Experimental Archives
On the heels of the United States' 250th anniversary, I was recommended to host an archival session at a community gathering space, the Open Market. I arrived an hour into the event and found nobody there because all of the food was distributed! An Open Market win.
Attendees
- Zachary Hurdle
Notes
Due to the event ending early, I did some research instead. In last week’s session Roseline asked a poignant question, what is an archive? So I started to search.
My own assumptions bubble to the top. An archive for me is a collection of artifacts which describe the conditions, feelings, and ways of life of a given person, place or thing.
Per Cambridge:
a collection of historical records relating to a place, organization, or family
This definition led me to literally look at what an archive is, where the term is used. How it’s used. Which in turn led me to look at the challenges of archiving, and to think about accessing archives beyond academic spaces.
Over the months I’ve had to explore this subject, I’ve developed a core thesis to define the purpose of these sessions. I typed up a document to serve as my business card at a journalism conference where I described and invited people to participate in an Experimental Archive Session. Here’s what I shared with them:
We can view physical documents from centuries ago because they are physical objects. In one hundred years will we be able to view a website in the same way? We are in a Tower of Babel moment, approaching a Library of Alexandria level disaster, where our data exists digitally and can be lost in an instant.
So let’s write poetry.
We will be using a Greek form of poetry called Ekphrasis. It can be defined as a literal description of an artwork. A well-known example of Ekphrasis is a poem by John Keats called ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. A website is an artwork and so Ekphrasis will be useful for describing our websites.
We will also be using a more contemporary form called conceptual poetry. This is often described as ‘uncreative writing’. Another example we will refer to is called ‘Schema’ by Dan Graham. ‘Schema’ describes the form of a poem and applies metrics like number of words or space occupied by words on the page. This will be useful for thinking about the metrics we can observe on a website.
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