Body of Work

At this moment in time, as I write, I’m enrolled as a design student in the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in the Industrial Design Master. I currently generate no noteworthy income from my practice, but I do have hopes for a noteworthy professional future. This is what I assume my education will build up to.

I know however that I will be graduating in precarious times. This was obvious to me even before COVID punched a hole in the job market and into our collective wallets. It became apparent that the idea of work was changing comprehensively, with the labor market having become liberal and flexible, bringing new opportunities and with them also risks. We were seeing more types of jobs being created while salaries decreased, contracts were shortened and became flex, and a large degree of freedom was coupled with vanishing insurance policies and pension plans.

So, having said this and with my graduation peeking at the horizon, I rightly wondered what will become of me. This led me on a path to find the answer to the question ‘what do new types of work look like?’ And more specifically ‘who are the workers?’ 

Tell me about the world of work – The interviewees at large

My journey began by engaging in conversations with Geert Lovink, a media scientist who could fill me in on theories of new generations of workers; Alina Lupu, an artist who moves between the precariously employed field and the cultural field – which are at times one and the same; and the members of Cultural Workers Unite (CWU), a solidarity organization that promotes the rights of workers within the cultural field. I have chosen these interview partners because they work from different perspectives with (or within) the new conditions of work.

Figure 2: Lupu at a panel discussion CRITICAL STUDIES at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, 2017

 

 

Illusions of work:

Alina Lupu between dreams & realities of work

Is there a difference between the creative worker and the precarious laborer? Some would argue there never was one, maybe just a difference in branding. 

In the winter of 2017, a little over half a year from having graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from a prestigious Dutch art academy, the Rietveld, in Amsterdam, Alina Lupu received an invitation to be a part of a panel discussion during an event at that very same academy. The invitation was meant to showcase the experience of recent graduates, their evolution since finishing art school, and their experience as students, looking back. That experience was very much fresh in her mind. But so was her new side-job.

That afternoon, honoring the panel discussion invitation, Lupu decided to show up, talk about her position and also wear her new food delivery courier uniform. She went to the stage, without introducing her condition at the time, wearing a jacket from the company Deliveroo and a small food delivery bag with the same branding. The company was, at the beginning of 2017, very fresh on the Dutch market, without any scandal associated with it, but still very visually present in the local landscape with couriers riding in the streets daily in striking bright blue-green athletic gear.

Lupu had taken the job after her realization that having a degree in art was not enough to make a living. She spent half a year applying for office jobs which never called back. She couldn’t yet apply for structural funding as an artist, since there was a period of one year between graduation and the time one could submit an application, so she chose the quickest route that would have her – a job in the platform economy. This was a job that could start almost immediately after being called for an interview, with a quick onboarding.

A job that would give her a uniform if only she said yes and showed her passport. She was game.

Figure 3 MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018

Judgments of work: Meeting expectations of yourself and others

To live was to make. But to live was not to make a living – Lupu said while she was still an ambitious art student. A belief she did share with her peers and teachers while being in the safe surrounding of the Academy. I myself am yet following a similar mindset while making use of my freedom to explore and expand my horizon, getting critical and aware about abstract issues of the world. But have I understood my own reality? With my graduation ahead I start to question if I have reached the level of control and knowledge to steer into my professional future. Lupu had done it, she was free again but in a way that she and her educational path had not foreseen for her.

Lupu could feel that exposing this new side-job in her former art academy might cause some friction, but didn’t quite realize the extent of outrage that would follow. Exposing herself as a minimum wage worker created tension. She felt judged by her choice of temporary employment.

She was supposed to have become an autonomous artist, and even if most autonomous artists make a living by other means, she was not supposed to glamorize, or even show, her precarious job.

These jobs tended to be kept in the dark as ‘shadow jobs’ as if they should not be seen in relation to the creative worker. The clash of the expectations of the creative class and the realities of the market shaped Lupu’s choices in the years that followed her graduation and that panel discussion in particular.

Figure 4: Lupu performing THE MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE in The Living Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2017

Solidarity in work: A new type of workers who don’t recognize each other

That instance of exposing herself as a worker and being considered less deserving in the eyes of her peers and of the teachers that shaped her brought about the realization that there was a gap in perceiving solidarity among different categories of workers who are equally as exploited. Lupu would go on to make performances using the iconic looks of the food delivery couriers, but she would also join a union, continue doing the delivery work, and eventually join forces with the food delivery couriers in striking against Deliveroo and against exploitative conditions that the company would push on their workers.

Figure 5: MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018

Lupu rightly realized that “It doesn’t matter if I do creative work if I get paid as much as a cleaner – then I should be solidarity with that cleaner”. She saw herself aligned with the ones working in the same conditions, not only with the people in the same sector. And creatives were shown to have equally precarious contracts, if any, lack of security, lack of a pension plan or insurance.

In the same line of thinking, the CWU chimed in: “Maybe it is part of the problem that we consider ourselves “special” as this creates a “cognitive dissonance” in a lot of us, that would identify us as “artists” while we earn most of our money through side jobs or more “commercial parts” of our practice”. The Union, therefore, has tried to open the definition of the cultural workers they want to support. They include creators and curators as well as “cultural institution cleaners, administrators, security guards, horeca workers etc.” and “volunteers and interns who contribute unpaid and low paid labor to the sector.” This highlights a sensibility towards the various modes of work in culture and that they are reliant on each other.

Figure 6: MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018

Sharing of work: The autonomous workers collective – a paradox

Without a doubt, to be a food courier was not what Lupu had dreamed of when she started to study fine arts. It is no secret that the market in arts and design is by any means challenging and difficult which the individual maker mostly must face alone. However, it is this mindset that must be challenged Lovink points out. In his sight, one of the main issues is that single creators might fail thinking she/he is not ‘good enough’ to withstand the market’s pressure, whilst we are missing out on the community of those working in similar conditions: “It’s about new forms of cooperative work. […] But these discussions and debates have not yet reached the creative industries […], people need to understand that they actually have to act together.” This turns out to be the main challenge as the CWU claims:

Figure 7: MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018

“It’s difficult. Solidarity is a thing to be worked on, it isn’t the default position for most in a neoliberal society.”

Occupational prestige and desire for more personal freedom are the leading factors to the creation of the neoliberal condition and a singular mindset. However, the proposed independence that neoliberalism peddles is illusive.

“If freedom is to be taken as freedom from an employer, you are free to choose your own way of being exploited by the market.” Says the CWU “In effect, you’re not “free to” do whatever you want, as the economy has already pre-established paths for hyper-competitive and hyper-individualized entrepreneurial careers.”

The ‘free-thinking creative’ who needs to be set aside from the crowd seems to be outdated yet persists to be the role model in the sector of Arts and Design as experienced by Lupu and the members of the CWU.

“While we are encouraged to work collectively, collective work is continuously being devalued and is not taken as seriously as an ‘autonomous practice’. As if any practice can be ‘autonomous.”

Creative work as well as capitalist structures were and are still reliant on cooperation between different professions. It seems as if the truly independent worker in the creative industry is simply an unrealistic model of work. “Autonomous work does not exist” states the CWU, and there is no logical reason for a worker to pretend it does.

Figure 8: MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018

Communities in work: Recognizing and dealing with your working peers

Lupu’s working outfit which she eventually ended up calling “The Minimum Wage Dress Code” changed how she was perceived by other artists, but it also influenced how she was perceived in society at large. Her outfit allowed her access to certain spaces like restaurant kitchens while at the same time it gave her insight into how couriers are usually mistreated by other links in the delivery chain. Like an 18th century servant she had to be ‘hidden’ from customers, often left waiting outside in the cold.

“The irony is that you are treated like shit by the ones that earn as much per hour as you do.”

She lived through the same failures in perceiving solidarity from restaurant workers not just from the “creative class”. She witnessed how solidarity fails across the board as long as we judge and humiliate people just by their presumed link in a labor chain.

Maybe COVID was, in this sense, useful as it triggered the understanding of dissatisfaction and acknowledgment of insecurities in job and/or in life. One could be sure of a worldwide relatability and to a certain extend solidarity. “The idea that you can do it all on your own, especially if you have to work from home, no, that’s over.” Says Lovink. This unprecedented event has exposed the fragility of many, which is fertile ground on which unions like the CWU formed and gained more attention. Worldwide precarity almost enforced a large part of society to take jobs that are not unique to ones ‘main’ profession and it is yet uncertain if this affect will be reversed. This state is on its best way to become mainstream – and could this for once mean something for the greater good?

“Covid only exacerbates what was already there before the pandemic. Precarity was there, it just became visible” agrees the CWU. Like Lupu, they see the problems of precarity amplified throughout the crisis and aim for a solution of collectiveness. The membership number of unions has rapidly dropped in the last years. Lupu explains this with the popularity of flex and temp-work which has created more individual work, while communal or collective work, work that could be organized in the traditional sense, declined.

Figure 9 Lupu presenting the Online Campaign #RideWithUsPhilip, 2019; As Philip Padberg, CEO of Deliveroo Europe, suggested that riders should switch to a freelance contract, in her video, Lupu is asking Padberg to prove that what he was proposing (10 orders in 2 hours) was possible.

In the past Lupu, experienced the way in which classical unions had difficulties in reacting to new, flexible, platform-based working conditions. The FNV, The Federation of Dutch Trade Unions, initially had trouble adapting on how to tackle a company like Deliveroo: “They tried to support platform workers and strikes – with banners, tents with warm chocolate. But how do you strike against an online company? Do you go to the streets or block apps? Are you just not going to work?”.

The FNV has made strides in the past couple of years in tackling the food delivery giant, through a series of court trials questioning contractual agreements, which have been won. These were however symbolic victories since the gains rarely if ever got to reach the workers.

The case of Deliveroo has exposed how little protection one can expect as a precarious worker in an unregulated market

It has also rightly exposed similar precarious and unregulated tendencies within the creative field, which the work of Lupu highlights.

Chances of Work: Alliance between workers

Adding up these different perspectives gave me greater depth in understanding the problem as well as the strength of the new types of work at large.

Alina Lupu does perceive herself as an artist but aligns with workers which earn a minimum wage, who need to take precarious jobs out of pure necessity, and usually do not speak up against the unfairness, to not risk their only source of income. Lupu, as a progressive risk-taking artist, turned herself through her performance into a channel for her own, but also for their precarity. The dress became the medium for a collective message for anyone taking minimum paid jobs or participate in the economy in ways that are not unique to cultural work. It visually connected unrecognized labor with the profession of the artist created friction but moreover awareness and relatability of the working circumstances within the profession. She used the impact of the choice of clothing to challenge the publicly perceived identity of the wearer. Design-wise we can question if we could adapt this system for the new workers at large to shape and clarify their work identity. A visual (and wearable) statement could become a superficial work identity for the new working community, visible for oneself, the ones working in the same sector, and the public or client. From this perspective, a design like a work cloth presents the idea of a person, profession, and one’s community all connected in one design.

Figure 10: THE MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at the Launch of Simulacrum Magazine at Cinetol, Amsterdam, 2017

Figure 11: MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018, Participants eating the content of their delivery bags with visitors.

Similar to Lupu, the CWU tries to include and connect all workers and laborers that are involved in the production of arts, design and culture. They want to illustrate the necessary cooperation between cultural workers.

A common understanding of precarious conditions and shared knowledge are key elements to deal with precarity.

Collectivism needs to be included into the ‘look’ of the contemporary creative worker. In detail, change needs to happen on two levels: firstly, through recognition of a shared problem or support within a community, so that empathy can evolve between workers that deal with the same issues. COVID has highlighted these discussions on a global scale, it is up to us how we make use of them for our common future. Secondly, through a general understanding of the fact that current neoliberal socio-economic structures lead to precarity. If this will be achieved, new forms of cooperation could evolve. The equality of voices and easy access are important to create a collective body and to share knowledge. The new design of cooperative channels could be understood as resistant to the individualizing turn, placing emphasis on sociality rather than on the individual creator working to produce art or design.

Finally, the theorist Lovink presents the structural and organizational side which can facilitate and manage the space in which cooperation can happen in an effective way and can allow workers to distribute their ‘risks’ among several people. He promotes the idea of cooperatives as a solution to our current predicament. This way, a seemingly big problem becomes smaller through sharing. Thus, cooperation needs not only to be encouraged but also fairly valued financially and socially. Design wise we can discuss whether the co-opted skills are those of the contemporary creator or if creators engaged in collective structures have adapted to the new conditions of capitalism.

All three, Alina Lupu, the CWU and Geert Lovink, are proposing a new form of institution created by the ones suffering the most under the current models of work. This can make a shift from the drive for individual self-realization through work and towards more collective values that can uplift the currently precarious and atomized class.

I end this text not with a definitive conclusion, but with the prospect for a greater conversation on the art and design creator’s relation to work and to making their labor visible. What has become clear to me, and I hope to certain extend to the reader, is that art and design-making and work in the socio-economically context, are evolving simultaneously to an appearance in which we present our contemporary art and design practice.

Figure 12: MINIMUM WAGE DRESS CODE Performance at PUBLIC ART AMSTERDAM, 2018 

I want to thank everyone involved in my research including Geert Lovink for his generous sharing of time and knowledge, the CWU for their ambition and effort to combine their forces to answer my complex questions, and, naturally, Alina Lupu for being the steadfast and inspiring source which never forgot to feed me with sharp and on point answers and well-selected references and Instagram posts.

A theory on Digital Hygiene

…Cleanliness is godliness
And God is empty just like me.
Zero by The Smashing Pumpkins (1996)

Cleanliness is next to Godliness

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, our interaction with the digital has increased to never-before-seen heights. Along with it identity theft, hacks, the ‘misinfodemic’, data breaches, phishing, and other cyber risks all skyrocketed as result. Thus, improved or increased cybersecurity has become a necessity for all actors upon the digital networks. The tendency is to look to cybersecurity companies, studies, or governmental branches on (cyber) defense for these directives, whose deployment of military metaphors grant themselves a certain authority. However, another approach has emerged simultaneously within the field, one that leans towards principles of education and discipline. This approach has come to be known as ‘digital hygiene’. The rise of ‘digital hygiene’ to increase, secure and sanitize cyberspace corresponds with the ubiquity of the internet, its political-economic influence, and socio-cultural pervasiveness within everyday life.

Digital hygiene encourages individuals to perform routine-based digital practices in order to minimize cyber risks. In contrast to cyber security’s use of military or war-like metaphors, the narrative of digital hygiene returns to illness as metaphor, as introduced by Susan Sontag in a 1977 lecture, which provided the basis for her famous short book Illness as Metaphor (1978).

The use of metaphors to explain and guide concepts, in both everyday vernacular and authoritative rhetorics, has the tendency to instill morality that carries a disciplinary power. Back in 2014, the Institute of Network Culture’s (INC) Theory On Demand publication already provided insight into how we can consider at ‘digital hygiene’ as a metaphor. In a text titled Transcoding the Digital, the late Marianne van den Boomen unravels ‘digital praxis’, a coherent set of everyday practices that involve the manipulation, modification, and construction of digital-symbolical objects that “somehow matter socially”.

The relationship between the praxis and the objects is metaphorical. This theorizing of ‘digital hygiene’ borrows from Van den Boomen’s conceptual framework to unravel how the disciplinary praxis of ‘good’ digital citizenship and the relationship to its digital-symbolic objects through the metaphor of hygiene (and its history) is constructed in the first place. How does digital hygiene come into play in the cybersecurity discourse? Who is advocating for it? What is ‘good hygiene citizenship’ and how does ‘digital hygiene’ claim to provide it? This essentially outlines the current situation and provides insights into where ‘digital hygiene’ might be heading.

Prevention Over Defence

The digital has always been seen as a space where ‘battles’ are fought, albeit through viruses, heated debates, combats between hackers and the hegemony (think Mr. Robot), or other forms of cyber-attacks. The growth of the internet has been, and is, paralleled by the growth of cybersecurity. On one hand, the neoliberal foundation of the web paved the way for Silicon Valley’s capitalist tech ventures we see dominating the online platform economy and contemporary capitalism at large today. On the other hand, it created a landscape where information flows without restriction, and this circulation of information—including freedom of speech—is considered of utmost importance to be maintained at all cost.

These are two sides are of the same coin, but while the former required protection for political-economic ends, it is the latter, the more socio-cultural, which now seems to be running wild without restraint. It’s visible in the battle against piracy, the way platforms are currently (attempting to) combat fake news or harmful information through content moderation, and the oft used securing of terms within cybersecurity discourse that are military metaphors. Whether they are referring to the non-human technology or the humans behind cybersecurity, militant metaphors act as the authoritative agent between the cyber risks, the network, its users, and other stakeholders. While this form of agency carries a responsibility, it also generates dependency which centers power around these actors in cybersecurity.

Figure 1: Transcoding existing practices.

Military Metaphors Meet Medical Metaphors

These militant metaphors parallel the metaphorical world of medicine where cancer is battled, diseases are neutralized, infections infiltrate, and illness is defeated, or doctors fought until the bitter end. Wordings like this illustrate the ‘medicine is war’ metaphor whilst utilizing Sontag’s insights on illness as metaphor. In the aforementioned text, Sontag describes how military metaphors are abundant in discourses of plagues and how we respond to it through hygiene:

“[M]etaphors of illness are malign in a double way: they cast opprobrium on sick people and they hinder the rational and scientific apprehension that is needed to contain disease and provide care for people. To treat illness as a metaphor is to avoid or delay or even thwart the treatment of literal illness.”

The opprobrium cast upon sick people can act as a form of discipline. Metaphor also can obscure the nature of an illness. This act of applying existing concepts to the digital realm through metaphor is what van den Boomen calls transcoding. The familiarity of practicing good bodily hygiene makes it easier to understand similar practices in the frame of sanitizing digital environments of disease or viruses. The metaphor of ‘digital hygiene’ broadens the target audience and allows for more participants to enter the field. Routine practices ought not to be too technical since the more users there are practicing ‘good digital hygiene’, the better both personal and collective digital security will be. What follows is a list of actors and advocates who are attempting to educate user-consumers via utilization of the good-bad conflict:

Words such as safe, good, healthy, responsible and respectful recur in their pursuit to moralize digital hygiene. The suggested practices include regularly updating passwords, actively limiting one’s digital and social footprints, managing your mailbox, downloading software from legitimate sources, encrypting backups, and so on. Some encourage the use of technology such as 2FA, password managers, and firewalls.

Figure 2: 12 digital hygiene commandments by digitalhygiene.net.

Digital-Symbolic Objects

The use of software represents the materialization of the digital-symbolic objects and matter socially in the sense that they signify cleanliness or sterility. Other digital-symbolic objects such as VPNs also increase one’s cyber defense and provide personal control through privacy and anonymity, however, their prominence in suggestions is limited since the use of VPNs potentially circumvents personalized ads, thus opposing platform-economy logics. Normalizing practices, such as the ‘12 Commandments’ in Figure 2, discipline users to be(come) good digital citizens through an implicit message that it is their duty to keep digital spaces clean.

Good hygiene is made synonymous with good digital citizenship and thus not partaking in the practice becomes labeled as inherently ‘bad’. However, it requires a certain digital competence or accessibility to make use of these transcoded metaphors. This means that illiterate demographics, the elderly for instance—who already are frequent targets of personal hacks—or those whose budget does not allow for the use of smartphones, desktop computers, personal laptops, or access to these forms of information, are all excluded. Discriminating notions of classism lie behind the moralized and moralizing language.

Traditional actors of the field, like the gatekeeping cyber security companies, are also adapting to this new narrative. Not by modifying their products, but rather by introducing the same moralising language in their content marketing through blogs.

Through content such as the above, stalwarts of the cyber-safety industry have found creative ways to acknowledge the self-preserving acts of digital hygiene whilst their products implicitly tell their users that there is a socio-technical problem they have a responsibility towards but can’t fix on their own. Again, it is the consumer’s duty to undo the internet’s fundamental flaws and become a good digital citizen by investing in cybersecurity products: Consumerism is the available antiseptic towards attaining digital purity.

Just as philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed that Starbucks coffee ‘creates moral consumers’ by including an informal tax to aid some towns in a third world country somewhere, moral consumerism is also present in the commodification of digital hygiene through the subjectivization of good digital citizens. The use of purchased software symbolizes good digital citizenship. Similar to Mark Fisher’s comments on how the solution to treating mental health as a natural individualized pathology is sold back to the individual in a capitalist society, so, too, is the solution to the problem of digital hygiene. Atomised, and sold back to us, by cybersecurity software companies in the most surveillance-capitalist-way possible where user transparency is traded for increased privatized surveillance.

Beyond the Software

The commodification of the digital hygiene metaphor can also be found beyond cybersecurity software. Think about digital detoxes, another prime example of Fisher’s observation. Those who can afford it (another classism alert) take a break to purify themselves of the illnesses that come along with being online all the time: addiction, FOMO, stress, depression, instant gratification, and so on. Others who can’t afford to be offline just have to deal with this, I guess…

In contrast to the authoritative narrative of cybersecurity, the disciplinary power of hygiene metaphors can become malleable to fit other digital fields where it moralizes online users. For instance,

This form of power creates a certain type of individual. One producing new habits, movements, and skills by utilising and employing rules, surveillance, exams, and control.

These examples illustrate the spread of ‘digital hygiene’ as metaphor’s moralizing language, as well as how it is used without much regard towards its politics—Bergmann’s article is an exception—and its disciplinary nature. These metaphor’s use is little contested as various terminologies are used to signify good digital citizenship: digital literacy, media literacy, digital competence, digital detox, digital declutter, digital proficiency, digital hygiene, data hygiene or cyber hygiene, to provide a shortlist. While this essay focuses on hygiene, all metaphors generate a good-bad dichotomy that carries an embedded disciplinary power within them. This form of power creates a certain type of individual. One producing new habits, movements, and skills by utilizing and employing rules, surveillance, exams, and control. The aim is prevention, through moral education of digital hygiene, rather than protection.

Instead of serving as an authoritative intermediary, this discourse places its emphasis on the user and conceptualizes the problem as a personal responsibility to become a ‘good digital citizen’. By introducing a more soft-spoken, moralistic language, the effort becomes about minimizing cyber risks through the advocacy of self-preservation. Semantics such as ‘literacy’, ‘hygiene’, ‘good citizenship’, ‘commandments’, ‘abilities’, ‘skills’, ‘awareness’ and ‘practice’ all indicate the shift from the traditional authoritative military metaphor to the disciplinary narrative that also invites an education system into the realm of cybersecurity and the subjectivization of digital citizens. ‘Practicing good hygiene’ implies cleanliness, not only of your environment but also of one’s self. Cleanliness doesn’t start with washing your hands, but rather by knowing why and how to wash your hands. The education is here to help with that by singling out the individual. These notions of self-preservation and moralization coincide with a specific kind of ideology, with a political history.

I am the Hydra-headed beast
I am the worm you can never delete
I am the dangers that never sleeps
I am the virus
I am the virus
I am the Virus by Killing Joke (2015)

Washing the Hands of Hygiene

The ideology of wellness essentially presents its subject with a feeling of being fundamentally flawed and provides a solution that advocates the user to take matters into their own hands and to purify themselves. To not dwell further on the demoralized path of dirtiness, one needs to take certain measures, begin certain practices, and buy certain products. Since neoliberal capitalism sees personal responsibility as an important political and economic creed, it concurs with the ideology of wellness’s emphasis on the self. As seen earlier, the ideology of wellness is fundamental to the good-bad dichotomy of the moral consumerism advocated by cybersecurity companies.

Bergmann finds this ideology through the moralizing language in metabolic metaphors in digital data hygiene, but they are constitutional to hygiene as metaphor and the overarching illness as metaphor. She argues that the usage of disenchanting and shaming [language] is effectively counterproductive and hides the true problem: an industry built on neoliberal digital utopianism, surveillance, and data extraction—illustrating what Sontag prophetically observed in the late 70s: metaphors of illness tend to obscure the nature of the illness. Cybersecurity companies, institutions, and big tech, present digital hygiene as a self-preserving solution, but overlook their own role in, and contribution to, the problem. Similarities can be found with the impending ecological crisis, where polluting companies tend to discipline individuals to take responsibility, separate waste, recycle, upcycle, and be mindful about water and meat consumption, in order to minimize their contribution to climate change.

Social Projects Remain Social Projects

Tracing hygiene’s etymology illustrates the political history and relation to social reform and discipline. Rapid urbanization during the Progressive era ushered in the social hygiene (and purity) movement during the 19th century, which aimed to oust social immorality such as prostitution and the spread of STIs, subsequently bringing along gender inequality, racial marginalization, and hints of eugenics. Science and media techniques were utilized to advocate for self-discipline in order to put emphasis on the individual’s responsibility towards the public health problem. The movement itself later made its way into the education system. This is where institutionalization enters, and the initial relation between hygiene and literacy can be located. Standardization through the education system and social reform disciplined individuals to maintain cleanliness and stray from dirty immoral behavior. Along with public health officials, these regulatory apparatuses aimed to sterilize the spaces ‘diseased’ by urbanization—as a result neutralizing marginalized groups through civic standardization.

The use of hygiene as a metaphor extracted from illness as metaphor thus borrows and extrapolates from this disciplinary history of exclusion and moralization as well. The comparisons should not be hard to notice. Firstly, urbanization as the cause for the movement can be paralleled to digital urbanization: The shift from the early blogosphere and web 1.0 towards web 2.0 and the contemporary platformed internet. Today, we are taught that an innumerable amount of people use platforms without universal hygiene protocols. The subsequent increase in cyber risks ask for standardization through methods beyond cybersecurity: the current advocation and colloquially appropriate phrasing is made explicit on digitalhygiene.net’s homepage:

Digitalization or deployment of various digital solutions has become critical in our daily business and private lives. Our world has never been more technology-centric. Especially this year as more and more brick-and-mortar businesses and solutions have moved online. And the sheer volume of transactions taking place online is staggering. This digital acceleration hasn’t been without its risks.

Parallels between the social hygiene movement can also be found also in terms of the moral panics that come as a result of urbanization. Societal ills during the Progressive era required regulation, both by the public and institutions. Today we see something similar with the spread of misinformation, conspiracy culture, rising ethnonationalism, and polarisation, all taking place online. These immoral digital activities take place more on the fringes of the net where radical thought finds a safe haven, piracy takes place, and illegal goods can be marketed. Sanitisation, thus, is not confined to the urbanized platforms. A new infrastructure is currently being implemented, a digital sewage system to sanitize the streets of the platform economy whilst simultaneously neutralizing the polluted cesspool where immoral digital activity such as hacking, conspiracism, trolling, piracy, and radicalization, takes place (what about the dark web though?). The people who inhabit these contaminated spaces are sanitized and their acts are labeled poisonous through the use of moralizing language, disciplining digital users that such immoral acts belong in the gutter.

Naturally, digital urbanization also brings along digital gentrification. Similar to the social hygiene movement, digital hygiene is (on the cusp of being) institutionalized, but also melts into PR marketing tactics by neoliberal capitalism. It is a double-edged sword where standardization will make for control, also bringing along increased surveillance and traditional notions of exclusion.

“But industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.”
– A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Together we Clean, Divided we Soil

Digital hygiene follows as a magnified version of Sontag’s illness as metaphor and discipline through moralizing language. While it is still in full development, perhaps arguably in its early-adopter stage, one can already see its pervasiveness. The adjacency of military and illness metaphors makes it easier to adopt and transcode digital hygiene into something that is understood by many and required for digital urbanization’s population increase. We could expect a more pronounced version in the near future, increasingly incorporated into formal education and endorsed by governments.

Following the political history and relationship between military metaphors in discourses of plague, it would seem that ‘hygiene’ suits the climate of cybersecurity better than ‘literacy’. Not only because illness as metaphor holds virality during the global pandemic, since it is used almost ubiquitously in the news about COVID-19, but also because the internet and cybersecurity are already littered with illness metaphors—memes go viral, computer viruses, the spread of misinformation, infected computers, 4chan as a cancerous cesspool of racism.

Just as Sontag foretold, through the individualizing hygiene metaphor and its accompanying software objects we’re encouraged to use, the true nature of the illness that is cyber risk is obscured. Platform capitalism shifts its responsibility onto us. Therefore, I propose a critical definition of digital hygiene as follows:

A socio-technical reform that disciplines digital user-consumers towards moral purity through routinely-based self-regulation and surveillance.

It is not us, the individual, who are the patients, but rather the networks serving capitalism. In this discourse, we’re carrying and spreading the disease of immoral digital activity and need to be neutralized—similar to the imposed disciplines of mask mandates, curfews, and other dreadful things we’ve encountered the past year. These measures carry an urgency to them, especially during rapid-changing times, whether that be the pandemic or an increasingly populated and congested digital space.

Figure 3: What we learn is what we know (source: Existential Comics).

It is not that discipline itself is inherently bad. With increased data breaches, hacks, phishing, and viruses that problematize internet usage, both individuals and the capitalist structures rely on it. However, this critical analysis and theorizing of digital hygiene illuminate the underlying disciplinary powers that accompany the digital hygiene discourse and construct individuals, modifying their behaviors and habits accordingly to serve the structures dependent on ‘good digital citizenship’. The advocates of digital hygiene, an assemblage of hegemonic platform capitalists, neoliberalism, and ‘traditional’ state apparatuses, educate users of these practices under the name of ‘Skills for the 21st  Century’ while simultaneously constructing a digital sewage infrastructure. We are continually reminded why it is there, what septic waste flows through it, and that a good digital citizen does not act like a pig and never dares to wallow in such dirt.

Special thanks to fellow INC colleague Jess Henderson for their help with this article.

The Digitarian Society @ Tetem op 25 mei

In de driedelige serie The Digitarian Society onderzoekt Tetem samen met mediakunstenaar Roos Groothuizen en gasten van het Institute of Network Cultures, Waag en PublicSpaces wat er nodig is om verder te komen in onze zoektocht naar een veiliger internet.

De bewustwording over internet dilemma’s in relatie tot online verslaving, privacy en verantwoordelijkheid groeit; niet alleen onder organisaties, in de media en bij de overheid, maar ook onder het ‘grote publiek’. We hebben allemaal wel eens gedacht om alternatieve apps, videoplatforms en social media te verkennen, maar we doen het niet massaal. Wat houdt ons tegen?

In de driedelige serie The Digitarian Society onderzoekt Tetem samen met mediakunstenaar Roos Groothuizen en gasten van het Institute of Network Cultures, Waag en PublicSpaces wat er nodig is om verder te komen in onze zoektocht naar een veiliger internet. We gaan op zoek naar concrete acties. Wat kun je als individu doen? Welke rol hebben publieke instellingen hierin? Hoe krijg je je publiek mee om een switch naar veiliger platforms te maken? En hoe kun je met deze acties andere mensen inspireren om een volgende stap te zetten?

Deze serie events gaat verder in op de dilemma’s van de escape room tentoonstelling ‘I want to delete it all, but not now’ die Roos Groothuizen voor Tetem heeft ontwikkeld. Daarin komt de vraag naar voren wat ons tegenhoudt om te stoppen met diensten van bijvoorbeeld Facebook en Google. Hoe worden we een digitariër, iemand die geen producten of diensten gebruikt van bedrijven die hun geld verdienen met het verkopen van persoonlijke data? Of is het mogelijk die moeilijke stap te verzachten door een flexidigitariër te worden, waar je zoveel mogelijke bewuste keuzes probeert te maken, maar nog geen afscheid wilt of kunt nemen van bijvoorbeeld Whatsapp? Het idee is dat we met kleine stappen onszelf en andere mensen en organisaties aansporen om bewuster te worden ten aanzien van de apps die we gebruiken en samen de stap naar een veiliger internet zetten. De drie events vinden plaats op verschillende platforms waarmee we als flexidigitariërs gaan experimenteren.

The Digitarian Society #1
Dinsdag 25 mei van 19.00-20.00
Met Roos Groothuizen,  Geert Lovink (mediatheoreticus, internetcriticus en oprichter van het Institute of Network Cultures) en Chloë Arkenbout (onderzoeker en editor bij Institute of Network Cultures)

De titel van de tentoonstelling ‘I want to delete it all, but now now’ van Roos Groothuizen komt uit het boek ‘Sad by Design’ door Geert Lovink. Het boek biedt een kritische analyse van de groeiende controverses op sociale media zoals nepnieuws, giftige virale memes en online verslaving. Tegelijkertijd roept Geert Lovink op tot het omhelzen van de digitale intimiteit van sociale media, berichtenverkeer en selfies, in de hoop dat verveling de eerste fase is van het overwinnen van ‘platformnihilisme’. Om daarna de afbraak van – verslaving aan – sociale media in te zetten.

Tijdens The Digitarian Society #1 ontdekken we wie de mensen achter het Institute of Network Cultures zijn en wat er bij hen persoonlijk is veranderd na het publiceren van het boek ‘Sad by Design’. Roos gaat met Geert Lovink in gesprek over de schaduwzijde van online platforms, menselijke verlangens die ons tegenhouden en hoe je als individu de theorie in praktijk kunt brengen. In een gesprek met Chloë Arkenbout wordt ingezoomd op Chloë’s onderzoek naar de macht van memes, media ethiek, morele verantwoordelijkheid, (digitaal) activisme, call out culture en de manieren waarop zij als nieuwe generatie onderzoekers met social media omgaat.

Doen, durven of je data?
Het publiek krijgt de kans om ‘Doen, durven of je data?’ binnen het thema van The Digitarian Society in te sturen. Uit de inzendingen wordt een selectie gemaakt die we gaan voorleggen aan de sprekers. Stuur jouw ‘Doen, durven of je data’ van max. 25 woorden uiterlijk 19 mei naar expo@tetem.nl. De sprekers krijgen een keuze tussen ‘Doen/Durven’ (een opdracht uitvoeren) of ‘Data’ (de waarheid over je digitale leven vertellen).

Voorbeeld van Doen/Durven (een opdracht uitvoeren):
• Stuur je moeder een appje dat je vanaf nu niet meer via Whatsapp wil communiceren
• Raad van een andere tafelgast welke social media zij het meest gebruiken

Voorbeeld van Data (de waarheid over je digitale leven vertellen):
• Wat is je grootste afknapper bij een platform?
• Heb je praktische maatregelen genomen om je social media gebruik te verminderen? Zo ja, wat?

Informatie over de events i.s.m. Waag (juni) en PublicSpaces (juli) wordt binnenkort bekend gemaakt.

Praktische informatie
Datum: Dinsdag 25 mei van 19.00-20.00

Prijs: Gratis

Sprekers: Roos Groothuizen, Geert Lovink (mediatheoreticus, internetcriticus en oprichter van het Institute of Network Cultures) en Chloë Arkenbout (onderzoeker en editor bij Institute of Network Cultures)

Online platform: ohyay

Inschrijven: Schrijf je in via de rode knop op deze website. Je ontvangt een paar dagen ervoor de link naar onze kamer op ohyay.

Voertaal: Nederlands

Self-Surveillance, Step by Step: Tracking My COVID Walks

“A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.” – Francis Alÿs

Most of us are used to knowing that our devices track how we interact with them and monitor what we do when they are around. But the Health app, built-in on iPhones, has been causing me a lot of grief lately. What started as an innocent interest in the number of steps I take has grown into an issue. Is tracking steps a helpful tool for becoming more active? Or is it more damaging than helpful in this context, that is, is it easier to associate the level of physical activity with productivity and, by extension, self-worth? I propose to explore the differences between pre-pandemic walks and what I’ve been calling corona walks/COVID walks.

A weekly report on the Health app.

Before the pandemic, I knew that my phone had an app installed that tracked my steps. I would look at it occasionally out of curiosity but did not feel compelled to check it often. Then, the pandemic began, and suddenly almost all options for spending time outside seemed dangerous. My relationship with walking started to shift. Going on walks became a promise for a better mood and a better day. The alternative was dire, sitting in a studio apartment, breathing stagnant air, unmoving and worrying about the future. I would walk to take my mind off things and to have at least some variety in an otherwise homogenous routine.

Soon, I found myself performing for my phone. I would check it during walks to see what mark I was hitting. Am I over 5,000 steps, or still around 3,000? When the weather was bad, I would sometimes pace back and forth at home, phone in hand, watching as it registered each step. As an avid social media user, I had found another way to gain instant gratification. I watched the numbers go up and felt better about myself. Until I felt like I’ve performed enough. Then I would leave the app alone, until the next day. Rinse and repeat. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Artist Stanley Brouwn’s manual step-tracker app. “A Distance of 336 Steps” (1971).

My granddad, a now-retired but still academically active professor, loves to walk. Like many, he believes that walking clears his head and helps him come up with good ideas. I grew up believing that going on walks can solve a lot of things. Above all, it offers a new perspective, getting rid of stagnant energy and providing needed stimuli.

I appreciate the physical and psychological benefits of walking. But being an able-bodied person without a driver’s license or a car means that walking is also my most reliable form of transportation, especially when using public transport is not advised (but, of course, sometimes necessary). So, I find it hard to separate a utility walk from a leisurely walk. I walk fast because I am used to walking to get somewhere, do something. Living in the Netherlands changed this a bit, as now I rely on my bike to run errands. But the habit of walking “with purpose” persists. Even now, over a year into my corona walks, it seems I cannot slow down.

Asking around

I asked on my Instagram story if my friends and acquaintances cared how many steps they were taking and if they used an app to measure their physical activity. Forty people responded, most of them reporting that step counts did not matter that much. But the split was almost even between those who used health apps and those who did not. (See below.) This suggests that some people have health apps, either built-in or downloaded willingly, but they do not check up on them daily, or tracked activities other than walking.

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I wanted to know more about other people’s experiences over the last year, so I asked a few close friends about their changing relationship to walking. James said that before the pandemic, he did not go on leisure walks as his job required him to stay on his feet all day. But nowadays, he says, “I always feel better after a walk, even if there were too many people or my feet hurt.” He elaborates: “I had my first proper cry on a walk in about three years. I’ve never felt claustrophobic in my flat but there’s something about how big the outside is that it just felt right, to fill the space.” I love this perspective. It makes me think that going on walks nowadays is a more embodied way to experience something outside of ourselves, something more tangible and fulfilling than observing an endless stream of information online.

According to John Wylie, landscapes represent the “creative tension of self and world.”[1] So, experiencing a changing landscape can be a way to reconcile something within ourselves, exploring these tensions. Corona walks are also about control. Living through a pandemic is an extreme exercise in letting go, accepting there are some events and consequences we cannot influence or neutralise. So, we go outside to be somewhat in charge of our surroundings. The views change as we walk, serving as a reminder that time continues to pass outside of our homes, outside of ourselves. Still, a level of unpredictability prevails, even on a calm walk.

Walking around Leiden last summer.

Frédéric Gros is a philosopher of walking. In an old Guardian interview, he said: “You can be replaced at your work, but not on your walk. Living, in the deepest sense, is something that no one else can do for us.”[2] Do we walk to prove to ourselves we are alive, living, and moving through time? It makes sense to me. Walking grounds me, connects me with my body, and helps me relate to other walking, thinking bodies who walked before me.

Walking is also a manifestation of slowness. It is a refusal to optimise, streamline, be efficient and generate profit. Walking requires your attention, and (usually) gets you away from your working self. It asks you to slow down and take stock. This is why I see it as a challenge. My habits speed up my walking pace as my mind starts to wander towards work plans, ideas, anxieties. This inability to take a break is a product of late-stage capitalism. Even when I try to think about something else, it creeps back in, beckoning me to do more, quicker, better, promising I will feel more useful if I increase my productivity. But I do not want to give in. So why am I still compelled to know how far I’ve walked?

Today’s everyday technology allows us to measure everything, monitor performance. Media outlets advise us how to be on our A-game, and how to cut out whatever is unnecessary. But who gets to decide what is and isn’t urgent, needed? Why should I feel compelled to shove my phone under my pillow each night to let it track the quality of my sleep? To go on walks with my phone in hand, feeding it a stream of information about my whereabouts? I do not see how I can benefit from these forms of self-surveillance. Sometimes I wish we could go back to a time when phones allowed for communication and not much else. But we cannot go back. We have to face the privacy threats that come with our wearable personal technologies.

Nostalgic about everyday technology. Artist Maya Man’s Are.na page

There must be a middle ground. Perhaps it is time I disable “Fitness Tracking” on my phone altogether and move however and whenever I want. I do not want to perform for my phone anymore. I want to peel away from it and enjoy time apart.

Looking inwards

Independent, aimless walking allows us to step into ourselves and think about how we relate to the wider world; the actual world, out there, continuing to change even if we are not walking through it and witnessing it. Gros talks about how walking helps to go into autopilot mode, during which we synchronise with our bodies and glide for hours at a time (if your health allows it). This perspective makes walking sound like a primordial, almost ritualistic activity. Why not? Magic has been syphoned out of Western everyday life. Walking can be a vessel for restoring some of that meaning into our routines A refusal to hurry and perform labour makes space for meaningful connections with ourselves and our surroundings.

In the Nintendo Switch game “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” you have the choice of travelling around Hyrule on foot or a horse. Sure, the horse can take me around faster, but I quickly find myself missing the slower pace of walking in-game, and how much easier it is to notice the details I would have otherwise missed.

Exploring the landscapes in “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” on Nintendo Switch.

When I talked to my friend Max about corona walking, he said: “I kind of like having my phone tracking steps, but maybe that just comes from growing up playing video games. I like to know the stats from time to time.” I get that, and it is hard to remove ourselves from measuring our performance. Maybe I am making it sound all too serious. If walking can be a ritual, I don’t see why it can’t also be a game. If we treat our data with some distance, we refuse to be controlled by it. Gamifying everyday tasks can be another way to restore some of the joy and spontaneity we’d lost through excessive planning and obsessive control over our performance.

Maybe we are in a contemporary digital panopticon, willingly giving ourselves over to constant surveillance in exchange for surface-level interactions? Foucault says that a participant in a panopticon structure “is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.”[3] Our phones were meant to be communication devices, but they act more like data extraction devices. We are given a degree of seeing and engaging, but the price we pay is high – boredom, dissatisfaction, inaction, radicalisation.

I am unsure how to find a way out of this mess. In fact, I might have internalised the panopticon, watching myself from the watchtower as I sit in the cell, pacing and watching the numbers go up. But it can change. I can refuse to participate in the spectacle of constantly measuring myself and my self-worth based on faulty interpretations of productivity. I am growing less interested in my performance, my stats. Doesn’t that take away some of its power?

I have been in locked-down Amsterdam longer than pre-corona Amsterdam. It is sad, but it’s also something I cannot change. So, I go on walks. I see new sights as I glide around town, growing more familiar with these spaces. Sometimes, I catch myself worrying about my stats. Other times, I allow myself to just be, and for that to be enough. Change isn’t linear, but by consistently questioning and readjusting our positioning to digital power structures, we might begin to take back some of the power that self-surveillance holds.

References

[1] John Wylie, “Landscape and Phenomenology” in Routledge Guide to Landscapes; p. 62

[2] The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/20/frederic-gros-walk-nietzsche-kant [Accessed 28 April]

[3]  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200

Translating ‘Les Philosophes’: A Collaborative Challenge

Translating 'Les Philosophes': A Collaborative Challenge

by Felicity Gush and Rosie Rigby

We embarked on the project to translate Palissot’s Les Philosophes as a class in our second year at Oxford. Many of us were in the process of working on our 17th- and 18th-century French period papers for finals guided by Jess. Theatre in a variety of forms made up a large part of our studies for this paper. We not only read the texts, but also learnt about the theatres themselves as social, physical and political spaces. This context and understanding of the period helped to inform our decisions and thinking around how best to translate Palissot’s play.

After having read the play ourselves in French, we sat down in a translation class in Jess’ office in Catz and looked over an existing English translation of the text by Frank J. Morlock. This was a springboard for us; it allowed us to discuss what we’d do differently, what we liked and disliked about its style, word choice or sense of the meaning and ultimately what a good translation looks like in our eyes. The key goals we took out of this were to capture the sense of the French, capture the period and use as idiomatic English as possible. Obviously this project was different to our experience of translation thus far, as we were translating as a group, rather than as individuals. For every other task at university we are encouraged to develop our own, unique writing style, however this project was not about us as individuals, but as a team. It was important for us to make sure that the reader could not identify where one translator started and another stopped, and so we worked hard together in order to create a style in which we could all feel comfortable writing, and which reflected the collaborative nature of the project.

Early on in the process, we realised that to ensure a smooth reading experience, we would have to ensure the style and approach was consistent across the whole piece. An example of this would be our decision to treat certain key terms, such as philosophe, in the same way throughout. As philosophecarries with it a certain weight that philosopher does not in the English, we decided to leave the term untranslated for the majority of the play.

Typical of a play of its time, Les Philosophesis written in the alexandrine form. This 12 syllable form does not exist in the English language, and so we chose something that was equally classic: iambic pentameter. It quickly became clear that when translating we could either have rhythm or we could have rhyme, but it would be very difficult to ensure we had both. This choice, although integral to maintaining a sense of authenticity, posed a real challenge to idiomatic translation.

There were also further details to consider, such as what might be necessarily untranslatable. There are frequent uses of cultural references that are deeply rooted in the philosophesociety of the late 17th century. Many of the scenes, specifically Act 2:3, rely heavily on references to works and authors as Cydalise, Valère and Théophraste attempt to prove their wits. We discussed whether or not to translate these titles into English or leave them in French, concluding to leave them; whilst leaving them in the French might hinder the reader’s understanding, it certainly helped maintain the air of intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake. Take for example, in Act 2 scene 3, the reference to Diderot’s,Le Fils naturel. Translated into English, this title has the same rhythm and number of syllables, but loses some of its aloofness and almost unapproachable nature. Keeping the French titles makes them contrast the rest of the text, and holds the English speaking reader at a distance from the characters who think their intellect makes them superior.

We translated the very first scene together in class, throwing ideas around and bouncing off each other. Working on an online document meant that we could all edit in real time, leave notes and comments and build up the translation collaboratively. From then on, we translated scenes and sections individually adding them to the online document and coming together fortnightly to discuss our progress, the potential stumbling blocks and how to overcome them. Every session we worked in pairs with different people on our versions and edited the translations, cutting out the forced rhymes or misunderstandings and putting our brains together for the right word, idiom or sense.

Avoiding anachronisms was a challenge; when translating, we decided early on that it was important to ensure the text was clearly from the 18th century, because the play embodied the cultural and intellectual issues of its time. However, we also wanted to make sure that the text was approachable to a modern day audience. This was where translating as a group really became an asset: we could bring our suggestions to the group and workshop them, to make sure that they did not sound too antiquated, or have an air of forced theatrics. Being able to work as a team like this was a privilege, and was definitely an approach to work that is rarely experienced at Oxford. It was great to understand the different ways to tackle a translation and to see how our collaborative, real-time editing process ultimately produced a more successful final product than if we had each worked alone. This project taught us so many skills about how to shape a project effectively as a team, how to communicate and criticise sensitively and constructively and even gave us a taste of remote working as we worked on the drafts on our year abroad dotted across the world! These skills have all proved invaluable, some in more unexpected ways than others. The pivot to open book translation exams for our finals meant we could draw on our experience of this different style of translation more readily and, as we entered the newly-remote working world, we’ve found ourselves more at ease and confident to tackle collaborative projects.

We must end on a huge thank you to Jess, not only for giving us the opportunity to take part in this project, but also for her enthusiasm and expertise and the enormous amount of time she invested in the project and in us.

'The Philosophes' by Charles Palissot is an open access title available to read and download for free here.

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions

Haitian Radio //
Radyo Ayisyen

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Last week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life.

The sweeping stories of Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University), its more than 5300 recordings fully digitized and described in English, French and Haitian Creole) come together in this all too brief account. Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording and wrote the descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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For four years, I spent forty hours a week in a cubicle in a converted tobacco warehouse with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, listening to and describing the entire audio archive of Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter. Though my title was “project archivist,” I am not an archivist by training. But I am compelled to compile, assemble, and preserve stories from lost people and lost worlds. Sound is more intimate than printed words or video. Video can easily feel dated. With sound, voices are inside your head, as close as another person can be. As I processed the Radio Haiti collection, I would forget that many of the voices I heard every day belonged to people I never knew in life. Sometimes in my dreams I would see the station’s director, Jean Dominique, alive and laughing.

Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas
Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas working in the studio in 1995, image courtesy of the author

Radio Haïti-Inter was inaugurated in 1972. Dominique, an agronomist by training, quickly became the most recognized journalist in Haiti. His professional partner and wife, Michèle Montas, Radio Haiti’s news editor, was a Columbia Journalism School graduate who trained several generations of Haitian journalists. Dominique was part Ida B. Wells, part Edward R. Murrow, part Sy Hersh, part Studs Terkel, part Hunter S. Thompson. He was an investigative journalist who uncovered human rights abuses, government corruption, and corporate malfeasance. He was an activist who possessed the charisma of a theater star, the crackling wit of a satirist, and the public intellectual’s gift for insight and analysis. When Dominique was assassinated on April 3, 2000, more than fifteen thousand mourners attended his funeral.

In 2013, Montas donated the archive of Radio Haïti-Inter — more than 1600 open-reel tapes, more than 2000 audio cassettes, and approximately 100 linear feet of paper records — to Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, under the condition that it be digitized and made available to the widest possible public in Haiti. Today,  the Radio Haiti Archive is a free, publicly accessible, trilingual digital collection. Its more than 5300 audio recordings represent the most comprehensive archive of late 20th-century Haitian history. Radio Haiti still speaks, despite government repression, multiple exiles, the assassination of Dominique, the attempted assassination of Montas in December 2002, the closure of the station in 2003, and the 2010 earthquake. That the archive exists is a miracle. 

Revive Haiti-Inter
Flyer calling to “Revive Haiti-Inter,” ad for the solidarity campaign to reopen the station in 1986, image courtesy of the author

According to its mission statement, the Rubenstein Library “builds distinctive collections of original materials and preserves them for use on campus and around the world. In support of Duke University’s mission of ‘knowledge in service to society,’ we collect a diversity of voices in a wide range of formats… We invite students, scholars, and the general public to explore the world through our unique collections.” In other words, the library seeks to preserve the voices of marginalized people, and make various kinds of materials (including sonic media) available to audiences beyond Duke, the United States, and academia.

In Radio Haiti’s broadcasts, rural farmers, activists from poor urban neighborhoods, sex workers, marketwomen, Vodou patriarchs, and refugees narrate vivid stories of their lives and worlds. The aurality of radio allowed speakers and listeners who were not traditionally literate to participate in the political life of Haiti. Likewise, the aurality of the Radio Haiti collection makes it a trove of information that appears nowhere else. It is invaluable for academic researchers and ordinary audiences alike. It is a people’s history of Haiti, told through voices that are silenced in the written record.

While libraries in poor countries like Haiti lack the resources to process audiovisual materials, wealthy institutions in wealthy countries also deemphasize sonic archives. Audiovisual archives are expensive and difficult to preserve, digitize, and make discoverable; as a result, many projects, including Radio Haiti, depend on external grants. Unlike written records, audio is difficult to skim, and hard for researchers to use. The rights considerations are often fraught. And in the case of Radio Haiti, the audio is in Haitian Creole and French. All of these factors made Radio Haiti a complex project. But I believe the complexity of a project like Radio Haiti could be mitigated if institutions were to truly make custodianship of marginalized collections a priority. 

Processing Radio Haiti was intellectually and psychologically challenging. I heard former political prisoners describe horrific torture. I cried as mothers described how the army slaughtered their sons at a peaceful demonstration in 1986. I cried as Michèle Montas addressed her listeners for after her husband’s assassination. But it was not my trauma. This project was challenging because I am not Haitian, but it was also easier because the anguish was not my own. I understood the archive’s importance, but I did not feel the pain in my bones. 

Jean Dominique and the people who mourn him
Crowds of people mourning Jean Dominique, image from the Radio Haiti Archive Twitter page

Though the contents could be heavy, this project was difficult mainly because the current practices of US academic libraries are incompatible with a project like Radio Haiti. For the last year and a half of the project, there was no remaining grant money or internal funding for an intern fluent in Haitian Creole or French to earn a living wage. When I proposed seeking additional funding to support an intern, I was told it would be unfair to other staff who are likewise underpaid. I had to describe the collection alone. In order to finish before my own grant-funded salary ran out, I listened to and created multilingual narrative description for an average of ten recordings a day. Every day was a race against time. I was reprimanded for “overdescribing” the audio: “You are the archivist, not a researcher. Don’t do the researcher’s job for them.” Library leadership and I did not share the same objectives. Despite their mission statement and commitment to digitize Radio Haiti and make it available to the Haitian public, they still considered traditional academic researchers the target audience, while I was thinking of ordinary people in Haiti, trying to access the audio on a secondhand smartphone with a limited data plan.

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor ask, “what happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of recordkeepers and archivists less as sentinels of accountability… and more as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility?” They call for empathy between the archivist and the creators, subjects, users, and audience of the archive. My sense of empathy was a source of strength, pushing me honor the voices in the archive. I believed that “slow processing” — providing detailed, trilingual description of each Radio Haiti recording — was a necessary act of empathy, and the only way to make the collection truly available to Haitian audiences. I feared that if I provided only “minimal description,” Radio Haiti’s audio would remain lost. 

The work left me physically and emotionally exhausted. I began to have panic attacks. At a staff meeting, one of my colleagues wondered “if we are giving Laura the support she needs.” The meeting continued, as though she had not spoken. Months later, an administrator said I needed “strategies for self-care.” “Self-care,” which places the responsibility onto the individual worker, is not a solution to burnout. What I needed were more resources.

Broadcasting from Radio Haiti-Inter
Employees broadcasting from Radio Haiti-Inter,  Fritzson Orius in foreground, image courtesy of the author

Like everyone else in the neoliberal US university, archivists are bound by concrete considerations of political economy. They are being asked to do more with less: they must eliminate backlogs and process more collections more quickly, without improvements in salary, staffing, or workspace. Library work remains a feminized profession, one that downplays and erases the intellectual labor of those workers who simply “process” collections. The archivist is the invisible technician, while researchers make “discoveries.” And so my intent is not to impugn any individual. Rather, I point to the structural factors and cultural attitudes — including institutional white supremacy — that make traditional archives inhospitable to collections like Radio Haiti. 

Former archivist Jarrett Drake contends that “the purpose of the archival profession is to curate the past, not confront it; to entrench inequality, not eradicate it; to erase black lives, not ennoble them.” I am a white American woman with a Ph.D. My personal experiences were not comparable to those of archivists and scholars of color who confront racism regularly. But this experience revealed how collections like Radio Haiti are subjected to racist violence. The Radio Haiti collection was created by and for Black people. It is a collection that centers the voices, perspectives, and experiences of Black people. It is a sonic archive, in a field that prioritizes traditional paper collections. It is a collection that is largely in Haitian Creole, a disparaged language spoken mostly by Black people. It is a collection from a country that has been colonized, exploited, invaded, occupied, vilified, pitied, embargoed, evangelized, and intervened upon for centuries. And finally, it is a collection whose primary audience is not anglophone academics, but Haitian people. 

Portion of resistance mural
Part of a painting of the outside of Radio Haiti-Inter addressing the assassination of Jean Dominique, image from the Radio Haiti Archive Twitter page

Many library workers do extraordinary work to combat systemic white supremacy. But can low-level staff create change when the larger institution remains hidebound? Bringing Radio Haiti back to Haiti required relentless intellectual work, passion, and love. To represent diverse voices and make a collection like Radio Haiti truly accessible to a worldwide public, traditional archival institutions must undergo a radical transformation. They must confront assumptions about what makes a collection “difficult to process,” commit resources to collections that foreground the voices of marginalized people, and support the work of staff who give those collections the care they deserve.

Featured Image: Picture of a painting of Radio Haiti tied to a cross with the inscription (in translation): “The proverb goes: each firefly lights the way for itself [every man for himself]. We say: unity makes strength. Let’s help Radio Haiti-Inter lay its cross down so that it is not crucified.” Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

From 2015 to 2019, Laura Wagner was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her writings on the earthquake and the Radio Haiti project have appeared in SlateSalonsx archipelagos, PRI’s The World, and other venues. She is also the author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, a young adult novel about the earthquake and its aftermath, which was published by Abrams/Amulet in 2015. She is currently working on a book about Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive.

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program–Chelsea M. Daniel and Samantha Ege

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions

Haitian Radio //
Radyo Ayisyen

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Last week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life.

The sweeping stories of Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University), its more than 5300 recordings fully digitized and described in English, French and Haitian Creole) come together in this all too brief account. Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording and wrote the descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

—-

For four years, I spent forty hours a week in a cubicle in a converted tobacco warehouse with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, listening to and describing the entire audio archive of Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter. Though my title was “project archivist,” I am not an archivist by training. But I am compelled to compile, assemble, and preserve stories from lost people and lost worlds. Sound is more intimate than printed words or video. With sound, voices are inside your head, as close as another person can be. As I processed the Radio Haiti collection, I would forget that many of the voices I heard every day belonged to people I never knew in life. Sometimes in my dreams I would see the station’s director, Jean Dominique, alive and laughing.

Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas
Jean Dominique and Michèle Montas working in the studio in 1995, image courtesy of the author

Radio Haïti-Inter was inaugurated in the early 1970s. Dominique, an agronomist by training, quickly became the most recognized journalist in Haiti. His professional partner and wife, Michèle Montas, Radio Haiti’s news editor, was a Columbia Journalism School graduate who trained several generations of Haitian journalists. Dominique was part Ida B. Wells, part Edward R. Murrow, part Sy Hersh, part Studs Terkel, part Hunter S. Thompson. He was an investigative journalist who uncovered human rights abuses, government corruption, and corporate malfeasance. He was an activist who possessed the charisma of a theater star, the crackling wit of a satirist, and the public intellectual’s gift for insight and analysis. After Dominique was assassinated on April 3, 2000, more than fifteen thousand mourners attended his funeral.

In 2013, Montas donated the archive of Radio Haïti-Inter — more than 1600 open-reel tapes, more than 2000 audio cassettes, and approximately 100 linear feet of paper records — to Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, under the condition that it be digitized and made available to the widest possible public in Haiti. Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council on Library and Information Resources, today the Radio Haiti Archive is a free, publicly accessible, trilingual digital collection. Its over 5300 audio recordings represent the most comprehensive archive of late 20th-century Haitian history. Radio Haiti still speaks, despite government repression, multiple exiles, the assassination of Dominique, the attempted assassination of Montas in December 2002, the closure of the station in 2003, and the 2010 earthquake. That the archive exists is a miracle. 

Revive Haiti-Inter
Flyer calling to “Revive Haiti-Inter,” ad for the solidarity campaign to reopen the station in 1986, image courtesy of the author

According to its mission statement, the Rubenstein Library “builds distinctive collections of original materials and preserves them for use on campus and around the world. In support of Duke University’s mission of ‘knowledge in service to society,’ we collect a diversity of voices in a wide range of formats… We invite students, scholars, and the general public to explore the world through our unique collections.” the library seeks to preserve the voices of marginalized people, and make various kinds of materials (including sonic media) available to audiences beyond Duke, beyond the United States, and beyond academia.

In Radio Haiti’s broadcasts, rural farmers, activists from poor urban neighborhoods, sex workers, marketwomen, Vodou patriarchs, and refugees narrate vivid stories of their lives and worlds. The aurality of radio allowed speakers and listeners who were not traditionally literate to participate in the political life of Haiti. Likewise, the aurality of the Radio Haiti collection makes it a trove of information that appears nowhere else. It is invaluable for academic researchers and ordinary audiences alike. It is a people’s history of Haiti, told through voices that are silenced in the written record.

Most libraries in poor countries like Haiti lack the resources to restore, digitize, and process audiovisual materials, but wealthy institutions in wealthy countries tend to neglect sonic archives. Unlike written records, audio is difficult to skim, and therefore harder for researchers to use. The rights considerations are often fraught. Audiovisual archives are expensive and difficult to preserve, digitize, and process; as a result, many projects, including Radio Haiti, depend on highly competitive external grants. While these days many universities prize Black archival collections (sometimes to the point of commodification, as Steven G. Fullwood argues), it’s another matter when those collections are audio, especially non-English language audio. In Radio Haiti’s case, the audio is in Haitian Creole and French. All of these factors made Radio Haiti a complex project. But I believe the complexity of a project like Radio Haiti could be mitigated if institutions were to truly make custodianship of marginalized collections a priority. In other words, some of the complexity isn’t inherent to the collection, but rather to the system that was not built to accommodate it.

As I processed Radio Haiti, I ached for the cane-cutters that the Duvalier dictatorship effectively sold to the Dominican Republic, former political prisoners describing horrific torture,  and migrants risking their life at sea. But it was not my trauma. In some ways, this project was challenging because I am not Haitian, but it was also easier because the anguish was not my own. I understood the archive’s importance, but I did not feel the pain in my bones. 

Jean Dominique and the people who mourn him
Crowds of people mourning Jean Dominique, image from the Radio Haiti Archive Twitter page

So, yes, the material in the archive could be heavy, but the project was difficult mainly because the current practices of US academic libraries are incompatible with a project like Radio Haiti. For the last year and a half of the project, there was no remaining grant money or internal funding for an intern fluent in Haitian Creole or French to earn a living wage. When I proposed seeking additional funding to support an intern to help describe the audio, I was told it would be unfair to other staff who are likewise underpaid. In order to finish before my own grant-funded salary ran out, I listened to and created multilingual narrative description for an average of ten recordings a day. Every day was a race against time. I was reprimanded for “overdescribing” the audio, and told, “Don’t do the researcher’s job for them.” Library leadership and I did not share the same objectives. Despite their stated commitment to digitize Radio Haiti and make it available to the Haitian public, they still considered traditional academic researchers the target audience, while I was thinking of ordinary people in Haiti, trying to access the audio on a secondhand smartphone with a limited data plan.

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor ask, “what happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of recordkeepers and archivists less as sentinels of accountability… and more as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility?” They call for empathy between the archivist and the creators, subjects, users, and audience of the archive. I believed that “slow processing” — providing detailed, trilingual description of each Radio Haiti recording — was a necessary act of empathy, and the only way to honor the voices in the archive and make the collection truly available to Haitian audiences. If I provided only “minimal description,” Radio Haiti’s audio would remain lost. 

The work was exhausting. I began to have panic attacks. One administrator encouraged me to develop “strategies for self-care.” “Self-care,” which places the responsibility onto the individual worker, is not a solution to burnout. What I needed were more resources.

Broadcasting from Radio Haiti-Inter
Employees broadcasting from Radio Haiti-Inter,  Fritzson Orius in foreground, image courtesy of the author

Like everyone else in the neoliberal US university, archivists are bound by concrete considerations of political economy. They are being asked to do more with less: they must eliminate backlogs and process more collections more quickly, without improvements in salary, staffing, or workspace. Library work remains a feminized profession, one that downplays and erases the intellectual labor of those workers who “merely” process collections. The archivist is the invisible technician, while researchers discover. And so my intent is not to impugn any individual. Rather, I point to the structural factors and cultural attitudes — including institutional white supremacy — that make traditional archives inhospitable to collections like Radio Haiti. 

Former archivist Jarrett Drake contends that “the purpose of the archival profession is to curate the past, not confront it; to entrench inequality, not eradicate it; to erase black lives, not ennoble them.” As a white American woman, my personal experiences were obviously not comparable to those of archivists and scholars of color who endure racism regularly, but my time as the Radio Haiti project archivist revealed to me how Black archival collections are subjected to structural racism. The Radio Haiti collection was created by and for Black people. It centers the voices, perspectives, and experiences of Black people. It is a sonic archive, in a field that prioritizes traditional paper collections. It is largely in Haitian Creole, a disparaged language spoken mostly by Black people. It is from a country that has been colonized, exploited, invaded, occupied, vilified, pitied, embargoed, evangelized, and intervened upon for centuries. And finally, its primary audience is not anglophone academics, but Haitian people. 

Portion of resistance mural
Part of a painting of the outside of Radio Haiti-Inter addressing the assassination of Jean Dominique, image from the Radio Haiti Archive Twitter page

Many library workers at predominantly white institutions make extraordinary efforts to combat systemic white supremacy, but low-level staff cannot create change when the larger institution remains hidebound. Bringing Radio Haiti back to Haiti required intellectual work, passion, and love. To represent diverse voices and make a collection like Radio Haiti truly accessible to a worldwide public, traditional archival institutions must undergo a radical transformation. They must confront assumptions about what makes a collection “difficult to process,” commit resources to collections that foreground the voices of marginalized people, and support the work of staff who give those collections the care they deserve.

Editor’s Note: Minor changes have been made since publication for clarity and to add links to sources. Nothing substantive has been changed. 12:48 PM EST, 5/3/2021

Featured Image: Picture of a painting of Radio Haiti tied to a cross with the inscription (in translation): “The proverb goes: each firefly lights the way for itself [every man for himself]. We say: unity makes strength. Let’s help Radio Haiti-Inter lay its cross down so that it is not crucified.” Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

From 2015 to 2019, Laura Wagner was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her writings on the earthquake and the Radio Haiti project have appeared in SlateSalonsx archipelagos, PRI’s The World, and other venues. She is also the author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, a young adult novel about the earthquake and its aftermath, which was published by Abrams/Amulet in 2015. She is currently working on a book about Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive.

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

Black Excellence on the Airwaves: Nora Holt and the American Negro Artist Program–Chelsea M. Daniel and Samantha Ege

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Formless Formation

Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World Sandra Ruiz & Hypatia Vourloumis Formless Formation is an experimental project conceived and co-authored by two performance theorists working in critical aesthetics and political thought. The book is an insurgent revolt, walking side by side with plural and planetary anticolonial forces organizing against debt, expropriative extractive capital, environmental catastrophe, and the militarized policing … Continue reading →

Copy before you transfer. Digital archiving strategies with nGbK Berlin

Collectivity, copying, care. Sharing knowledge is key; no one should be irreplaceable. Copy before you transfer. Care about your content and be transparent about your biases, as archiving is never truly objective.

Last Friday, the Networks of Care event series initiated by nGbK Berlin took place. Artist Cornelia Sollfrank introduced Old Boys Network (OBN), a cyberfeminist alliance from the late 1990s in need of archiving and preserving today. Guests revealed their archiving experiences, strategies and pitfalls they encountered while building archives of different types, ranging from initiatives started by national institutions to self-organised independent projects. 

Going into this, I wanted to develop a better understanding the challenges of digital archiving. Now I appreciate the importance of the commons and care in the context of these cultural practices. I will share the most insightful points from the event, and reflect on the significance of informed and honest archive-making.

Sollfrank explained that OBN was hard to define and pin down. It aimed to facilitate discussions about cyberfeminism through research, experimentation and direct action. She noted the challenges of documenting a shapeshifting organisation; sometimes a network, sometimes a group, or a collective with an aesthetic dimension.

OBN home page (click on image to visit).

The talks

Curator Mela Dávial-Freire reflected on the difficulties Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid had archiving materials that belonged to local LGBTQ+ activist groups from the 1990s. Posters, banners, and photographs of demonstrations exposed different archiving issues. Some materials were kept in multiple spaces, their authors/makers were often unknown, and emotional involvement complicated acquiring and circulating the content. Dávial-Freire noted that the project unbalanced the musem’s collection, which gathered millions of documents to date. This was a good thing, as it made the institution reconsider its archiving strategies.

Art scholar Michael Hiltbrunner explained his practical approach to archive-making while gathering information about the early days of the F+F School of Experimental Design (now the F+F School of Art and Design, in Zürich). He worked with time witnesses from the 1970s, when the school was founded, and maintained positive relationships with individuals who provide insights, leads and materials. The goal for his project was to create a platform that has an openness to it, one that allows interaction.

Monoskop founder Dušan Barok noted the importance of working with independent servers. Monoskop’s server allows other websites to use it as a host, free of charge, and offers basic maintenance tools. He clarified that while running a server is not a precondition for creating a digital archive, it is a good solution. He stressed that we should be wary of the current trend of storing information in “the cloud,” as they routinely run statistics and analytics of users.

Monoskop’s main page right now (click to visit)

Curator and cultural worker Laurence Rassel urged everyone to consider sustainability from the beginning of the project, going as far as asking: “What happens when the archivist dies? Who knows how the archive works, how to add to it and maintain it?” Based on her experience as director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, where she opened the archive some ten years ago, she highlighted the importance of using free and open-source software. She also mentioned that being transparent with the public and cultural workers about each step of archive-building should not be overlooked.

The aftermath

Based on the talks, I identified overarching themes and most valuable advice: collectivity, copying, care. Sharing knowledge is key. No one should be irreplaceable, and their knowledge should not disappear when they do. Copy content before you transfer. Care about your work and the networks that are involved in its creation and maintenance. Be transparent about your biases, as archiving is never neutral.

In the discussion, a point was raised about the untouchability of archives. Some participants believed that archives are ever-changing, and that with each interaction, they shift just a little into something different. Others said that the value of an archive lies in its autonomy; people may interact with the content or add information, but the very nature of the archive should remain unchanged. I tend to side with the first camp, seeing interaction as added value, but I understand the core of an archiving project should be respected.

I wish there had been enough time during the event to discuss what strategies may be used to build the OBN archive. However, it seems like the project has just begun. I am sure the discussions gave ideas to the OBN team. The meeting left me wondering about the fragility of archives, how we rely on them always being there, but may be disappointed to find traces instead. Digital archivisation does not lift the anxiety of losing content, and comes with its own set of challenges; technical, logistical, even emotional.

Nothing lasts forever. One day, archivists, their archives, and anyone interested in them will be gone. There is no way of telling when this happens. But maybe it doesn’t matter. It is up to us at this moment to decide what feels urgent, and how to record it and share it for as long as it retains a degree of importance. 

Kaucylia Brooke’s “Boy Mechanic” project, documenting the disappearance of lesbian bars in the US and Germany. [Cologne Edition, 2004]

I wrote my master thesis on the ways artistic research activates engagements with queer temporalities. I focused on projects that utilised archives, used archiving strategies, and/or acted as archives themselves. While archival artworks operate on a different set of priorities than the projects discussed during this event, there are similarities between them. In my research, among themes of nostalgia, longing and speculative thinking, I identified an overwhelming sense of community; a desire to relate to others across time (and space), coming together in the present to establish these connections. The question of how to build sustainable digital archives is multifaceted, especially now that cultural events happen almost exclusively online. What traces do they leave? Do archivists recognise their power as individuals who decide what to record, and what to discard? It is clear that only collaborative, transparent efforts can preserve content that would otherwise fade and dissipate, way before its time.

“To stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours… It is in these ecstatic moments that we arrive (or move inexorably towards) collective potentiality.” – José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009).

Earth Day and the Beauty We Love

Earth Day and the Beauty We Love

by Sam Mickey

Beginning with photographs taken in the 1940s, space exploration made possible numerous pictures of Earth taken from outside of the planet’s atmosphere, of which one of the most famous is the 1968 photograph of Earth taken from the moon, “Earthrise.” Seen from the vantage point of the moon, Earth puts humankind in context, conveying a sense of the unity of the Earth community. There are many important differences that distinguish humans from one another and from the more-than-human inhabitants and habitats of Earth. Yet, as pictures of the whole Earth indicate, those differences take place in one planetary context. No matter how different we are, whether human or nonhuman, we are earthlings. Common ground for cultural interactions and political negotiations is right here in our literally common ground, our singular homeland—Earth.

At around the same time that pictures of Earth began circulating widely, a science of the whole Earth began to emerge—Gaia theory, more commonly known today as Earth systems science. There is much to celebrate about this increasingly clear view of Earth, but any such celebration comes with a poignant irony. At the same time scientists were becoming aware of the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of Earth, they were becoming increasingly aware that the life, land, air, and water of Earth are in critical condition due to the rapacious growth of industrial societies fueled by ancient lifeforms fossilized in coal, oil, and natural gas. Celebrations of our planetary home must reckon with grief and mourning for all that has been lost, and they must face the challenge of protecting and regenerating all that remains. That was the impetus for the inaugural Earth Day in 1970, which continues to be celebrated worldwide every year on April 22.

Earth Day garners more participation than any other secular holiday. It is a day for joyous attention to the wonders of the planet, and it is also a day for personal and political transformation. This is not to say that Earth Day has been a miraculous success in slowing the pace of environmental destruction. 51 years since its inception, Earth Day has not solved the global ecological crisis. However, that is not its purpose. It is not supposed to solve the existential threat of ecological collapse. It is a reminder that the solutions we need are right under our feet, in our common ground. Solutions do not come from a holiday celebrated once a year. They come from communities connecting with their place on the planet. There are many ways of cultivating those connections, many ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in service of our common home, many ways of preserving the resplendent beauty of the living Earth community. Consider the words of the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi. “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”1

1 Maulana Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi, The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition, translated by Coleman Barks (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 36.

Sam Mickey, PhD, is an Adjunct Professor in the Theology and Religious Studies department and the Environmental Studies program at the University of San Francisco. He has worked for several years at the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. His teaching, writing, and research are oriented around the ethics and ontologies of nonhumans, and the intersection of religious, scientific, and philosophical perspectives on human-Earth relations. He is an author of several books, including Whole Earth Thinking and Planetary Coexistence (2015), Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency (2016), and On the Verge of a Planetary Civilization: A Philosophy of Integral Ecology (2014). He is co-editor (with Sean Kelly and Adam Robbert) of The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era (2017). He is also co-editor of Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing, an open access title available to read and download for free here.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash