29 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
29 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
|
+++
|
|||
|
|
title = "Duree"
|
|||
|
|
glassblowers = ["nickthurston.md"]
|
|||
|
|
+++
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Actively growing is taken to be an archive’s sign of life.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
By the same metaphor, inactivity must be deathly — archives grow or die. Projecting a mortal lifecycle on to an archive is a coping mechanism. It helps us to cope with the fact that things and structures, including archives, can neither live or die.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
They just change in tow with patterns of attention and neglect.
|
|||
|
|
An archive is a structure that organises access to its holdings.
|
|||
|
|
Whether it is growing or not, it can still afford that access so long as its structures are at least
|
|||
|
|
maintained.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
So, UBUweb has stopped growing but it is all still there.
|
|||
|
|
Its duree is not that of mortality but of a time-based performance — a subjective cultural gesture.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
It was always a durational performance of gathering, organising and sharing; one that would last for as long as the act was sustainable and interesting.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
In turn, UBUweb, like all artworks, has a quasi-subject status.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
It bears characteristics — or their markers — that we associate with subjecthood.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
It invites or inclines us to attend to it on terms that reinforce subjectivity: its, ours, the archivist’s, and the authors archived.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Like all ‘little databases’, UBUweb is flooded with subjectivity: tastes, identities, desires, capacities, and of course, limitations.
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
So there it is. Subject-like. But perfectly capable of affording things we cannot do or even yet imagine. A mirror and a prism on to subjectivity.
|