Www.poetryfoundation.org Harriet 2011 04 Archiving is the New Folk Art

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Archiving Is The New Folk ArtBY KENNETH GOLDSMITH

The digital theorist Rick Prelinger has proclaimed that archiving

is the new folk art, something that is widely practiced and has

unconsciously become integrated into a great many people's lives,

poten tially transforming a necessity into a work of art. Now, at

first thought it seems wrong: how can the storing and

categorizing of digital (or analogue) data be folk art? Isn't folk

M iY Favorite Po-e t ry

Firstlings

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

Over and Over StitchBY JORIE GRAHAM

[fJ Spring Snow

BY LINDA GREGERSON

[fJ Dogwood

BY WILLIAM JOHNSON

spring song

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art the opposite, something predicated upon the subjective

handcrafting of an object into a unique and personal statement,

often times one that expresses a larger community ethos? One

need think of, say, the magnificent quilts of Gees Bend produced

over many generations by a group of African-American women

who live in an isolated Alabama town. Each quilt is unique, while

bearing the mark of that specific community. Or the spectacular

cosmic visions of someone like Rev. Howard Finster, whose

obsessive, emotional hand-rendered religious paintings and

sculptures could only be sprung from the unique genius of Finster

himself.

Like quilting, archiving employs the obsessive stitching together

of many small found pieces into a larger vision, a personal

attempt at ordering a chaotic world. It's not such a far leap from

the quiltmaker to the stamp collector or book collector. Walter

Benjamin, an obsessive collector himself, wrote about the close

connection between collecting and making in his essay

"Unpacking My Library": "Among children, collecting is only one

process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects,

the cutting out of figures, the application of decals - the whole

range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to

giving them names." In Benjaminan terms, all of these impulses -

making, collecting & archiving - can be construed as folk

practices.

Let's add to that the organizing of digital materials. The advent

of digital culture has turned each one of us into an unwitting

archivist. From the moment we used the "save as" command when

IIBrowse related poetry

BHANU KAPIL

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har riet_poetry is the group Twit ter

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TWITTER F E E

"To l ive & write you mustthrash." Bill

Luoma: f rom an essay: Cowgir ls

Like the Salt Lick. Iwant to write an

essay. Iwant to thras h.

1 minute ago via web

Each society has a crypt. Def ine:

crypt.llay roses on that shabby

step. To write: a novel of the race

r iot . (Forexample.) To begin.

10 hours ago via web

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v -' .& .& .&P-' IJ.& .& .&6 v&vvL& '-'.&.& .&v , -, -, -,vU&.& .&v&.&LJ, ' -'U& U&V&'&'&VU& .&.&.&.&PU&lJvJ uv6u&.&.

"Save as" is a command that implies replication; and replication

requires more complex archival considerations: where do I store

the copy? Where is the original saved? What is the relationship

between the two? Do I archive them both or do I delete the

original?

When our machines become networked, it gets more complicated.

When we take that document and email it to a friend or professor,

our email program automatically archives a copy of both the

email we sent as well as duplicating our attachment and saving it

into a "sent items" folder. Ifthat same document is sent to a

listserv, then that identical archival process is happening on

dozens - perhaps even thousands - of machines, this time

archived as a "received item" on each of those email systems.

When we, as members of that listserv, open that attachment, we

need to decide if - and then where - to save it.

I could go on, but you get the point. Writing on an electronic

platform is not only writing, but also doubles as archiving; the

two processes are inseparable.

Or take the "simple" act of listening to music. Ifwe look closer at

that which we automatically do every day without thinking, we'll

find it's not so simple. Let's say I want to playa CDon my

computer. The moment I insert it into my drive, a database is

called up (Gracenote) and it begins peppering my disc with ID3

tags, useful when I decide to rip the disc to MP3s. The archiving

process has begun. Unlike an LP, where all that was required was

to slap the platter on a turntable and listen to the music, the MP3

process requires me to become a librarian. The ID3 tags make it

No, I d on'twantto swerve. Not

today.lwantto go to Wyoming.

Straight up 287 to the red hills and

complicated society of those parts.


Your: materials? Yourgerminal.

Your non-copulative pre? Your site

before the diagonal? Your Bernard

Tschum i matrix? Your swerve?


Ud**pur/ lndia: turquoise, a pink

desert, extreme poverty, agricultural

pol lutants, f irst love: a lake: wri ting

came from these mater ia ls.

11hours ago via web

"Je souhaite aller aux Indes et au

Japon en qq." Sekula-Schaeppi:AMEMOIR: "which is but a trace."

11hours ago via web

"My special thanks to Anne

Blonstein, who introduced me to

Sonja Sekula" - Kathr in Schaeppi:

[NUMINOUS, 1954]

11hours ago via web

Fo Ilow @harriet_poetry 0n Twitter

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Clearly, all of this is a far cry - and a lot of extra busy wor k -

possible for me to quickly locate my artifact within my MP3

archive. IfGracenote can't find it, I must insert those fields -

artist, album, track, etc. - myself.

iTunes automatically stores these MP3s into my "iTunes Music"

directory, creating two new folders - the first being the artists'

name and the second, the album's name. Within the album folder,I find that these tracks have been assigned numbers and names,

as well as bearing its ID3 tags. If I move these MP3s into the

iTunes program to play them, iTunes automatically creates yet

another database of all this information, seeking as well to

acquire album artwork and so forth. And yet, I might decide that I

don't want my files archived according to the iTunes scheme and

stored on my hard drive, which is quickly running out of space.

Instead, I store all my MP3s on a large external hard drive,organized by a schema that makes sense to me, which involves

another level of transfer and archiving. Once I want to share my

playlists or MP3s with other people, I must archive on yet an

entirely other level.

All of this needs to be constantly backed up, which creates yet

another level of the archive. No one wants to lose their data.

Since I've pretty much been living online for the past fifteen years,

archiving my work - my documents, my correspondence, my

collections, and so forth - has become just as important as the

creation of new artifacts. Having lost too much information over

the years, I religiously back up: some drives are backed up

redundantly, two or three times.

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COMMENT 5 (2)

from the act of merely listening to music. In fact, I spend much

more time acquiring, cataloging and archiving my artifacts these

days than I do actually engaging with them. The ways in which

culture is distributed and archived has become profoundly more

intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced

is a inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to engage

in a more profound way with the acts of acquisition over that

which we are acquiring; we've come to prefer the bottles to the

WIne.

Our primary impulse, then, has moved from creators to collectors

and archivists, proving Walter Benjamin, once more to be

prophetic: "Ifmy experience may serve as evidence, a man is more

likely to return a borrowed book upon occasion than to read it.

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be

characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. Itis

not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the

oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which

Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and

then finished with the standard question, 'And you have read all

these books, Monsieur France?' 'Not one-tenth of them. I don't

suppose you use your Sevres china every day?"

2011-04-19

On Apr il 23, 2011 at 5:03pm Arkivering ar en fo Ikkonst I Kris tofer Svensson wrote:

[. ..] over det har lasvarda in lagget pa poetryfo undatio n.o rg skrivet av avant -gardets

Assange.Titeln ar [.. .]

Reportthis comment

OnApril25, 2011 at4:21 am i s hould know better I queer city wrote:

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[...] to argue wi kenneth golds mi th at 2am about archiving. his recent essay on the

poetry fo undatio n.o rg s ite d is turbs me, not 0nly because he co nflates the art of archiving to

[... ]

Reportthis comment

Posted in Distribution, Group Blog on Tuesday, April roth, 2011 by

Kenneth Goldsmith.

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Www.poetryfoundation.org Harriet 2011 04 Archiving is the New Folk Art