To start, two Chicago-based designs on paper as material and medium (figure 1). In 1940, Hungarian multimedia artist, educator and Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy published a brief article, “Make a…
Archive for February, 2021
Collected & Uncollected
In September, 2019, I was invited to speak at a symposium about archives. The premise of the gathering was to imagine new ways of translating archives and immaterial forms of…
Misbegotten
And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel. — Seamus Heaney, transl. Beowulf (2000) This is an excerpt from a longer essay, framed from just before the 2016…
On Less Convenient Histories
Every day, I look at the sepia-tinted photograph that hangs on my refrigerator, but I don’t often see it. The woman at the center of the image has long, coarse…
A Lacuna Follows
“The Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History,” wrote Daniel Defoe at the beginning of The Fortunate…
Math of the Non-visible
Siddhartha Lokanandi, who owns a bookstore and arts event space here in Kufürstenstrasse called Hopscotch, told me two things in our first meeting that he believes to be true about…
The After Archive: Introduction
After the end, or after the beginning, or after we started to write these essays everything changed. I wait for my ability to imagine a relationship with the past or…