VISU-member Brenda Bikoko participates in the international PhD Workshop "The Ways of Archiving. Practices, Conditions and Discourses around the Study of Arts and Culture" on 12 September, 2022 .
Abstract
Many institutions have digitised their archives often in an attempt to open up to the public. In 2019, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum offered an artist residency to Antje Van Wichelen, and in collaboration with Michael Murtaugh and Nicholas Malevé, The Recognition Machine was created. The machine is a website, a photo booth, an archive and a database that also works with a QR code. It categorises in an unconventional way. After taking a visitor's self-portrait, an algorithm searches the database for an emotional match. The database consists of reappropriated archival photographs from the nineteenth-century colonial era. The self-portraits are subcategorised according to their emotional match. In this way, the database gains data and becomes more diverse. The latter can be seen as an act of desegregation. Visitors are also invited to search for the original digital photograph. In some cases the archive is online, in others you have to make a request by email. The Recognition Machine forces archival institutions to rethink their position. Just digitising is not enough. How can they reach out to the public? How can they avoid revictimising the oppressed? How do they become institutions with multiple histories?
About the event
This event opens a space for PhD training around the problem of archives, sources and fieldwork in the discipline of History, with a special focus on the study of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.
The event is divided into several theoretical and practical sessions, as well as a series of visits to archives and documentation centers in Spain and France. The aim of this formative space is to offer a critical and transversal approach to intrinsic and current issues related to the archival device and its associated practices. Ultimately, the originality of this Research Workshop lies in its dialogical vocation as it will bring together PhD students with national and international experts, generating a space for exchange that will enrich their ongoing research.
Place