My digital/material Anarchive is a continuation and elaboration upon the intertwining of “text” and “textile” within art, storytelling, and various histories of communication technology. Anarchive attempts to take my previous text/ile inquiries toward a reconceptualization of the archive as a site of only momentary meaning and mere traces– fleeting concrescences and dissolutions that serve the present as quietly passing presence giving way for a future to come. I am interested in exploring the inherent tensions and liberatory potentials between remembering and forgetting, knowing and not knowing, holding and letting go.
Anarchive leaps forth from the assertions of Derrida’s Archive Fever. “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token to the future... what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It begins with the printer.” (Archive Fever, p.18) I am interested in the continuously changing technologies of archiving and, moreover, their alternative consequences for ways of living. In particular, 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, are easily erased. The result can be the appearance of material noise that approaches zero, purified mind, only information, not stuff, no mess, none of the inevitable, unpredictable frictions of several bodies in space. I think part of my fascination with textiles involves the visible signs of hands and many fingers, the traces of a body’s decisions and varying attention.
The piece begins with an Internet call for contributions. The e-mail serves as a kind of community echolocation into various networks for the collective generation of content and a strategic interpolation of the work’s “audience.” The generated content is cut and reassembled to form an intricate weaving that plays upon the limits of textual literacy and the communication possibilities left in texture, color, craft, pattern and material.
The weaving is scanned as a high resolution JPEG, dated and uploaded to the Anarchive website as a searchable html document that invisibly describes the weaving's contents and contributors. (Prototype in progress 
here.) Contributors are notified of their part in the work's re-iteration and WWW location. As the digital weavings are found and uploaded by web browsers, the accumulated hits contribute toward a programmed half-life deterioration of the image file. An anarchive is designed to unmake itself, to slowly forget, to gently deteriorate under the repeated touches of digital handling.
My hope is to design a piece that makes a sincere effort to remember, draw together a body of knowledge, that also makes peace with unknowledge, death, and inevitable decomposition. The anarchive draws people together but does not allow itself to be what holds them together. The anarchive cannot hold, cannot keep. It both acknowledges and refuses the organizing principles upon which the archive insists. The audience’s participation brings it to life and also causes its dissolution, leaving a question of what remains and where it remains. Thus, my project seeks to make sensible a virtual life cycle, a vulnerability of information to decomposition in contradiction of the notion that digital technology and the Internet as archive provides a place of everlasting memory with unlimited capacity and access. Already, there is an archaeology to the Internet, old codes, operating systems, old hardware that make the Internet’s past variously accessible, variably forgotten. The Anarchive is interested in demonstrating explicitly a digital gathering and passing away.
Included in the piece along side the Anarchive website are the poem loom (prototype 
here.) and thin spools of paper generated by the call for contributions as well as the paper weavings themselves.
I plan to design the website using HTML and PHP to calculate the images hits and encode the degradation of the image files
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Claire Evans
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Ann Hamilton
Janine Antoni
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