincidence.

Amalgamated Concept #2: puzzlehunt
B&G can expose its archive through a pervasive game, such as an urban puzzlehunt. Teams of gamers sign up to solve rounds of puzzles - in this case media riddles could be featured, but in a public space context. Drawing from of the texts in "Space Time Play," this could be an ideal set-up:

• Pervasive games mix everyday tangible space with closed information spaces. The rules and information network (game space) intertwine with the city space (play space).
• "Temporary autonomous zones" are created by roleplay. In these zones willing players create a new set of rules, when imposed onto innocent bystanders, question implicit social interactions.
• Because the real environment is used, there are real consequences. This removes the safety bubble of traditional play (where one can safely explore "what if" and what one cannot do in real life), but it also offers elements of psychogeography to come into play. The city itself can be enhanced by the game by encouraging players to see it through new eyes or to uncover stories to drive us.
  

B&G would curate the material used for puzzles, and gather data as done currently through web-based games. Material costs (if mobile-projection gadgets are to be used) would be more safely covered. The element of surprise still strikes non-participating passerbys, and they can also be used as part of the game. An element that could be interesting from the MIT Mystery Hunt is that the winning team wins the right to organize the following year's competition (rules, hints, everything).

An interesting part about creating these puzzles is to make it such that a Google search does not solve it. A good team could solve all puzzles to the end in about 48 hours (or that is a target). This is an example in which one deliberately tries to make the information not available, for a reasonable purpose.


Points for moving on:

• Does the theoretical framework need more work?
• Could storyboards of potential puzzles be a starting point, then see what happens when this game context is removed?
• Is B&G's role clear enough such that the concepts are appropriate for them in particular? (Does it make an "appropriate" use of the content of their archive?)

********************************
New Readings since last time:

1. Gregory Sholette - Dark Matter
   Raises discussion on the creative realm unrecognized by the institutionalized art world (and its importance), why it may not be accepted, and its connection to political art.
   • "What stabilizes the borders of the elite art market is the routine production of relatively minor differences."
   • Importance of connecting "'unblocked' moments of working class fantasy with the history, or histories of actual resistance to capital, patriarchy racism and nationalism. Rather than a smooth, linear narrative," it assembles "a montage of 'historical fissures -- crises, war, capitulation, revolution, counterrevolution."
   • Describes interventionist art groups that design objects of intervention as well as workshops that encourage this behavior.
2. David Garcia & Geert Lovink - The ABC of Tactical Media
3. Rui Guerra(!) - It's Not That Kind, guerilla projections & other projects that empower individuals to intervene with public spaces
   

To Read (mostly from INTK):

1. Gregory Sholette - The Interventionists: User's Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life
2. Krzystof Wodiczko
   Nowadays public space is occupied with the displaced, members of a nomadic culture. These spaces should be reclaimed as agoras for statements and discussion.
3. Claire Bishop
   Participation in socially engaged art
4. Markus Miessen - The Violence of Participation
5. Chantal Mouffe - Artistic Activism and Agnostic Spaces
   Urge "for radical democracy of agnostic pluralism where all antagonisms could be expressed. In their opinion, ‘...there is no possibility of society without antagonism’; indeed, without the forces that articulate a vision of society, it could not exist."
6. Michael Naimark - Arts Lab
   Proposal for a hybrid arts center and research lab
   

Round 03: Chance Interruptions

The approach being taken to bring the archive closer to its audience:

Interrupt daily routine to bring a higher awareness of the current situation and the archive.

To varying degrees, concepts in this direction impose archive fragments on a random audience. There are those who look to the past to learn, or to reminisce, and there are those who do not. As the present is a result of the past, this approach gives more power to the archive: it does not wait to be initiated by an interested user.

background principles

• An archive is a collection of fragments. Digitization of its content aids fluidity of presentation and makes interaction with the archive more dynamic, and allows for new connections and interpretations to be made.


• The technology that we have developed seemingly independent of the Supernatural now makes qualities of it even closer. (E.g. invisible forces, quickness, mutability)


• Changes in one's routine, whether or not by chance, create a higher awareness of the current/"normal" situation.


• Over text, audiovisual material is already communicating closer to the people. Sound and moving images were what we perceived before written literacy. Outside its original context, AV material can trick us into thinking it is current.

Three initial concepts are defined to explore these principles. They all take place off-site, but differ on who is curating the information. Beeld & Geluid is used as an impartial provider of content.

archive bomb

• Guerilla warfare model: quick, temporary, anonymous broadcasting in public spaces that may produce chaotic results.
• Archive fragment bombs are detonated without explanation: less information forces the audience to lay their own interpretations.
• This is a one-time event. The effects are imposed on the memories and interpretations of the surrounding people.
• Can comment on current situation using historic locations and political/cultural/religious events. Can be used as a way to take back broadcasting.
• Curation by the people? If it were Beeld & Geluid, does it have an obligation to remain neutral?

shadecast

• Visual podcasts are broadcast on public train sunshades.
• Geyser model: known location, but when it is triggered is not explicitly expressed. Spurts are short, appropriate for commuters of varying periods.
• Can provide more information on the places passed on the train, but it could expand to have a visual radio feel.
• Competition over broadcasting space filters out different parties who are interested enough to make a coherent podcast.

connect the dots

• Running chicken model: finding meaning amongst randomness. Letting chickens (or people) run freely, the results of which reveal a new meaning.
• Input locational data to be interpreted by the tag system of B&G. The system functions as a Supernatural power, giving a different meaning and overview that people cannot see as clearly.
• Results of this are displayed in public locations; while the location is static, the information fed to it is now dependent on the surrounding people.

Another question arises: what is the effect of these ways of (re)broadcasting?

Reading: Archive and Aspiration

Yesterday our clustering session yielded several research directions that we will dig deeper into this week. The topic I will address is power and the archive. The IT revolution has changed the way we think about information and accordingly, the archive. The result has been a shift in power from traditional, controlled archives towards information created, curated/edited and distributed through a participatory culture, in a sense democratizing these processes.

I started by looking into the V2_/NAi publication, Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, for some insight. The book is a collection of essays, projects, and interviews from different art/design disciplines. The most inspiring article I read was Archive and Aspiration, by Arjun Appadurai. I over simplify and paraphrase below.

Appadurai discusses how the digitalization of the archive has led to a return to the archive's traditional role as a deliberate site for recording anticipated memories for collectives, freeing the archive from the exclusive realm of state control, policing or from the tomb of the trace. The IT revolution has had the effect of increasing the accessibility and extended the function and possibilities for the archive. The digital archive becomes the site for the deliberate production of anticipated memories by communities. Appadurai gives the example of the digital migrant archive; the archive for disposessed people whose histories do not correspond with "official" memory. This intensified form of archive acts as a highly interactive forum giving voice, agency and debate, as a site for creating/negotiating collective memory and aspiration, mediating between the past and present locations.

"Rather, the migrant archive is a continuous and conscious work of the imagination, seeking in collective memory an ethical basis for the sustainable reproduction of cultural identities in the new society."

The archive is the map of how to interact within uncertainty and a tool to link between memory, desire and hope. For me, the notion of archive lending agency and location to grassroots, subversive or other groups confronting, breaking down or transforming the powers that be, is very fascinating...the tools of the oppressors become the tools of the suppressed.