The Archive of Digitales, textile version (2004-2006)
DIGITALES Working days, Interface3, vocational training centre for women in new technologies, Brussels,
In all areas of society and cultural life we collect information in different forms of digital media. The organisers of Digitales, a transdisciplinary project and recurrent event, were faced with quantities of traces, texts, images and sounds produced in different forms of media, of which they wanted to make a "biography", a memory, a living archive.
I was asked to conceive of an archive in a feminist context. The data is found as objects in bags. They read, listened to, watched, reproduced, used again and commented on. These pockets can be combined in different ways and therefore they are interwoven intertwined in a net of various connections.
The "Digitales Archives" uses textiles to emphasise the interchange of the people using it. Traces of use remain visible on textiles; in all bags there are cards for handwritten notes. The different bundles of contents and themes can be put together in new ways.
Everything in the end is still incomplete. Even what is lost or neglected and everything that is still possible becomes part of the archive. Like a skin textiles cover all contents and information.
All these documents exist in different forms and inside a network of connections which influence each other and can be traced back. The textile bags organise this understanding in material reality. Going through the process of packing and unpacking turns into a tactile experience; the flexible combinations of different contents turn the users into acting persons searching the appropriate archive.
