Experimental Archives
I had a website building class at This & That Art Gallery in South Minneapolis scheduled for the past month. A day before the event I decided to invite people who I had been inviting to Experimental Archive Sessions. It was a blast.
Location
Attendees
- Qin
- Trish
- Luke
- Gaya
- Zachary
Websites
Notes
Hosting an Experimental Archive Session in a gallery is the dream. The ideal result of an archival session is to attempt to derive meaning from the created works in the same way those viewing the archive a century from now might. A gallery is the perfect venue: the works created can be put on display immediately. The piece can be performed. The poems which can act as both a description of a website as well as directions for how to recreate the website will be on display. In addition, a rendering of the archived website through a game of telephone. Do the directions faithfully preserve the authors intent? Did our experiment work? A gallery facilitates this line of questioning.
At This & That we dialed into a point made by Ashley, a participant from Session 003, which was pointendly discerning how to describe the two forms of poetry at play. She pointed out that the archival process is equivalent to left brain right brain discussion, where both hemispheres specialize in “numbers” and “arts” respectively. We discussed the function and form of a website and have deliberated on how to describe their components. I brought forward ekphrasis and conceptual poetry as mechanism, though Gaya drove home the point that poetry may not be the only means of archiving (see Dance Notation and Land Surveying). We didn’t get to explore this as much as I would have liked, but I am eager to meet the next session with a greater degree specificity because of the previous sessions and their participants.
For EAS 004 we focused on function. We combed through each site fairly meticulously and attempted to not only describe our experience viewing and engaging with the websites, but also their contents and how they’re describing a moment in time.
It seemed as though we were wondering “to what end?” What is worth describing? I asked the participants how they would write home about it. This seemed to loosen up a tension in publically voicing arbitrary observations.
This session in particular reminded me of a story I heard about in a Taiwanese tea house, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering, where poets sat along the bank of a river and waited for a cup of rice wine to stop in front of them. When it did, they would have to drink it and write a poem. A public gathering and a moment of expression. Where do we have those moments in the United States? How do we express ourselves collectively?
Poetry
Dont drink pea soup on a hot day.
They measured it twice. Okay 👍🏿
Your table choices are color coded.
The waters here are surely loaded.
Dont eat the veggies. Don’t drink the water.
Ecoli is in.
Mystified by their exact science.
Dont drink the pea soup.
– Zachary Hurdle (https://minneapolisparks.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=88319f73c7904adcbabccacdff38bbf1)
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