Monday November 26, 2012, 10–5 pm
No Dust in the Digital Archive?
Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston MA 02115
Wednesday, November 28, 2012, 5–8pm
The Critical Archive: Materials, Models and Methods
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House, 48 Professors Row, Medford, MA 02155
nodustsmfa.wordpress.com
ase.tufts.edu
Monday November 26, 2012, 10–5 pm
No Dust in the Digital Archive?
Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston MA 02115
Over the past few decades, the traditional space of the archive—physical and dusty—has sparked alternative knowledge and possibilities to contest history in the hands of visual artists and cultural activists. The archive has been mined and interrogated as actively for what it misses and hides as for what it displays and protects. More recently, following a desire for democratization, supported by a wide and effective dissemination of information and technologies to upload and store data, the static authority of the archive has been redirected to a participatory and mutable status. The production and use of contemporary digital archives problematizes notions of copyright, accessibility and permanency, offering a new form to connect with our past.
Speakers
Alloy Orchestra, Man With The Movie Camera
Jessica Borusky, Feminist Inquiry, Artistic Practice, and the Archive
Bonnie Donohue, Killing Mapepe: Sex and Death in Cold War Puerto Rico
Marianne Hirsch, Connective Memories, Digital Archives
Mike Mandel, They Came to Baghdad
Susan Meiselas, Aka Kurdistan
Chantal Zakari, They Came to Baghdad
Introductory remarks will be given by Carla Herrera-Prats, Graduate Program Director of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Thanks to support from Jim Dow (Critical studies and Photography faculty), Jack Nyland (MFA ’13) and Sarah Pollman (MFA ’13).
Learn more about the speakers at nodustsmfa.wordpress.com.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012, 5–8pm
The Critical Archive: Materials, Models and Methods
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House, 48 Professors Row, Medford, MA 02155
This colloquium will be a multidisciplinary exploration of the function, definition, role of the ‘archive’ as a dispositif or apparatus through which individual and collective history, memory, and identity are mediated in the 20th and 21st centuries. If one of the defining characteristics of the traditional archive is its existence as a physical repository of knowledge, many other models and methods have reinvented the system through which verbal, visual, and aural materials are conceptualized, categorized and catalogued. This active questioning of what constitutes the archive—and how the archive constitutes ‘the commons’—has been accompanied by a recognition of its role as an ‘authority’ that governs relations of power. This event asks whether we can define what a ‘critical archive’ might be by examining practices from different disciplines, cultural contexts, and time periods.
Speakers
Jeffrey Schnapp, What is an Archive?
Richard J. Golsan, Beyond History, Beyond Memory? The Novel as Archive in the New Century
Eric Rosenberg, Trauma’s Archive: Photography, Amnesia and the Failure to Document
Tina Wasserman, Unhinged Time in the Digital Archive
Gediminas Urbonas, Memory Hack: Taking Archives into One’s Own Hands
The proceedings will be introduced and moderated by Noit Banai, Lecturer, Modern and Contemporary Art, Visual and Critical Studies Department, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Generously sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts and the Department of Visual and Critical Studies, Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
For more information about the speakers and schedule, click here.
Admission to both events is free and open to the public. For the November 26 event, attendees must obtain free tickets from a kiosk at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to gain admittance.
