The Figure of the Archive: Research Seminar #4

This series considers the figure of the archive as it functions in a range of current artistic research projects and in other disciplines. We are especially interested in the different political readings of this figure within different research undertakings. We are concerned both with the concrete and literal operations of archiving and with the metaphorical extensions and figural potencies of the image of the archive. We are interested in the archive not only as a matter of technique but also as a key dimension of the organisational imaginary. A centrally recurrent epistemic trope, indeed something both contagious and symptomatic, does this figure perhaps also disable us from seeing what is best not apprehended through the figure of the archive? What might the well worn critique of the archive obscure with its cliched formulae of power, inscription and forgetting? Not every collection of material and inscription is well-served by a too hastey and all too familiar invocation of “the” archive! 
 
For this fourth session in the series, we are delighted to be joined by our colleague Monica-Lita Storss from Northeastern University, a prestigious 2026 Women@MIT Fellow who is also a poet, theorist, and researcher working across extended reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and experimental publishing. Storss contribution will be an  interactive, hands-on session that introduces her relational approaches for working with, and building archives, Storss will look at how to work with (or against - à la Hartman) archives, and explore building and stewarding your own archives–including archiving the impossible and unarchivable, as well as working with human and non-human sensemaking. 

We are also delighted to welcome back Jason E. Bowman, an artist, researcher and educator based in HDK-Valand leading numerous CAPIm-associated initiatives, who will present on the archival dimensions of the exceptional research exhibition In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes (Raven Row, London, 2017.) In the development of this project Bowman constructed a registry of some 4000+ items for the informal accumulation of material and ephemera attached to this extraordinary experimental performance practice at its height in the decade spanning 1971-1981. 

Relational Method Poetics in the Archive: Archiving the Impossible in the Chthulucene 
Monica Storss 

This sesssion introduces Relational approaches to working with and building archives. Archives are not neutral spaces, but human-shaped, imperfect, flawed compendiums. Their silences, stores, omissions, location in space-time, forms of access, stewards, and interfaces are as important as what they contain. Increasingly, digital tools and nonhuman sensemaking are primary modes of archival encounter. While conventional archival logics often treat records as objects to be captured, classified, and filed, Relational methods recognize the archive as an ecosystem of relationships among things, objects, subjects, archivists, technologies, times, places, and researchers. This session asks participants to reframe their own relationship to the archive, while reconsidering encounter, interpretation, and relation through human and nonhuman forms of sensemaking. 

This interactive, hands-on session will introduce Monica Storss’s Relational approaches to working with and building archives. Intersticed with hands-on encounter and participatory exercises, the session will explore how to work with and against archives, while also considering how we might build and steward our own archives otherwise, including archives of the impossible, the partial, and the unarchivable. Drawing upon Storss’s work with The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine, Unsettling Indigenous Writing in New England, The Boston Globe Photo Morgue, and The Early Caribbean Digital Archive, the session’s case studies will attend to how augmented reality, AI-assisted cataloguing, OCR, digital tools, nonhuman sensemaking, erasure, metadata, spatial publishing, and community-based stewardship might surface the wonders, violences, and generative possibilities of the archive.

In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes. 
Jason E. Bowman 

Via an illustrated presentation Jason E. Bowman will narrate the processes of an attempt to articulate, in exhibitionary form, the relations between the modus operandi and art works of the disbanded, cross-artform artists-group The Theatre of Mistakes (1974-81). From hunting for, collecting, registering and indexing over 4000 artefacts - including missives, diagrams, manifestos, records of meetings, photographs, marketing material, artworks and instructional manuals – Bowman sought to produce criteria by which to emphasise how exhibitionary form may articulate The Theatre of Mistake’s own zeal for methodological replicability whilst taking account of the ambiguities of members’ differing memories and perspectives on the group’s authorship. 

As an archival survey exhibition, In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes  enmeshed archived material with the reconstruction of live works. The exhibition navigated a dominant notion of performance art as being ideologically preoccupied with time-bound, evaporative immediacy, a concurrent disavowal of objecthood and materiality, and resistance to documentation. Whilst some of the exhibited records were ephemeral, meaning that they marked evanescent moments in a history of The Theatre of Mistakes, others were more provocative in terms of an impulse for potential longevity. In Case There’s a Reason considered the operational and administrative dynamics of the company amidst the influences of its fluctuating membership and associates over a seven-year trajectory (1974–81). A conventional, singular, chrononormative chronicle was evaded, and a counter-narrative evinced instead through spatio-temporal methods of exhibition-organising.  

Further info: https://ravenrow.org/exhibitions/in-case-theres-a-reason-the-theatre-of-mistakes 

Storss is a poet-theorist, researcher, and cultural technologist working at the intersection of the arts and emerging technologies. Her practice explores how augmented reality, artificial intelligence, spatial publishing, and digital humanities methods can open new forms of poetic encounter, archival stewardship, and public meaning-making. She is the creator of The Augmented Reality Poetry Machine, a participatory spatial publishing project with an installation on Earth’s Moon, and The Oracles, an AI language model trained on her own writing corpus. 

Storss is currently the Women@MIT Fellow, where her work brings together archives, augmented reality, and experimental publishing to work against the erasure of women’s work in emergent media. She has worked with archival and digital humanities contexts involving Indigenous writing, photojournalism, machine learning, OCR, and cultural memory. Her archival practice is influenced by Saidiya Hartman and Brewster Kahle. She is also the founder of Digital Poetics Press, the world’s first XR-native literary small press; Scholar-in-Residence at Northeastern University’s Digital Integration Teaching Initiative; and teaches in Northeastern’s Arts Administration and Cultural Entrepreneurship master’s degree program. Her research appears in outlets including The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and she serves as a reviewer for ACM’s Creativity and Cognition and a Guest Editor for Digital Humanities Now. She is a PhD student at Northeastern University.  

E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice. His art works address the coercion of publics via participative methods. He is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at the HDK-Valand Academy. He is currently working on an edited volume that interrogates the intercessions between curating and the expanded practices of self-organisation. For more see his full profile here.

This event is part of a larger series and ongoing research strand on The Figure of the Archive.