The Fluid Archive

In Hal Fosters essay The Archival Impulse (2004) he suggests that contemporary art is fused with individuals desire to arrange and juxtapose. He also describes how practitioners elaborate on ‘the found object, image and text’. In considering the notion of ‘fluid archives’ I will pose questions around the use of objects and text in artists digital and material archives within contemporary art practice and how archive narratives are created by the presence of an author. This will also involve an interrogation of the fictional archive and how objects, texts and images are utilised to generate fictive approaches, which impacts upon the continually shifting ‘fluid’ relationship of an audience/user/viewer in the reception of such work.

My own digital archive will be discussed and the methods of construction which include appropriating objects, imagery and text using the mechanised logic of search engines who are ‘co-authors’ in the process, enabling a connection of seemingly random text and information. The archive has recently developed into a research tool and continuing associations are made from its contents meaning that the archive itself functions as the starting point for a variety of separate material art work/objects.

Foster, Hal (2004) OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3–22