[Reader-list] Properties of the Autonomous Archive, Public Event: January 7, Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai

[rohitrellan at aol.in]

CAMP, 0x2620 and Pad.ma invite you to:

PROPERTIES OF THE AUTONOMOUS ARCHIVE

A gathering of key internet platforms, archival initiatives and related 
infrastructures. You are invited to a full day of presentations and 
discussions on Friday, January 7, 2011.


Participants include: Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton from aaaaarg.org 
and The Public School, Peter Sunde Kolmissopi from flattr.com, Kenneth 
Goldsmith from ubu.com,  G. Sundar from the Rojah Muthiah Memorial 
Library, Amar Gurung from Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, media theorist 
Matthew Fuller, historian Rochelle Pinto,  Rustom Bharucha of the Arna 
Jharna Museum,  the Shared Footage Group, Sebastian Lütgert and Jan 
Gerber from 0x2620.org,  Lawrence Liang and Namita Malhotra from the 
Alternative Law Forum, Shaina Anand, Sanjay Bhangar and Ashok Sukumaran 
from CAMP, among other invited observers and participants.

"Show me your Properties!"
Friday January 7,
10:30 am to 8:00 pm.
Max Mueller Bhavan,
Kala Ghoda, Mumbai

Schedule:

10 15 onwards: TEA and COFFEE
10 45 Introduction. Ashok Sukumaran: autonomy and translation
11 00 Pad.ma: people annotate describe make add
11 45 Kenneth Goldsmith: If we had to ask permission, we wouldn't 
exist: a brief history of UbuWeb and the law
12 30 Sean Dockray: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG.ORG
 1 15 LUNCH BREAK
 2 45 Shared Footage Group: Its past and future
 3 30 G Sundar and Amar Gurung: Archiving in the vernacular, 
experiences from Tamil and Nepali
 4 15 Rochelle Pinto: The mundane state - historians in a state archive
 5 00 TEA BREAK
 5 30 Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi: Flattr, the need for alternative 
financial views
 6 15 Matthew Fuller: Two evil media stratagems: structure data & know 
your sorts
 7 00 Lawrence Liang and Sebastian Lütgert: Privacy and Scandal: Radia 
tapes and Wikileaks
 8 00 CLOSING DISCUSSION


Saturday, January 8
Workshop
(if you would like to attend write to info(AT)camputer.org)

This event is supported by the 50 years of the Goethe Institut in India 
program.



PROPERTIES OF THE AUTONOMOUS ARCHIVE

"Beyond the status of the archive as property lie the properties of the 
archive, which can destabilize and complicate received notions of 
rights."
- from Pad.ma, Ten Theses on the Archive, no. 9.

Not only rights, of course, but ALL received notions. The proverbial 
dust of the historical archive, its actual censorious or smiling 
archivists, the digital archive's protocols, video codec or "social 
network", all of these things crowd the archive, its imagination and 
reproduction.  In other words, the archive's real properties tend to 
destabilize ideal characteristics we may ascribe to it. And tend to 
take us into exciting side-streets of constraint and possibility, often 
beyond the motivations or will of authors, rights holders, and even 
archivists themselves.

Such a sensitivity towards properties (not restricted to physical 
qualities, and extending both the usual sense of property and its 
ethical sense as "proper", or propriety) can help express better the 
work of the archive in our times, acknowledge its role as "media", and 
suggest how its metaphorical and allusive capacities can be made 
stronger. That is, how the archive may be related to creative and 
artistic practices, which is one of our main intuitions with Pad.ma. 
Practices that, in general, are always entangled with the properties of 
the materials they work with. So that the focus on footage and not 
finished films in Pad.ma for instance, asks for a recalibration of 
ethics and politics around film. The discussion that we hope to have 
then, is about such qualities and powers of contemporary archives: 
including their stable or emergent properties, their performance and 
beauty, survival and capacity, and autonomy. 

Why autonomy? Or, autonomy from what? Well partly, from the old and 
still-valid categories: control by state and corporate interests, 
historiography of and by the powerful, and from "subjection" in 
general. But also, by declaring that autonomy is a basic, ontological 
property of the archive and its contents, atleast two (related) claims 
are being made:
1. Materials in the archive are not exhausted by annotations, "users", 
or any uses the material may be subjected to. The irreducibility of 
materials to narratives means that these are deep reservoirs to which 
we and others can return, and from which new ideas, experiences and 
effects can continually be drawn.
2. The autonomy of the archive inverts the logic of people as 
autonomous (as free consumers, choosers, users) and the archive as 
merely a resource, as something to be used. Such an archive then has a 
riskier, more open-ended relationship with the future.

"In declaring their autonomy, archives seek to produce norms beyond 
normativity, and ethical claims beyond the law." [1]

It is likely that this discussion will take us beyond the metaphor of 
the archive, to its roots and branches, its fruits and farms, and to 
the ideas and initiatives that now neighbour it, in a changed 
landscape. It is clear for example that "found" materials are no longer 
found, like objet trouve, as if lying unattended on the road.  Many of 
the things we care about or can work with, are to be found in private 
or protected territory. But also, increasingly, amidst vast oceans of 
digital "raw material", as the Wikileaks example shows us.  In such an 
alien (to ideas of culture, or social traditions) landscape, how can 
individuals or groups act, what analytical tools or creative 
infrastructures can be built, even at our smallest, scrappiest, and 
most experimental levels of "making history", as Marx put it in a 
related context, "in circumstances not of our own choosing"? [2]