#hemisphericinstitute

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Save As - Andrea

“Save As” by Diana Taylor:

“While it may be true that “data never dies” it is also true that it lives as bits of information that we might not be able to access” –– I never knew that this was true and I’m kind of in shock. We are sometimes excited by the idea that nothing online dies and we are sometimes scared by this idea but the truth of it is that it must be efficiently recorded in order for it to stay there forever.

“As Wendy Chun notes: online, in order to use, one has to agree to be used” ––The internet “uses” us. It is almost scary how when I go on a website or social media platform, they know what I have searched and are using those websites as the advertisements on the page. “They” want to get more out of us— but who is the they? Who or what is the person or thing that is controlling that for us?

“The Cobweb: Can the Internet be Archived?” Jill Lapore, New Yorker, Jan. 26, 2015:

•   "A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” –– We are so used to reserching things online and to have a link as a source is so common. It is crazy to me that I never thought about how that “evidence” or source could just disappear and you could find yourself with no back-up later on.

•   “The address of the Internet Archive is archive.org, but another way to visit is to take a plane to San Francisco” –– I think it is so cool that what we think of as the internet (just digital, things flying through the air or something) is really a PHYSICAL thing. There is a physical place where all of the information is stored.

“Images on the Internet: How digital archives have changed the way the world looks “ - Slate:

“Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented” –– I like this idea that this is why we have become so “obsessed” with images. At first we just wanted to show what something looked like but an image could technically last forever, therefore outlasting what the image is of. Now we want everything to last forever so we take a picture to hold onto it.

[citationpractices]

The Pose as Interventionist Gesture: Erica Lord and Decolonizing the Proper Subject of Memory

( Erica Lorde. Untitled (tattooed arms), 2007. Digital photograph, 14" x 40". Property of the artist. Obtained from http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/daniher)

My post this week features an incredibly rich analysis by Colleen Kim Danihier of the photographs and installations of mixed-race Native Alaskan artist Erica Lord. She suggests that Lord’s poses can be taken as decolonial gesture because “in the act of posing, Lord intervenes in a visual and historical archive that positions both Native and mixed race subjects—especially women—as particularly vulnerable subjects to the ongoing Western imperial project of assimilationist inclusion. Lord’s photographic poses enact a literal seizure of time that resists both the presumed past-ness of the Native American and the presumed futurity of the racially-ambiguous, mixed race woman. In so doing, she revises the temporal politics of both, critically calling into question “the proper” subject of memory.”

While reading carefully through this article (because this is a piece that requires very care filled reading), I was drawn to Danihier’s comment that Lord’s artwork incites viewers to “remember otherwise.”  What might it mean to engage in the work of “remembering otherwise” in our citation practices? Or to theorize while attenuating to the memories that our bodies carry with them from place to place?

--Fi

[spookycouch]