"Archiving the Commons" - afterword in Özge Çelikaslan's book: Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anticipating an Archival Commons
2005-09-03 Conference paper Vital Signs - creative practice and new media now. Melbourne
An Archival Commons is a framework for a globally distributed digital repository for self-archiving and annotation. This pervasive but socially connected space is organised into a virtual topography by the use of tools that are geospatially and temporally aware. Preconditions for an Archival Commons are developing rapidly - but are yet to converge. An Archival Commons will transform our understanding of the archive from being an official space for institutionally controlled recollection (necrotic in character), to being a non-official space for individual aspiration and intent. The tensions and anxieties in this transformation arise from the potential for oppositions between public access to private actions, authoritarian rigidity over flexible spontaneity, and between malevolent surveillance and benevolent nurture. The imaginative and propositional practice of the arts suggest that this sector is better positioned than the technology or engineering sectors to explore the kinds of principles and mutual obligations that would allow for digital expressions of cultural values to flourish in a socially connected space.
2021
The workshop program (2021-2022) is designed for The Whole Life Academy program of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. The current situation of global social and political unrest is strongly connected to archival practices. In recording, storing and sharing lived experience, data and knowledge, the present is captured within a constellation of complex historical and contemporary social choreographies and sensual protocols. The Whole Life Academy Berlin rehearses collaborative forms of knowledge production in archives, taking up urgent questions on decolonizing archives and objects and unfolding marginalized narrations. What strategies of commoning, collectivity and solidarity can archives offer in the face of health, economic, natural and political crises? How can local narratives, archival objects and biographies contained within archives be made legible today? How do current human and non-human relations shape the ways in which archives are built and function? Embedded in an international long-term research process, the Academy will develop a nomadic curriculum in ten online workshops from October 2021 to February 2022.
(An/)archival commons: Digital media and contemporary social movements
Journal of Alternative & Community Media, 2020
Taking as its point of departure a dialectical relation between capitalist enclosure of the commons and forces trying to prevent the commons from being enclosed, the archive can be deployed as a useful theoretical concept to identify the key institution at the heart of both commodifying and communing processes. The article first discusses existing literature on primitive accumulation and commons, then moves on to elaborate on the archive and concludes with an overview of contemporary contentious online practices enacted by communities, users and social movements.
Envisioning the Archival Commons
The American Archivist, 2009
This article proposes an archival commons to support networked documentation efforts. It envisions a peer-based framework for the assembly, arrangement, and representation of related resources within the context and systems of archives, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations. The commons will expand involvement of users, leverage existing discovery tools, and reduce the cost of coordination associated with the documentation strategy. Using Giddens's theory of structuration and the roles of human agency and social structure, the authors propose basic functionalities to be provided by an archival commons. These functionalities would broaden the ability to form social memory in a commons-based environment supported by the economic idea of archival materials as nonrival goods. I n t r o d u c t i o n An archival commons would be a space where cultural professionals, researchers, and interested members of the general public could contribute narrative and links among objects of interest held by archives, libraries, and/or museums and systematically reflect those activities within the primary repository itself. Archival arrangement and description (reflected primarily via the finding aid) would be reoriented from a hierarchy focused on the records to a networkoriented structure. Public domain or creative commons rights could govern the commons space; 1 it should offer the ability to generate and associate links between objects using accepted Web standards, to aggregate or (re)arrange disparate cultural objects together into discrete forms regardless of genre or
Cultural Life Reconfigured: From the Ancestral to the Digital Commons and Beyond
2020
Transitioning to the digital universe The advent of the internet was undoubtedly the milestone of the information era, triggering a chain reaction and setting the stage for a series of revolutions in communication, production and the creative fields of culture, which characterise the period we live in. By its very nature and its operational structure of a loose, highly complex non-hierarchical network, as well as its decentralized management, the internet possesses attributes which justify its classification as a man-made common resource on a planetary scale. Virtually unlimited access to knowledge, information, opportunities for collaboration, communication, sharing, and distributed production, have all heralded the era of a digital commonwealth and of a networked public sphere (Benkler 2007). The fact that whatever can be produced can just as easily be multiplied, distributed and shared, generated a climate of accessibility and openness. Consequently, this has led to an unprecedented social production, to a transformation of processes of collaboration and exchange, and to a movement of theorists and practitioners advocating the management of information as a digital
Which "Aesthetics of the Commons"?
Aesthetics of the Commons, 2021
Proceeding from the concept of the commons, this contribution discusses current developments of digital activism within the framework of the arts from the perspective of aesthetic theory. It is an attempt to do justice to the observation that artists situate specific social projects in the context of artistic institutions while, at the same time, they intentionally go beyond the horizons of these institutions with their social concerns and actions. In doing so, they are less concerned with their freedom or with the freedom of art than they are with the concrete practice of "commoning," in which they directly or indirectly work on the production, organization, maintenance, and accessibility of "common-pool resources."1 If these practices are described as aesthetic practices, this raises the question of what, exactly, is meant by the concept of the aesthetic. In what follows, two different understandings of the aesthetic in philosophy will be compared and assessed. After providing a critical representation of the dispositif of unlimited aesthetic freedom, I will attempt to ascertain, from the perspective of aesthetic theory, the consequences of the fact that the artistic practice of commoning can be understood as a form of agency. This agency involves giving, in one's own way, definition to something that is unavailable and turning it into something to which people can connect (paradoxically despite its general unavailability). Digital commons are ambivalent. On one hand, they are structured in a way that is entirely real, rule-based, and institutional; on the other hand, they embody utopia. Although this ambivalence is experienced both by the initiators of the archives discussed here as well as by their users, the self-empowerment of such projects-and this is my thesis-lies in their ability to organize themselves specifically and in detail while not dwelling on the representation of ambivalence as a value of its own.
Contestation and Sustainability of the Digital Commons
This paper reflects on the principal outcomes of the Economies of the Commons conference series that were organised three times in Amsterdam in 2008, 2010, and 2012. The series focused on the question how sustainable models could be identified for creating and maintaining public online rich media culture and knowledge resources. The series was unique in working with both very large archiving and memory institutions as well as small scale and virtually non-funded initiatives. Across these different scales sustainability issues are obviously very different, but still share certain vexing questions. The conferences also asked what a commons based approach, drawing on the theory and praxis of shared commons resources could contribute to the question of economic sustainability. In exploring these questions the aim was to raise the economic competence of public and cultural sector institutions and initiatives to strengthen their ability to fulfil their public roles.
Archives in a wider world: the culture and politics of archives
Archivaria, 2001
Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives * SARAH TYACKE RÉSUMÉ L'auteure propose ici une réflexion sur quelques questions que soulèvent la culture, la critique littéraire, l'histoire et le post-modernisme pour la gestion des documents, les archives et les archivistes, d'un point de vue britannique. Cet essai se fonde sur les changements observés, au cours des dix dernières années, dans la place des archives telle que perçue dans différents pays. L'auteure soutient que les archivistes ont le rôle majeur de résoudre les tensions sociales contemporaines concernant ce qu'il faut conserver et détruire et ce qu'il convient d'ouvrir ou de restreindre, que ce soit pour le présent ou, plus important encore, pour les générations futures. Les archivistes doivent expliquer de façon claire les fondements de leurs décisions et comprendre les biais inhérents qui les sous-tendent. ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical, and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. * This is a revised version of an unrefereed article for a Festchrift. I am indebted to discussions I have had with Michael Moss, Elizabeth Hallam-Smith, and Ian Willison. In particular, they have improved my own slender knowledge of the battleground between postmodernists (or at least some) and other historians (or at least some) and drawn my attention to the work of Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2d ed. (London, 1997).