A Guide to Archive Me
This program was a public event organized in conjunction with the artwork A Guide to Archive Me by Archive of the People (AOP), presented in the 10th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Eu Zên. Archive of the People is an art collective initiated in 2017, originating from Kai Chung Lee’s Open Archives project, launched in 2014. A Guide to Archive Me suggests different approaches to understanding history and public memory in relation to archival materials created by artists.
The project explores the categorization and dispersion of the artist materials in public institutes, which makes artists powerless. In response to existing online archives and search engines based on various hierarchical settings, AOP states art as a bottom-up creative force and subversive form of engaging art archives. The project comprises of a newly developed Art(ist) Searching engine (archiveme.art), a series of moving images that elucidates the representation of artists and their material on internet with a sense of humor, a teaching pack that demonstrates how artists can archive themselves in relation to the complex network of organizations and institutes.
The program consists of three workshops. In the first workshop, participants explored the searching engine (archiveme.art) with the artist, learning about its operational principles and keyword optimization. The second session involved a broad conversation on art archiving—from the production process to media-specific documentation methods. During this session, participants also viewed other works in the Biennale with the artist to select connecting keywords, which were then displayed as part of A Guide to Archive Me for the remainder of the exhibition. In the final workshop, a professional archive researcher joined the artist for an in-depth discussion on practices of art archiving.
