Consider Susan Howe’s work in That This and Spontaneous Particulars and take it somewhere new—in relation to this week’s topic and/or any of the other texts or works we’ve considered this semester.
Consider Susan Howe’s work in That This and Spontaneous Particulars and take it somewhere new—in relation to this week’s topic and/or any of the other texts or works we’ve considered this semester.
After reading Charles Hardy III’s essay, “Painting in Sound: Aural History and Audio Art,” and listening to the four audio pieces assigned for this week, write a critical reflection considering the particularities (aesthetic, material, ethical, etc.) of sound/voice/audio in archival appropriation, drawing on whatever additional course texts you find productive.
For next week, you will produce a “mini project” working with appropriation of archival audio (originally the plan for this week!) Please come to class prepared with a found/archival audio clip (or more!) that you would like to work with and we will have time to experiment in class.
Take up appropriated archival images, graphics, photographs, and/or other ephemera—either digitized or born-digital—use Photoshop to create a composite image that places them into new relationships or contexts toward a desired effect/affect. Try things. Have fun. Make an inventive intervention. Then write a brief reflection considering your practice in relation to course texts and topics – around questions of materiality, memory, nostalgia, collage, fiction, imagination, etc.
Create a very short (less than 30-second) video from an even shorter (less than 5-second) clip of found video footage. OR make some other appropriative intervention of your own design into a found footage or “archival” clip of your choice.
See Martin Arnold “Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy” and Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” for inspiration.
Upload your video experiment to YouTube or Vimeo and embed it in your post. Write a brief reflection considering your practice in conversation with this week’s reading/viewing materials.
Take a question or idea that arises in the first half of Jaimie Baron’s The Archive Effect and use it to think through some element of the appropriation films we’ve watched for class: No More Road Trips? (Prelinger, 2013), The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (Forgács, 1997) or The Voyagers (Lane, 2010). If you want to bring in other examples from outside of class, that’s great too!
Read this week’s texts. Think about them. Do something interesting with them.
Take up this week’s readings and apply them to (1) a contemporary cultural practice of personal or everyday archiving OR (2) a particular platform or forum that enables and encourages this kind of practice on a larger scale OR (3) a current event or debate that extends the conversation around this topic OR (4) whatever else gets you going…
Alternately, if you feel inspired: Try a week of “life logging” in some form (see Thompson) and use the readings to think through the experience and the implications.
Consider Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as an experiment in method—let’s call it archive-as-method. How would you describe its rules or features? What does it aspire to? What does it achieve? Point to specific moments in the text that interest or excite you and go from there.
Pay a visit to an official archive of your choice and spend a few hours exploring its collections, following whatever interests or intrigues you. Using Farge and/or Steedman as a point of entry, consider your experience as an encounter with both the space of the archive and the materials it contains.
Select any deliberate collection (official or everyday) and analyze how it has been arranged, catalogued, described, and presented. What logics or assumptions govern the selection and ordering of its components? What kinds of things does its structure invite or include? What might it silence, obscure, or overlook? Use this week’s readings to think through these questions and pose questions of your own.
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