EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY STUDIO

This panel session is designed for artists to present their own work as it relates to archiving-as-art. Given that archiving is a rather large field, the aim here is on speculation, or, building out what near and far futures of archives might be. A second focus that artists bring to this panel is on landscape, broadly conceived. The archive-ness of the work ought to point toward environmental, economic, and social justice narratives based in futurity thinking as they happen in landscapes, or locales. New, radical ways of cataloging built and natural environments, as well as places and objects of political import, therefore, compose the intellectual and aesthetic realm of this panel. In his 1999 book “Pandora’s Hope,” Bruno Latour theorizes the “circulating referent,” the minutiae of how entities move from their interwoven place in the world into the scientific gaze of order and classification. What happens when artists—and specifically printmakers—critically take on the work of creating information about the world? In the presentations—whether digital slideshows and/or the display of printed material—artists are requested to leverage their work samples to contribute to the larger conversation spurred by Latour. Namely, what are the mechanics, tropes, and systems for creatively bringing extant worlds into organizational schemes that help us imagine equitable social and economic futures?

The concept of archiving, generally, pertains to the past (see Hal Foster’s article “An Archival Impulse” from the Fall 2004 issue of October for examples). As such, evoking a speculative archive means that we must think of future states of being, and what those future people will need to know about their own past. Preserving the past for the future is akin to taking a snapshot of the present. In this panel artists are encouraged to manipulate this truism, to toy with the linearity of time and causality. As past and present techniques of archiving merge, it will be fascinating to see how printmakers interject ideas of the printed ledger, indexical relationships, referencing, searching, and accessibility.

Logistically, this panel is meant to consist of 3-4 artist-presenters, and 1-2 respondents. The respondents will be academics, library-information scientists, historians, and/or artists.
If you are interested in participating, please contact Nicholas Bauch at <nbbauch@protonmail.ch> to discuss application, submission, and registration details. Please note that the submission deadline is November 22, 2021.

Thank you for considering--I hope to hear from you!