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Jacek
Smolicki

Post-Digital Archives (2017)

Let's say the digital revolution is over. The enthusiasm that ushered in this revolution has since become counter-balanced, if not submerged, by skepticism and disenchantment. And what we are faced with are ubiquitous surveillance, impoverishment of aesthetic experiences and trivialization of social life, the results of an - at once deep and shallow - immersion in the digital and network media. The way we access, record and archive our presence in the world has also been affected. In this post-digital situation, we all engage in some forms of archiving, whether we want to - or not. When interacting with our devices, we archive and are being archived, held captive by a densely woven net of technologies. How can this condition be approached creatively?

Post-Digital Archives was an exhibition that took place between 11th and 20th September 2017 at Inter Arts Center in Malmö. The intention was to create a zone for the exploration of hybrid modes of personal archiving. In a loose and impromptu manner, the event presented on-going work of several practitioners who, in a poetic, humble, renegade, creative and subversive way combine digital and non-digital techniques to record, erase, archive, unarchive, remediate or demediate selected facets of everyday life in the present moment. One of the outcomes that the event gave rise to was a series of post-digital publications combining analog and digital components and focusing on practices concerned with idiosyncratic forms of documentation and archiving of everyday life and public space. More on para-archives.net


Participants: Jacek Smolicki (curating), Olle Essvik, Malin Pettersson Öberg, Nikita Mazurov, Jenny Soep, Ronda Bautista, Lucy N.

The exhibition was followed by 'Notes on Post-Digital Archives', an essay published as part of 'Representations and Reconfigurations of the Digital in Swedish Literature and Art, 1950-2010', Linköping University, and presented at the international conference there in November 2017.

Olle Essvik, For Objects to Come & For Years to Come


Olle Essvik, For Objects to Come & For Years to Come


Jacek Smolicki, Acquainting / On-Going Project


Jacek Smolicki, Acquainting / On-Going Project


Malin Pettersson Öberg, Everyday Archives


Nikita Mazurov, Exothermic Data Liberation


Nikita Mazurov, Exothermic Data Liberation


Ronda Bautista, Have a Nice Parking


Ronda Bautista, Have a Nice Parking


Jenny Soep, Sound Drawing


Jenny Soep, Sound Drawing


Jacek Smolicki, Fragmentarium


Jacek Smolicki, Fragmentarium