cataloguing your thoughts

in my work life and creative practice, i often place myself as a resource. looking at ways i can bring my experiences and energy to the fore and to work with others on ideas and projects and access. my mind is a catalogue that spills and becomes bookmarked into the recesses of the machine.

as the brain retrains into filtering an endless display of data, and clicking through to significant pieces and what might matter later on. how our individual selves curate this information becomes a form of currency. the value in time and energy expended in the research, how on #twitter a thousand people may not realise they have each posted the same thing and this feeds the algorithm. this information super highway has become a narrow dirt track at the rear of town.

What Do You Mean by Archive

‘Notions and Considerations of “The Archive”

The last category I am including here is about theorizing “the Archive.” A broad range of work in literary and media theory focuses attention on “the Archive.” Here I am thinking of Foucault’s notion of “the Archive” in The Archeology of Knowledge,” Derrida’s perspective in Archive Fever, and Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst’s notions of archives in Media Archeology. For the most part, this body of work is less about what goes on in an individual archives and is more about the role of “the archive” in society writ large or the idea of “the archive” as traces of the past in objects. For example, for Foucault, “the Archive” is not so much an individual set of materials but a term for the entirety of historical records/evidence that exists to work from. These theoretical takes on “the archive” can be frustrating to many archivists, as much of this work does not engaged with the professional practices of archives or with “archival theory,” the body of scholarship which archivists themselves have been building through ongoing practice and research since at least the French revolution.’

(arc)hive

i’m shifting the focus and naming of this research and project from ‘sanctuary’ to (arc)hive.

this shift has been influenced by the global pandemic and also a shift in my own thinking around the term and connotations of ‘sanctuary’. also influenced by what the core elements of the project is, which is a network and a resource. (arc)hive suits this re-iteration.

the term sanctuary for me now moves away from a safe place, a haven and into a place of privilege. the term has become disintegrated by the associations with the industrial wellness complex. when i hear the term i don’t know if it’s a day spa or a yoga studio, definitely not a cultural or art project.

in pandemic times for many there is no sense of sanctuary, not even homes can create this.

my research and focus continues to be on networks and the housing of experiences and resources. it is a place of activity and response.