Archive Reindex Archive (ARA) is a web-based platform that presents a collection of photographic archives from the National Geographic Magazine issues dating from 1945 to 1955, where visitors can leave annotations of "what they see." The images are masked with a fungus-like layer that represents how a machine sees them, with the aim to reassemble the perception of internalized movements of general viewers' eyes upon encountering the images for the first time. ARA unearths archived remnants of the aftermath of WWII--"expeditious" human movements of global colonization and imperialization and the discrepancies between raw materials, human resources and capital. It collects contemporary annotations that correct, question, and confront the uncomfortable gazes and the given semiotic relationships in the archive to bring a collective means of slow, gentle recuperation to those subject to alterity. ARA is a full collaboration between Ivetta and Kii through which Ivetta’s interests in linguistics, poetics, and ethnographic indexicality studies and Kii’s interests in the critical use of computation and embodied semantics converge and intersect one another.
Memex Room is a workshop in which your annotations and performative multi-lingual reading/spoken words crash, merge, and congregate within/around the interactive website. By registering for the workshops at HTMlles Festival 2024, you are signing up to become active annotators. For any additional inquiries, contact studio@ivettakang.com
Information on the Workshops
- 3 May. 16h (EST). In-person at Eastern Bloc
- 4 May. 14h (EST). ZOOM.
- Duration: 1.15 hrs per workshop
- Capacity: 10-12 people
- Requirement: A laptop for the in-person workshop
- Registration due: 28th April
ARA is created by
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang is a conceptual artist, worker, researcher and poet currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. They create project-based work woven across Canada, Germany and South Korea.
Kii (Wonki) Kang is an artist, architect, programmer, and ‘hacker’ currently based in Brooklyn, New York.