Memex Room: Reindexing the Archive

In this multidimensional performance workshop, participants are invited to annotate photographs of subjects in an archive, responding to the prompt “What do you see?” through the web-based platform Archive Reindex Archive (ARA) (2022–2024). ARA is only accessible to participants of Memex Room, a workshop series where annotations are collected in real time. By becoming active annotators, participants crash, merge, and congregate language within/around images. This is the second iteration of Memex Room. Past participants can also annotate from afar during the course of the performance workshop.

Created by the artists, ARA presents photographs from post-WWII (1945–1955) issues of National Geographic Magazine on an interactive world map. Images are further obscured by dark fungus-like layers—these form inversed saliency maps of machine vision, which deliberately omit “common objects” on which the AI is trained. ARA unearths archived remnants of the aftermath of WWII—“expeditious” human movements of colonization and imperialization, as well as the global disparities between raw materials, human resources, and capital.

These contemporary annotations strive to 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. The performance workshop will be accompanied by a live prosodic sonic performance comprising “artificial” voices who utter a hypo-text assembled from the archive and collected annotations.

Note:

• Participants are required to bring their own laptop.
• A second option for the Memex Room (Studio Edition) will be hosted by the artists on November 17 and is also available for registration via the Registration Button (please choose one date).

Additional credits:
Created by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Kii Kang
Conceived by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Web Design and Development by Kii Kang
PREDATOR by Günen
Project Assistant by Kyeonglin Park
Live sound performance by Kii Kang
Hypo-text by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Günen
Special thanks to Siri Lee Lindskrog and Minhwan Kim

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This series of artist-led workshops consider how expressions of voice operate “off the page” to explore the world-shaping power of narrative, which continues to be urgent amidst ongoing colonial violences. Participants will experiment with the influence of language, media, and art on how stories and knowledge are acted upon, shaped, and recorded. Through a lens of embodied and collective critical practices, these workshops ask: How do we seek the difficult questions? How do we recuperate images from the gazes of their uncomfortable archives? How can visual print media and protest intervene in everyday life, through web-like ways? How does your voice influence your surroundings?

This program is co-produced in partnership with C Magazine. The project has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Artists. The artists would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.