the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Hito Steyerl

Politics of Archive

This lecture took place on September 30th, 2008 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

The conditions of production specific to the art field foster archival filmic practices. Remixing or mashing strategies are in many cases only other names for a lack of funding for actual image creation. But they also reveal surprising aspects of different contemporary politics of archives. The archive is no longer just the monolithic entity, which theorists like Jacques Derrida or Allan Sekula have described: a sort of paper fortress guarded by the combined forces of nation and capital.

Within the contradictory dynamics of globalization and post-communism/-colonialism, archives fragment and multiply, they become porous and leak. While some images are being destroyed for good, others can never be deleted again. While audiovisual material is mostly more accessible than before the digital turn, this also generates a constant reconfiguration of the material itself. In the chaos of digital circulation, historical films are constantly reedited, made flexible, adapted to new political and economical contexts. Other images simply go underground and float on top of the gratuitous pornographic chaos and conspiracy theories of p2p networks. The archive has become an amorphous and dispersed battle site where claims for property and (national) identity are being fought over, a site where images are being arrested and accelerated.

About Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and video artist in the field of essayist documentary film as well as a cultural theorist, widely published writer, and professor of cultural and gender studies at the University for the Arts in Berlin. Her work takes place at the interface between film and the fine arts, between theory and practice.

Relevant Links

• The readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.