Archive Agencies. Tracing the Implied Producers of Media Art Collections

Abstract

The relation between archives and history is, at best, a precarious one. It is often assumed that everything we need to remember or know is to be found in archives. And the way archives have been and are being used to write histories is based on hard selections that some will claim are necessary (because ‘not everything is worth remembering’). But archives are far from perfect. To find sound art or media art in archives is rare, if not impossible; Or, one could claim that to find most kind of artistic information or material from unpleasant or inconvenient realities in 3rd world countries is all but impossible; from my own Scandinavian background, it is clear that what can be found in archives is mostly from practitioners going to (or copying those that went to) New York in the 60s and 70s – but there is a whole other stage of production in Scandinavia which did not enter the archives at all. It is time to recognize the importance of those unarchived collections of media art and to make, what Flusser called a ‘deontological’ process of un-constructing the paradigm of all-encompassing archives (and the histories written on top of them based on narrow selections). My talk will trace what I call the implied producers of media art collections: Those agencies, human or non-human, artistic or non-artistic, that retrace the unarchived. And ask: what methods for writing histories are needed here?