Installation: The Great Archive

With support from Kunstfonds e.V., Bonn in 1992-93, I created the installation ""T": Files out of the Great and Small Archives" ("T: Akten aus den großen und kleinen Archiven") in the Ozwei Gallery in Berlin which focused many of my recurring interests and included many of the materials which I had been gathering during the preceding years under "one roof". I had long been interested in moving beyond the proscenium space of the "hypertext opera" performance project and this indicated a new direction in installation as well as in performance.

This installation contained original historical archive documents, "text-objects" and video and has formed the conceptual basis for a number of installation/performance projects since. Influenced by use of the Data/Text projections in the Opera performance, I proposed to limit the installation to the display of texts in rooms. The installation would include no images, but would show related texts and documentation about Memory, History and Biography functioning as images, as objects and as information. Memory is not only a question of time, but that of a "space" for remembrance and archival storage. My interest in the connection between memory and the archive, which has since become more and more important in my work has derived from my years of experience in navigating through biographical and historical fragments within a computer architecture. One begins to perceive of information as spatial. It is interesting that the so-called "Art of Memory" as practiced in its neo-platonic form in the Renaissance (14), at a moment when oral and written culture coexisted, represents the joining of image and memory in spatial terms as "loci". As we recollect, we tend to "locate" our imaging of moments from the past in specific "memory" places. When we reconstruct a Memory from isolated moments, separating foreground from background, our remembering takes on spatial aspects. As Memory no longer sustains our identities, we use terminology like "dislocation", "displacement" and "dislodging" to indicate our state of alienation and "hidden" and "buried" to describe the location of meaningful and often unobtainable knowledge.

In 1993 I built an object for this exhibition which I called the "Great Archive" (Das Große Archiv), in which I attempted to objectify "hypertext" as a three-dimensional image. A black box approximately 1.5m. high, .4m. wide and 1.2m. long and painted black, is divided by four lateral sheets of Plexiglas sandwiching clear plastic sheets inscribed from edge to edge with layers of finely printed texts. (The uppermost text layer being the top of the box). The layers of texts are illuminated from below. The texts were constructed from the tens of thousands of biographical fragments which I have renovated from the "Who's Who in Central & East Europe" As one peers into this "sea of information", it is as if one stares into a bottomless well filled with layers of floating texts in depth. One focuses with one's eyes on any given text fragment on a given level, as the other text levels defocus and blur. One's attention might wander to a deeper or nearer fragment, the eyes continually refocusing as one isolates and "links" a related or unrelated name or phrase. It was my intention here to realize, in three dimensions, a "hypertext" as a metaphorical space which contains in compressed form a database of all mankind.
The three rooms of this exhibition are all related to this object in theme and structure, delineating a logical path first through the metaphorical "Small Archive", then "The Storage of Memory", and finally to the "Great Archive". In the first and largest room, "The Small Archive", are found 110 archive documents on the walls and 4 large text scrolls on the floor. This room represents two aspects of the individuum:
a) Lists of fragmental details such as addresses and organizations which were sampled from the "Who's Who" database and were printed on large endless text scrolls using an architectural plotter. These scrolls dominate the center of the center floor area, representing both an archaic form of writing, seemingly without a beginning and an end, as well as a sacred object with biblical overtones.
b) In contrast to these objects implying a collective history, the documents on the walls of the "Small Archive" trace the observation, recording and archiving of mistaken identity. 110 chronological selections from International Secret Service Archive document the life and times of a forgotten Central European historical figure whose multiple identities span three continents and touch on many of the most important events of the pre-war period.

In comparison to the collection of hundreds of individual stories upon which "Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933" is based; the improbable but real life of "T" seems to include a collection of lifelines and events within one individual. I have collected over 3,000 pages of original documents from State Archives in Europe and North America. These "original" archive documents were digitized and "faked" by specially developed printing techniques applied to the reverse side of Postwar East German archival pages, posing question about the "identity" of both the subject's personality and the documents themselves.
In the center space, which is in the form of an elongated tunnel and which serves as a conduit between the "Small Archive" and the "Great Archive" in the last room, we find data presented on a track containing large hanging plastic cards which can be moved back and forth at will, containing information on an international "high-tech" computer firm and an American church-sect which is pursuing an extensive worldwide archiving project. "The Church" has been collecting and storing the personal data from over 15 Million persons from around the world for over 50 years in 1.6 million rolls of microfilm which are stored in Utah in the Western United States in a cave safe from nuclear attack. Each year 30,000 new rolls are added and the material is made accessible to the public at Family History Centers worldwide. This project is the largest of its kind ever conceived, and as its goal seeks to collect store, and digitize all genealogically useful information which can be located before eventual disappearance. This project was the inspiration for the creation of the "Great Archive". "The Company" has developed a robotic Mass Storage System in which files are ordered and physically moved by a robot monk/librarian. In the area of the aforementioned Card Catalog is found a video installation illustrating the self-destruction of a robotic mass data storage machine.
This installation built on my previous work in creating a hypertext from biographical and historical fragments, yet also included ideas and concepts which have since become central to my work: text in space: the architecture of Memory and the use of archival documents in reflecting the "official" traces of history and memory.

Continue: From Book to Book, A Journey in the Text

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