Experiments and Archives in the Expanded Field

All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist explores the documentation of the creative process. From their different viewpoints, fifteen leading artists, archivists and art historians reflect on the ways that artists and archivists deal with all this stuff , and how artists manage and relate to their own archives. This is a timely and important book, based on work initiated by the Art Archives Committee of ARLIS, the Art Libraries Society of the UK and Ireland. The book addresses issues from the perspectives of the archivist as well as those of the artist. At a time when more members of the library profession are being asked to manage artists archives, it is important to address the challenges associated with the special nature of this material. All This Stuff: Archiving the Artist provides artists and researchers valuable insights into the archival process, addressing questions such as what material should artists be keeping? What will happen to their material after it has been accepted by an archive? It also explores how an archivist or researcher can approach an artist s archive in a non-traditional way. The experiences described by the different contributors offer a practical understanding of the challenges facing researchers working with artists archives, and will help to raise awareness among artists of the longer-term value of their archival material, and the unpredictable ways in which it may be recontextualised, explored and interpreted in the future.

Fieldworks from the Museum of the Void: Experiments in the Event of an Archive

This exhibition was a research presentation of works made at Center for Land Use Interpretation [CLUI]base in Wendover, Utah, USA between 2008-2010. The project was commissioned by the Centre For Land Interpretation in USA and funded by The Henry Moore Foundation in the UK. Documentation of research conducted in the field as made available as video and installation. An experimental discourse on the preservation of land art was put with GPS drawings and research information displayed as maps and documents. In examining physical sites in Utah, USA, the project connected to contemporary discourse centred on archives in relation to land art and land use. Using experimental processes conceived in relation to key concepts such as event structures and entropy, conceptual frameworks developed by Robert Smithson (USA) and John Latham (UK), the 'death drive' of the archive was examined in the context of a cultural impulse to preserve iconic works. The work took items from Lathams archive and placed them at the canonical 'Spiral Jetty', Smithson land art work at Rozel Point north of Salt Lake City. This became a focus for the project that also highlighted the role of the Getty Foundation in documenting major public artworks and CLUI in creating an American Land Museum. Work was created in the field at extreme remote locations using GPS technologies and visual tools were developed to articulate the concepts of the artists discussed, to engage the exhibition audience in ideas of transformation and entropy in art. Audiences were encouraged to sign a petition to be used in future preservation of spiral jetty currently facing development challenges.

Securing the Anthropocene? International Policy Experiments in Digital Hacktivism: A Case Study of Jakarta

This article analyses security discourses that are beginning to self-consciously take on board the shift towards the Anthropocene. Firstly, it sets out the developing episteme of the Anthropocene, highlighting the limits of instrumentalist cause-and-effect approaches to security, increasingly becoming displaced by discursive framings of securing as a process, generated through new forms of mediation and agency, capable of grasping inter-relations in a fluid context. This approach is the methodology of hacking: creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency. It elaborates on hacking as a set of experimental practices and imaginaries of securing the Anthropocene, using as a case study the field of digital policy activism with the focus on community empowerment through social-technical assemblages being developed and applied in ‘the City of the Anthropocene’: Jakarta, Indonesia. The article concludes that policy interventions today cannot readily be grasped in modernist frameworks of ‘problem solving’ but should be seen more in terms of evolving and adaptive ‘life hacks’.