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1.6 KiB
JavaScript
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1.6 KiB
JavaScript
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repo={"frontmatter": {"draft":false,"glassblowers":["nickthurston.md"],"iscjklanguage":false,"title":"Duree"}, "content": "\nActively growing is taken to be an archive’s sign of life.\n\nBy 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.\n\nThey just change in tow with patterns of attention and neglect.\nAn archive is a structure that organises access to its holdings.\nWhether it is growing or not, it can still afford that access so long as its structures are at least\nmaintained.\n\nSo, UBUweb has stopped growing but it is all still there.\nIts duree is not that of mortality but of a time-based performance — a subjective cultural gesture.\n\nIt was always a durational performance of gathering, organising and sharing; one that would last for as long as the act was sustainable and interesting.\n\nIn turn, UBUweb, like all artworks, has a quasi-subject status.\n\nIt bears characteristics — or their markers — that we associate with subjecthood.\n\nIt invites or inclines us to attend to it on terms that reinforce subjectivity: its, ours, the archivist’s, and the authors archived.\n\nLike all ‘little databases’, UBUweb is flooded with subjectivity: tastes, identities, desires, capacities, and of course, limitations.\n\nSo 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.\n", "path": "shard/duree.md", "relpermalink": "/shard/duree/" }
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