I context of my final paper research emerges from several questions arising from my art practice involving the relationships among text and textile and the archive as both a biologic and a geologic technology of memory that necessarily implicates the body as several and thus involves various distributions of remembering and forgetting simultaneously.
I’ve been thinking about how digitally produced writing easily masks the body’s signs of existence, the marks of a hand at work. Our errors, typos, mistakes disappear, may never appear. In other words I am interested in how the hand does and does not appear but is always implied in writing and textile, in writing as textile, through a history of communication technology- the archive in particular.
An archive’s contents demonstrate some texts’ inherent resistance against the forces of impermanence and forgetfulness. The archive, as collective gathering memory, is both the site of shared community knowledge production and the product itself. Thus, the archive, as both its location and its contents, necessarily re-inters signs within the earth and reinstantiating the materialism of signs. My thesis, then must consider the deterritorializing effect of digital technology upon our concept of archives. The archive necessarily implies more than one body, multiple hands. The technological absencings of the body emerging from digital and newer media have demonstrated technology’s potential to calls bodies more strongly into new being by renewing the possibilities of sense. For better or worse then this is a thesis of speculations that tries to follow the archive as the trace of the hand upon the mind and the earth. In what ways might we now re-imagine our archives? And toward what end?
In anticipating my research I am interested in setting up a certain artistic and bibliographic resonance of work around the concept of the archive– one that traces the shapes of geology, biology, biotechnology, and history as varying functions and forces of and for memory, this concept we might call archive. Or anarchive. The location anticipates both the potential possibilities of order and possibilities of chaos which continuously call our survival into question.
With Derrida’s Mal d’Archive we touch upon a particular crux in our story- the moment of archive and psychoanalysis that emerges from the writings of Freud. The implication I realize is therapy; that the cultural conditions of the present are elucidating a kind of artistic therapeutics from archive fever. The tensions of memory can no longer be around life and death, but rather between ease and disease. Rather than speculate about ULTIMATE ENDS, we might gain more from questions of relative wellness, transitions of state at both smaller and larger scales, one to many and vice versa. The memory organs within us, but also the memory organs which contain us rather than a singular self or location.
1. Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-keeping in the Ancient World
2. Bastian, Jeannette Allis. Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History.
3. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
4. Derrida, Jacques. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, & Genius. Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
5. Ettinger, Bracha L. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
6. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.
7. Hayles, Katherine. “The Condition of Virtuality” from Peter Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 69-94.
8. Jean Francois Lyotard. “Can Thought Go On Without a Body?” in The Inhuman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 8-23.
9. Mc Kemmish, Sue. Archives: Recordkeeping in Society. Wagga Wagga, N.S.W.: Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2005.
10. Montfort, Nick and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. “Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature.” Pamphlet. Version 1.0. Electronic Literature Organization, June 14, 2004. 
http://www.noahwf.com/essays/
11. Proceedings from a colloquium held May 2006 in Washington, DC, which brought together information professionals, educators, managers, and technologists. http://www.archivists.org/
12. Silko, Leslie Marmon. The Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
13. Simon, Joan. Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006.
14. The Society of American Archivists. New Skills for a Digital Era (2007)
15. Wilsted, Thomas. “Planning New and Remodeled Archival Facilities.” Chicago, IL : Society of American Archivists, 2007. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0711/2007007790.html
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