Archive Reindex Archive

Schedules:
In-person at Eastern Bloc (Montreal) [May 3rd. 4-5:15 PM (EST)]
Online on ZOOM (TBP) [May 4th. 2-3:15 PM (EST)]

Workshop requires registration by 26th April (Friday).
Limited capacity.
via here: https://www.jotform.com/form/240935501006244

Archive Reindex Archive (ARA) is a web-based platform that presents a collection of photographic archives from the National Geographic Magazine issues dating from 1945 to 1955, where visitors can leave annotations of “what they see.” ARA is also a platform for growing collections of texts through which authors, poets, and writers respond to layers of the latent concepts and emotions that emerged from, stuck to, and imbued with the artists throughout the entire creation.

The images are masked with a fungus-like layer that represents how a machine sees them, with the aim to reassemble the perception of internalized movements of general viewers’ eyes upon encountering the images for the first time. ARA unearths archived remnants of the aftermath of WWII—“expeditious” human movements of global colonization and imperialization and the discrepancies between raw materials, human resources and capital. It collects contemporary annotations that correct, question, and confront the uncomfortable gazes and the given semiotic relationships in the archive to bring a collective means of slow, gentle recuperation to those subject to alterity.

Archive Reindex Archive was conceived by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang within the continuous scope of Kang’s 2022 participatory text-based installation work, Proposition 2: Index. Since then, ARA has been a full collaboration between Ivetta and Kii through which Ivetta’s interests in linguistics, poetics, and ethnographic indexicality studies and Kii’s interests in the critical use of computation and embodied semantics converge and intersect one another.

ARA is presented through interactive, participatory, and performative workshops, entitled Memex Room. Memex Room is a workshop where workshop attendees’ annotations and performative multi-lingual reading/spoken words crash, merge, and congregate within/around the interactive website. Attendees are invited to become active annotators who move through the translatability and untranslatability of the performative reading and undulating soundscapes collected from different regions of the world.

The web is currently only accessible to workshop attendees of the Memex Room. Memex Room is a workshop in which your annotations and performative multi-lingual reading/spoken words crash, merge, and congregate within/around the interactive website. The performative spoken & sonic component is made from a text PREDATOR by Günen. By registering, you are signing up to become active annotators.

Credits:

Created by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang & Kii Kang
Conceived by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Web Design and Development by Kii Kang
PREDATOR by Günen
Second commissioned text (soon) by Joy Xiang
Project Assistant by Kyeonglin Park
Voice & spoken words
Portuguese by Gabriel Sanceau Fuks
Italian by Dalia Maini
French by Eve Tagny & Matthew Wolkow
Castellano and Mapuzugun by Günen
English by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang

Sound created by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Sonic excerpts from Ivetta’s Anterior Skin (2019), composed by ijo & Kii Kang
Special thanks to Siri Lee Lindskrog & Minhwan Kim

Ivetta Sunyoung Kang acknowledges that the project is partially funded by the Canada Council for the Arts