I work at Merck: a large pharmaceutical company. Here, in Boston, research is conducted to find treatments for cancer, asthma, arthritis, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis. The records that are kept, for the most part, preserve the characteristics of the company (financial records, receipt records, inventory, protocols, etc.). They are representative of the actions of a corporate entity, but not of the thousands of people that allow the entity to function.
When I first started collecting sticky-notes, I was interested in analyzing material that is easily disposed of in this age of digital storage. As I collected, however, I realized that the easy disposal of sticky notes makes them material that is outside the purview of Merck. These handwritten reminders, directions, notes, and other ephemera, then, could represent the actual individuals within a corporation. (I thought about emails, but they would have been impossible to collect [protection of confidential information]).
After collecting these sticky notes from the seventh floor (the floor I work on), I decided that I wanted to maintain the materiality of this medium because it is the materiality that allows for the individuality I was interested in. So I pinned sticky notes and category labels to a cork bulletin board.
Poor quality photo, weak camera phone, hopefully you at least get a sense of what it looks like.
Cataloguing was a challenge. I could not decide on a way to organize that would accurately and fairly depict the individuality of the handwriting and content of each sticky-note. So, I chose to make a dynamic archive. The categories and the organization of the sticky notes within the categories can be constantly changed. Just as people’s writing, memory devices, and syntax are not easily categorized, so must the sticky notes avoid permanent categorization. For the time being, I have placed the sticky notes into four categories: directions, reminders, notes, and miscellaneous. I used strips of dry erase board for the category labels. They can be erased and renamed at any time and more strips of dry erase board can be used to create more categories. The sticky-notes themselves can be moved with the push pin that fixes them.
What can be drawn from this? It depends upon how someone interacting with the archive chooses to organize. If the sticky notes are arranged by color or type, then the information could be used by a sticky note company to discover what kinds of sticky notes are most popular (imagine this on a wider scale). If the sticky notes are arranged by context of the writing, then there is insight into the ways in which people go about their day within a corporate entity—how they work, how they remind themselves, how they interact, how they express themselves, and how they connect to each other.
Practically, this is not an archive that would normally be saved. This archive reflects more of what we throw out than what we keep. It’s a neglected collection that includes aspects of the personal that cannot be seen in company records. It eliminates the impression of a singular autonomous company voice and produces many voices that are often silenced by a paycheck and subordinated by the hierarchy of a large company.
The archive can also act as an exploration into the merging of a dynamic and material archive. What are the consequences of an ephemeral archive that is categorized by the viewer? What is lost? What is gained? Is there a place for it?
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