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Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics
Issue No. 2: COUNTER-ARCHIVE

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2009

The concept of “COUNTER-ARCHIVE” will be focus of INCITE’s next issue.

International contemporary art is currently in the grips of an archive fever. In recent years, more and more artists have been playing with/in the archives, opening up dynamic possibilities for counter-archival practice. In this formulation, the “counter-archive” represents an incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play. Taken as an action, the term entails mischief and imagination, challenging the record of official history. Employed as an artistic strategy it pushes our archival impulse into new territories, encouraging critique and material alteration/fabrication and emboldening anarchivism.  To counter-archive is to counter-act, to rewrite, to animate over.  In this age of draconian copyright law, the archive is rich with subversive potential.

This issue aims at addressing practices of repurposing found sound and image in light of their particular histories and contemporary transformations in media economies and ownership.  It proposes the archive as a site for creative intervention, one that enables new possibilities for preserving and representing individual memory within a larger historical consciousness. In this strange moment of image excess and commercial limitation (due to the increasing privitization of archives by multinational corporations), we can all become archivists and micro-analysts of our shared sociocultural experience.  Equal participation in the constitution and interpretation of the archive is a key to counteracting the unseen hand of authority, and helps to invigorate successful content-sharing applications such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and Creative Commons.

Texts, proposals, films + videos, online projects, and queries can be emailed to Brett Kashmere at [email protected]. We also welcome submissions (manifestos, essays, interviews, artist papers, etc) not connected to the organizing theme.

For further information on our editorial policy and submission guidelines, please consult the “Information” section of our website (http://www.incite-online.net/informationweb.html).