“[A]s an artist, you’re only as good as your archive.”

 — Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid)

This is a course on the art of archives—physical and digital, personal and public, in theory and in practice. Rather than taking up archives as a source materials for scholarly inquiry, in this class, we will take up the archive itself as an object of critical analysis and a site of aesthetic invention and encounter.

The first section of the course will focus on the making of archives, as a contested cultural, political, and rhetorical act. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of archival practice—from philosophy, historiography, media studies, etc.—we will consider questions such as: What is an archive? Why do we archive? How are archives constructed? And toward what end? Students will be challenged to look critically and rhetorically at a range of archival collections and to interrogate the values and assumptions that govern our impulse to collect and curate, to order and preserve.

In the second section of the course, we will turn to consider the aesthetic possibilities of making with archives, exploring a range of contemporary literary, artistic, and popular works that use archival materials—text, image, sound, and film—as materials for the production of new, imaginative texts. Confronting questions of method, materiality, and ethics through hands-on compositional practice, students will be invited to design and produce their own archival interventions in creative multimedia forms.

This is a hybrid seminar/studio course, which welcomes students from all subfields and backgrounds. No previous experience with digital media production is expected or required.