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ARCHIVE AND CONFLICT

ARCHIVES AND THE TECHNO-AESTHETICS OF DATAFICATION


Digital technologies have expanded the boundaries of the archive, which is now a liquid territory, with constant flows of information accumulated, examined, selected and processed in real time. In addition tothe power of the archontic impulse, we cannot but recognise its biases, constraints and paradoxes in the capture, ordering, ownership and access of data. We must still insist that the current potential of the archive, positive or negative, is by no means a product of its dematerialisation: in addition to the physicality of the infrastructures of global archiving, we also observe its consequences for human, natural, social and knowledge bodies.


The global data flow through submarine cables frames processes linked to offensive and extractivist apparatuses. We are witnessing a renewed Cold War, which is not only a war of confrontation, but also of numerical information. The possession and employment of these archival technologies will largely determine the geopolitical balance for the rest of the century. Likewise, colonialism no longer ceases with the trading of materials and objects, and with the subordination of cultures and peoples, following a modern/colonial world-system which has been hierarchically organised since the 15th century. On the contrary, it unfolds in the ever-increasing financiarisation of economies, in the commercial streams of migrant people and ideas, and in the datafication of everyday life.


Amidst such numerous subordinations, the insurgencies of political activism and counterculture, of feminism, of decolonial struggles and of ecosocialism, also unfold in a technologised archontic dimension, both in the North and, in a particularly complex way, in the Global South. This research seminar proposes some starting points to address the configurations between archives and the techno-aesthetics of datification, with a special focus on the links between archive and conflict. To this end, in the different presentations, we suggest as central nodes those processes of confrontation, but also of care, that we must navigate in order not to drown in the contemporary infosphere.

 

Keynote Speakers

Daniela Agostinho (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Andrés Maximiliano Tello (Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso)


Guest Speakers

Hasan G. López Sanz (Valencia University, Spain)

Arola Valls (Barcelona University, Spain)

Adolfo Estalella (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España)

Sara Fernández Gómez (Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia)




 

Direction Anna María Guasch, Ana Catarina Pinho

Coordination Pablo Santa Ollala

Report Eirini Grigoriadou

Assistance Chiara Sgaramella

Design Idil Emiroglu

Organisation Global Art Archive, Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Spain / ARCHIVO PLATFORM, Portugal


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