On the Gesture of Archiving

The sight of empty airports and a great unknown during Covid-19 was an experience that confronted my own present desire to archive and structure the ephemeral. The paradox of sharing this experience of physical isolation in the winter of 2020-21 with a community of fellow students from many different parts of the world at HfK Bremen pushed me to seek ways to capture this collective experience of an eerie new world through a personal perspective of language and voice.

With the idea to formulate a form of archive of voices based on this hyperobject, around November 2020 I created a Telegram group where people could share audio fragments of words/expressions that could reflect their own personal experience during the lockdown.

The participants of this group was mostly the people I have met in the first two months of online studies at HfK, and for me it was interesting to build my archive based on the affection I slowly built towards these people.Between November 2020 and January 2021 more than 200 voice audios fragments were collected in X number of language by Y participants.

Based on this collection of audios, an API (Application Programming Interface) was published to make it possible for the audios and data associated with them, to be able to be downloaded from any point of the internet. Therefore, the collection of audio messages that were confined inside telegram's platform became part of a public, retrievable archive of voices. In this particular context, one can understand this archiving gesture as an re-appropriation of data, which was at first confined to "telegram's archive" together with its interface and rules, to an alternative archive of direct access.

We are archivists, since we have to be. We don't have choice. 

This decision is already made, or determined by the contemporary technological condition.
 

YUK HUI, The Archivist Manifesto

The act of archiving has become an urgent social political matter. To formulate parallel modes of preserving, indexing, navigating digital memory will shape our present, our future and our past.

Based on this initial concern raised by Yuk Hui, this text component to reflect on my own artistical practice of archiving voices, understanding archives as living bodies, and voices as living archives.

In contemporary society we have become in fact interfaces of archives. Our smallest gestures are in the constant process of recording, indexation and analysis. These traces - the digital memory of our existence, shift around on metal-oxide semiconductors or magnetic cores at data centers unevenly spread across the globe. Opaque archives, with different levels of navigability and transparency that nonetheless serve specific agendas and discourses of very various tech conglomerates to which we have no agency to.

Archives are the main tools through which a future observer can understand a particular point in time, they are "exteriorized memory in its organized form" [Yuk Hui], reservoirs of discourses that make possible an archaeology of knowledge, it is the force by which the present will be understood as the past, and therefore how the future will understand itself based on that understanding of its past.

The sight of empty airports and a great unknown during Covid-19 was an experience that stimulated this present desire to meticulously archive and structure the ephemeral. The paradox of sharing this experience of physical isolation in the winter of 2020-21 with a community of fellow students at HfK Bremen pushed me to seek ways to capture this collective experience of an eerie new world.

With the idea to formulate a form of archive of voices based on this phenomenon collective, around November 2020 I created a Telegram group where people could share audio fragments of words/expressions that could reflect their own personal experience during the lockdown. 

The participants of this group was mostly the people I have met in the first two months of online studies at HfK, and for me it was interesting to build my archive based on the affection I slowly built towards these people. Between November 2020 and January 2021 more than 200 voice audios fragments were collected in X number of language by Y participants.

What interested me is the generated contrast that the voices and their medium caused in the public's perception: names of distant neighborhoods, some of them encompassing indigenous words, others reflecting the city's colonial past, being echoed in chants that I put in the historical sumptuous carriage. This small generated experience has brought me to perceive voices as living memory - the manner in which language flows in present time, present space.

The idea of archiving voices interested me for quite some time, I'm not sure how it started, or why this particular interest. I would say, the first conscious appearance happened in 2017 for an installation project called "etinerários etimológicos”. There I collected and recorded the chanting of neighborhood names from the ilegal vans that are seen across the suburbs of Rio, and displayed these same voices from inside an aristocratic chariot in the National Museum.

With The Pandemic Archive of Voices as a platform, an interactive installation was developed together with Chi Him Chik: a spatial audio-visual experience where visitors revolved around different perspectives of language and affections expressed by each of these fragmentary memories and experiences.  

The title “the living body is the center of all politics” is taken from the 2020 text “Learning from the virus” by Paul Preciado, which seeks to understand the phenomenon of the pandemic as essentially a bodily event. The installation circular design seeks to reflect this very notion, where floating words and voices of absent bodies would only appear when the visitor’s present body and voice would also be present.

Each voice carries the smallest traces of intent, pronunciation and intonation which can be understood as a living record of generations after generations of encounters, affections and conflicts that are being manifested through a body in the present time, present space.

The gesture of archiving such a phenomenon, is not only to capture fragments of experience and memory of each individual body in the present time, but also the collective body of human existence (experience) which flows through them.

WE ARE ARCHIVISTS, SINCE WE HAVE TO BE. WE DON'T HAVE CHOICE. 

THIS DECISION IS ALREADY MADE, OR DETERMINED BY THE CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGICAL CONDITION.
 

YUK HUI, The Archivist Manifesto

Archives are the main tools through which a future observer can understand a particular point in time, they are "exteriorized memory in its organized form" (Yuk Hui), reservoirs of discourses that make possible an archaeology of knowledge, it is the force by which the present will be understood as the past, and therefore how the future will understand itself based on that understanding of its past.

In contemporary society we have become in fact interfaces of archives. Our smallest gestures are in the constant process of recording, indexation and analysis. These traces - the digital memory of our existence, shift around on metal-oxide semiconductors or magnetic cores at data centers unevenly spread across the globe. Opaque archives, with different levels of navigability and transparency that nonetheless serve specific agendas and discourses of very various tech conglomerates to which we have no agency to.

The act of archiving has become an urgent social political matter. To formulate alternate modes of preserving, indexing and navigating digital memory will shape our present, our future and our past.

Based on this initial concern raised by Yuk Hui, this component reflects on my own artistic practice of archiving voices, which was explored through two standpoints, understanding archives as living bodies, and voices as living archives.

References

• HUI, Yui. Archivist Manifesto. May 2013. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/archivist-manifesto
• PRECIADO, Paul. THE LOSERS CONSPIRACY - Paul B. Preciado on life after COVID-19. March 

Links

• Pandemic archive of Voices Open Source API
• Installation Website.
• Project Documentation.