28 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
28 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
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title = "Duree"
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glassblowers = ["nickthurston.md"]
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Actively growing is taken to be an archive’s sign of life.
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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.
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They just change in tow with patterns of attention and neglect.
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An archive is a structure that organises access to its holdings.
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Whether it is growing or not, it can still afford that access so long as its structures are at least
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maintained.
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So, UBUweb has stopped growing but it is all still there.
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Its duree is not that of mortality but of a time-based performance — a subjective cultural gesture.
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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.
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In turn, UBUweb, like all artworks, has a quasi-subject status.
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It bears characteristics — or their markers — that we associate with subjecthood.
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It invites or inclines us to attend to it on terms that reinforce subjectivity: its, ours, the archivist’s, and the authors archived.
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Like all ‘little databases’, UBUweb is flooded with subjectivity: tastes, identities, desires, capacities, and of course, limitations.
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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.
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