Urgent Archives (2017)
“Urgent Archives” was published in Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self, edited by Charlotte Cotton and co-published by Aperture and International Center of Photography (2018). The essay was commissioned by Cotton for the book on the occasion of “Public, Private, Secret,” an exhibition curated by Cotton at ICP Museum (for which Printed Web #4 was created as a special project). This essay also appears in Library of the Printed Web: Collected Works, 2013–2017, the book I published cataloguing the Printed Web project when it was acquired by MoMA Library.
“How do we choose what to preserve? Any text, image, threaded conversation, or tweet may be considered a valuable artifact in today’s post-truth condition. While the pressure to save and accumulate is immense, so is our need to curate and amplify particular messages. After the most recent U.S. presidential election, I saw people printing tweets and carrying them high above their heads at protests. Bernie Sanders brought a large, printed tweet to the Senate floor during one debate on healthcare. This act of drawing from digital archives and displaying printed material publicly serves as a material reminder, or proof: at this particular moment, something was said. As each utterance is broadcast, indexed, and archived into our hyperreal state, printing still seems to be one way to control—or at least resist—the narrative. ”