INTERFACE

In Spring this year Eleonora Schinella undertook a research project which centred on the idea of Interface as an alternative archive. She found that Interface can be thought of as presenting an alternative perspective on the art world both in terms of the shows that are reviewed and the voices of the reviewers. Eleonora has crystallised some aspects of her research in this article, which is accompanied by a selection of fascinating images by Jennifer Drake who has been exploring archival culture in a different way, a link to Jennifer’s blog follows the article.

Our desire for archiving, writes Jacques Derrida after Sigmund Freud, springs from our need to defy death, to defy the inevitable fading of memories both collective and private. How much more potential do archives acquire, then, in the age of Web 2.0? When Derrida was writing Archive Fever, in 1995, the World Wide Web and e-mails were a booming enterprise, but it was not yet the age of user-generated content. What possibilities are brought to life by user-generated digital archives such as Interface itself?

Archives anchor items in time and bring them into the future. The advantage of digital storage, in this sense, is that it is virtually infinite, both in time and in space: not only is digitally stored information spared from the weathering of physical existence and can, at least in theory, exist forever; but there is also no spatial limit to the amount of items that can be stored.

Archives are also structured, and organic. In their structure, they reflect the order of things as it is interpreted by the institution that has started them. However, their structure is not insensitive to the changes in interest and focus brought about by time itself. As Michel Foucault beautifully puts it in The Archaeology of Knowledge, it is part of the nature of the archive that the collected items “do not withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale”.

What Web 2.0 has done to archives, then, is to take the telescope from the hands of the institutions with sufficient resources to create archives, and to hand it to internet users instead. Especially in an unedited context such as Interface, the hierarchical difference that normally separates the archive user from the archivist shrinks considerably. It is the users who can shape the content of the archive to their taste.

Of course, this is not automatically a positive development for which to praise and thank Web 2.0. The new approach to the internet has also produced monsters: the need for the incessant, real-time sharing for the most trivial aspects of life; the distribution of truth and fabrication with identical ease; and quite simply, the sheer amount of information, superfluous or significant, that is thrown at us every day.

Amid stars and monsters, the active choice of an Interface contributor to single out a particular contemporary art event or exhibition acquires even more significance: it is as much an act of consigning a documentation of the event to posterity, as it is an act of salvaging it from the anonymous mass of information overload. A good portion of Interface users seem to be reasoning in such a way: many of the events documented in it are transient in nature. In fact, performances, one-off events, conferences, public art projects, and student shows feature more prominently on Interface than they do in comparable print media. Even when the reviewed show is a more traditional gallery exhibition, lesser known and more remote galleries find representation amongst the Interface reviews.

This observation becomes particularly interesting when put together with the percentage of practicing artists among Interface users, over two thirds. Perhaps when it is artists rather than magazine critics penning the reviews there is a desire to portray a different arts scene that more often than not remains unexplored in other specialist media.

There is a second ‘type’ of Interface reviewer, however, corresponding also to a different way of using the archive. If one way is moulding the archive to show a reality more suitable and interesting in the eyes of the contributor, the other is to mould your own self through your sheer presence amongst the archive’s writers. Capitalising on the authoritative nature of the archive, Interface is also used by its contributors as a tool for professional development and legitimisation as a critical writer. What can become important is practice  and discipline of writing itself, and more than that  the very act of depositing their writing in the archive.

Of course these two archetypes are not the only two types of contributors or the only two possible purposes for people to choose to update their content on Interface. But they are useful to see how the archive can function as a tool: its orientation towards the future can make you decide to focus on your own written legacy, or on the portrayal of contemporary art that you want to leave. Both areas of interest can be present simultaneously on Interface, or one can prevail on the other at any one time. Foucault suggested in The Archaeology of Knowledge that the underlying principle of an archive becomes more visible the further away in time one is from the archive itself. Interface is perhaps too young a venture to judge what will be its legacy to contemporary art: a documentation of the minute and the transient, or a new generation of arts critics? It is impossible to predict. Because Interface is what its contributors make of it.

By Eleonora Schinella

More information about the images accompanying this article can be found on Jennifer Drake's Projects Unedited Blog

First published: a-n.co.uk November 2009