This talk introduces arguments and examples from my current book project, Document Practices: The Art of Propagating Access, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental video works and ideas about “the document” which haunt the sociology of literature as much as documentary arts practice, I sketch out the project’s starting points and some of its key debates.
Documents remain the primary media form of public information and record, so the social and epistemological status of “the document” should be central to a spectrum of debates, from data literacy norms to intellectual property claims. Yet, as buzz terms like “post-truth” and “deep fake” remind us, the social lives of documents are entwined with the techno-political conditions of the communities who produce, save and share them. As such, the status of any document and its content are both contextually variable. Since the 1970s, as a response to the suppression of marginalized histories and the rise of personal computing, radical practitioners from across the arts have shifted from representing “the document” as a symbol of power to critically (and sometimes illegally) re-publishing documents as an artistic act.
With this macro picture in mind, my project takes the micro perspective of art criticism to figure out some comparative frameworks for thinking across media and across artforms about the public-ness of publishing.
The talk was organised by the Open Documentary Lab and Trope Tank Lab as part of the Graduate colloquia series for the Center for Comparative Media/Writing at MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Audio and video recordings are available courtesy of MIT's SoundCloud and YouTube channels.
