Tag Archives: archive

found archive

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Walking in the hilly maze of streets between Istiklal Cadessi and Cihangir in Istanbul in July 2009, Itai and I came across a small shop crammed full of boxes of old photographs, and assorted personal objects, like jewelry, used perfume bottles, souvenirs from trips to other places. It was as if the contents of innumerable Istanbul lives had been dumped into his shop. An old man sat outside of the shop, entirely uninterested in us as we poked around and intruded into the forgotten memories of unknown others.  I bought a few photographs from the old man for one lira.

I remembered the walk today when, as I took a book of photographs of the Istanbul bus terminal off the shelf, these photos fell out onto the floor. Picking them up, I felt the bustle and beauty of Istanbul again, its distinguished decay, its fullness and color, its melancholy elegance.

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I am not an Istanbullu, and may never be, but I love this city more than I have a right to. In the moment of seeing these black and white photographs I was seized by a longing to return, to know the people in the images, to walk in those places. Despite only visiting once, and for a short time, Istanbul entered my dreams. I search for friends in its hills at night, and always find them, in doorways and courtyards, old friends, good friends. In this way I have never left. What is this longing that infects me, prompting such dreams? Is it for particular people and places? How can these images of strangers and unknown places be as magnetic as friendship?

Orhan Pamuk warns of the dangers of exaggerating his city’s beauty:

Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of Istanbul’s dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A good many writers of earlier generations fell into this habit when writing about Istanbul: Even as a they extol the city’s beauty, entrancing me with their stories, I am reminded they no longer live the place they describe, preferring the modern comforts of western cities. From these predecessors I learned that the right to heap immoderate lyrical praise on Istanbul’s beauties belongs to those who no longer live there, and not without some guilt: for the writer who talks of the city’s ruins and melancholy is never unaware of the ghostly light that shines down on his life. To be caught in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorus is to be reminded of the difference between one’s own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past.

– Istanbul: Memories and the City, p.56-57

architectural imaginary

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The exhibition catalog for Automatic Cities: The architectural imaginary in contemporary art, which ran from Sept 29, 2009 – Jan. 31, 2010, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, was written by curator Robin Clark, and contains an essay by Giuliana Bruno. Here is an excerpt from Bruno’s essay, “Construction Sites: Fabricating the Architectural Imaginary in Art.”

An urban image is created by the work of history and the flow of memory. This is because the city of images comprises in its space all of its past histories, with their intricate layers of stories. The urban imaginary is a palimpsest of mutable fictions floating in space and residing in time. Mnemonic narratives condense in space, and their material residue seeps into the imaginative construction of a place. The density of historical and mnemonic interactions builds up the architectural imaginary of a city. The process becomes visible in the visual arts, which are capable of capturing temporality and memory. Artworks can fabricate traces of existence and exhibit the sedimentation of time.  In art we can feel the texture of an image and the substance of a place when layered forms come to be visible on the surface and mnemonic coatings become palpable to our sensing. The actual folds of history and the fabric of memory can thus be “architected” in art, which can expose the density of time that becomes space.

Wow! I know, right? But wait, there’s more…

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dangerous archives?

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Watch the development of the case against Julian Assange very carefully. It’s pretty bizzare: sexual assault? espionage? Some are coming to his defense. As my friend Barbara says, one likely result of this drama will be greater restrictions on the way we are able to access, use and create various media archives. CBS News predicts a future of never-ending cyberwar. Never forget: sorting through these sorts of archives or databases is the political practice of our time, made even more so by sheer ubiquity. And the creation of digital archives themselves? What sort of politics is that?

One New Republic editorial questions Julian Assange’s/Wikileaks’ status as beacons of serious journalism, governmental transparency and democracy due to their commitment to collect data, without organization and argument. The article cites one of my fave media theorists, Lev Manovich:

The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The database is not just a metaphor, in fact—it’s a certification of what knowledge looks like and how it is to be gained. A metaphor is a carrier, a condensation of meaning. A database is a heap.

It is this “heap-ish” quality that makes databases like dumpsters. And I guess the creation of databases is kind of like garbage collection, except the goal isn’t disposal. There is no real possibility of (information) disposal as the existence of Wikileaks clearly proves. Does this mean that political action, and the creation of knowledge itself depends upon dumpster diving? Garbage collection and dumpster diving? Really?

YES! I think so. And I am kind of excited by this new political reality. I’m not the only one.

my archival practice

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I had a great question from my colleague today:

Hi Adeola. I’m curious how you think about your archiving practices in relation to your archiving (analysis? retrieval?)… I know in your work you are more focused on studying rather than creating archives. But you do create them, so I’m wondering how the 2 activities relate for you. Is one more personal and the other more academic? Or can there be such a distinction for you? What do you think Benjamin was doing with the Arcades project?

This was a great question, because it forced me to think carefully and articulate my approach to archiving. Here is my answer:

I don’t work on “the archive”, per se, because I think that it is too fetishized as an object. I am interested in “archiving” as an everyday practice that has been part of modern life, for many people (anyone associated with a state, in one way or another) and today, it is THE modus operandus for most people who live in the world of electronic devices–from TV watchers, to phone callers, and email senders.

Right now, as I write I am engaging in an archival practice. To me this is more than simply creating an archive that someone can retrieve. I take a lot of inspiration from Benjamin’s arcades project, and many of his writings are part of my “top shelf.” I don’t want to make the comment TOO long, so here is a link to my blog, where I discuss Benjamin a little:
 http://archivingthecity.com/2009/01/14/one-day-sculpture/

You will see that Benjamin is very interested in trash, debris, what as been discarded. Why? Not only because it needs to be retrieved and saved (the Arcades project was as much about his life in Paris, as anything else. It is far from a library, or national archive, or institutional archive), or worked with in any conventional way, but because looking at the trash–dumpster diving–was a way to re-train our historical senses, to begin to see how the past is never really gone, and does not necessarily need to be “retrieved” because it never actually left. The Arcades project is not conventional history, or even conventional archiving, in any sense. It is not about creating narratives. I think it is about training oneself as a researcher to do what, in one’s time seems odd, challenging, difficult or even embarassing. What is today’s equivalence of (academic) dumpster diving?

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archiving the crisis

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A recent New York times article highlights Ushahidi a “Kenyan-born” open-source adaptation of wiki technolgy, which has been used in crisis situations across the globe. From the election-related violence in Kenya, to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and even to the snowstorms in Washington, DC, Ushahidi technology has come to the rescue. How does it work?

Anonymous mobile phone users witnessing an emergency situation, or incident of violence, can text messages to the local Ushahidi number. These messages are instantly relayed to a mapping station and triangulated on interactive maps, and then help may be be dispatched to the crisis area, or researchers may get a sense of where incidences of violence are occuring most frequently, or find out how far inland hurricane damage struck, etc.

As an archive instantaneously created by people in situations of distress, this is unmatched. The use of technologies like Ushahidi, challenges the paradigms of reporting and writing the history of places like Kenya, Haiti and Chile. Reports can now come from local people, on the ground, living these situations, rather than from the first wave of foreign reporters, and then years later the histories created from these reports by trained, published historians. This is the Long Here and the Big Now in action. This is the creation of an alternative sort of archive.

It is also interesting that this creative use of open-source technology, which challenges the paradigms of history-writing, and which is so in tune with the everyday ways in which people use technology today, comes from an African city, generally marginalized in discourse on technology, the city and crisis management.

cultural analytics as an archival practice

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Imagine this method applied to the vast amounts of visual information about the city, contained on people’s flickr sites, and mobile phones, or blogs and facebook pages. What might we be able to learn about affective experience of the city? This wall of images is a machine for feeling out the resonances between objects.