Words

Words

Archive

An archive is a collection of documents, digital or physical, that is constructed to operate across multiple contexts such as academic and governmental, private and commercial, educational, non-profit and cultural etc. This multiplicity of environments causes the documents to be kept for a wide range of reasons. The process of archiving has become a rigidly codified act from the start due to the institutionalised aspect of the process. Being the product of institutionalisation, archives have been attracting much critical scrutiny because of their strong political implications. In most of the cases, the act of archiving creates an imbalanced relationship between the one who’s archiving and the one who’s being archived. Archives assembled by institutions such as museums and scientific centers have become a mirror of the disproportionate power relations shaping our society such as the wealthy educated observing and archiving the underprivileged or the white western archiving the indigenous populations. Archives have the power to maintain or even strengthen the oppression and subjugation of their archived subjects through the shaping of particular narratives by the archivist. As Achille Mbembe argued ‘the archive is primarily the product of a judgement, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority’. But not all archives are the same. They are also being used by communities as tools and practices of resistance. Caring for their own documents and histories allows these communities to thwart the authority of institutional archives as they create possibilities to shape other narrative and to fight their eradication by capitalist, patriarchal and colonial states.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is applied in for example military, entertainment and healthcare contexts. It is generally described as a technique for ‘enhancing real-world environments with computer-generated perceptual information’, emphasising a clear separation and hierarchy between what is “real” and what is “computer-generated”. In addition, AR also assumes a two-eyed user. This not only because it relies on ocular devices, but also because the Computer Vision algorithms that calculate the alignment between physical and computational reality, calculate their so-called “real world coordinates” from stereo cameras that mimic human eyes. AR is different from Virtual Reality (VR) and potentially more interesting, in the sense that the interactive experiences of AR explicitly mix computational materiality with physical environments. What other perspectives could AR make possible?

Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is a term used to describe the tangible and intangible legacies that a culture inherits. Cultural heritage often plays a role in the construction of national and regional identities; its genealogical understanding of culture presupposes a stable lineage. What counts as cultural heritage is therefore easily confused with establishment and if a lively debate around the terms of inclusion or inclusion is missing, it risks to become a tool for sedimenting conventions. In Belgium, cultural heritage is also an administrative term that sets apart cultural production from work being done at museums and archives. It is exactly these borders that DiVersions would like to blur.

Classification

Classification is the act of sorting out elements. The practice of classification relates to many different areas hence its pervasiveness in our everyday life. Classification finds its presumed scientific grounds during the period called the Enlightenment whereas European scientists and intellectuals were driven by the illusion of objectivity and believed rigid methodologies, such as classification, were the way to achieve it. That process brought the classification of the flora with, for instance, plants vs trees; the fauna with, for example, mammals vs cephalopods; and the humans, with for example blacks vs whites or women vs men. The classification of elements, not only humans, is highly problematic because the process generally ignores complexity, multiplicity, fluidity and fuzziness. Furthermore, the classification of humanity turned into a strategy for scientists to validate their strong bias towards people who did not look or act like them, namely white European men . Nevertheless, classification is omnipresent because it helps people make sense of what is around them. For instance, institutions working with cultural heritage are based on the construction of databases formed through classification. The very scenography of institutions such as museums are designed following specific classifications (euro-centrist in many cases) with instances of displays of non-European populations following an European chronology as classifier. The attachment between the act of classification to the idea of objectivity is a lasting belief. Indeed, the imperative of classification in computational processes, has replicated the conviction of neutrality in computation.

Database

‘Within databases, the tractability of data and relations depends in no small part on the degree of normalization of data and the structures it is entered into. Normalization means the treatment of each piece of data and each relation as a separate entity. It involves stripping away unnecessary hierarchies or other structures within data. This means that as data are updated, deleted, or inserted, they do not carry any dependencies on other data or structures (such as nesting within a set of parent–child nodes). Normalization implies a neutrality as to the relative importance of one datum as compared to another. What it thus allows is for a query to be formulated through any point in the network of relations mapped by the table. Nonnormalized data offer one kind of resistance, in that they require nested sets of dependencies. A red round thing may be a cricket ball or an apple, and neither may exactly be round, but once they are normalized and interpretable as simply exemplars of bearers of one or more of the categorizations red, round, and thing, they lose their specificity. The quality of irreducibility is transferred from the entity described to the categories into which its qualities are organized.’

Decolonial

A decolonial practice rejects everything taught by the system of racial oppression we were all born into. Decoloniality calls for an active, intellectually strong and unapologetic disobedience in the pursuit of dismantling this century-old system. The difficulty of this move comes from the omnipresence of colonial heritage in every part of our lives from education programs, languages (English being a very good example), science, gender and sexuality, religion, fashion, food, travel and so many others. In Belgium, the ongoing vigorous presence of Leopold II's regime in public space and the general lack of critique on the Belgian colonial rule, demonstrates that the decolonial process has not reached the collective conscience yet.

Diversity

Diversity literally defines ‘a condition of having or being composed by multiple elements’ and can be considered as a synonym for “variety”. More recently, it became the leading word to define groups of people composed of diverse sets of humans, diverse referring in general to race, religion, ability or gender. The increased use of this word has moved it into the realm of corporate vocabulary, and marketing. In that transformation, the condition of diversity became deeply institutionalized with instances of “diversity training” and “diversity officers”. This process frames diversity in terms of aesthetics, hence focuses on visible traits such as race or ability, instead of fundamentally changing the way oppression and power work in relation to them. Diversity acts as an agent of recognition for everything that fits within the norm. The general narrative surrounding “diversity” managed to create a feel good politics by obscuring topics that are generally not-feel-good at all, such as racism and queerphobia by placing, once again, the focus on the not-white, not-straight, not-male so to prevent the uncomfortable formation of white, heterosexual and other types of guilt. Diversity is a white word, as Tania Canas argues, ‘It seeks to make sense, through the white lens, of difference by creating, curating and demanding palatable definitions of “diversity” but only in relation to what this means in terms of whiteness.’

e-collection

e-collection or electronic-collection can mean many things (from debt collection to on-line gallery). In DiVersions, it refers to digital or digitized collections brought together by cultural institutions.

Institutions

The word institutions can refer both to social mechanisms and formal organizations. In sociology, institutions are seen as ‘systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions. Language, money, law, systems of weights and measures, table manners, and firms (and other organizations) are thus all institutions.’ There is a distinction between informal institutions, such as traditions, and formal institutions such as governments, as they are both inhabited by commands for the pursuit of certain goals but formal institutions are constructed and function through the formulation and enforcement of explicit rules, procedures and organization whereas the informal institutions are mostly formed through implicit rules and norms. However, most of institutions fluctuate between the explicit and the implicit hence their multiplicity and multiformity of social configurations and interactions. In that sense, cultural institutions such as museums can be seen as formal institutions with their clear sets of commands stemming notably from the normative curatorial processes and their clear pursuit of preservation. But they can also be seen as social constructs as they create symbolic knowledge and beliefs emanating from their authoritative and formal position.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a framework developed by afro-american feminists to analyse how interlocking systems of power impact each other. It considers oppressions not as forces which exist separately from each other but understands that the entanglement of for example class, race, sexual orientation, age, disability and gender produce complexer forms of marginalization. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains: ‘Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them’. To say that DiVersions is a site for “decolonial” and “intersectional” practice means that we try to pay attention to different interfering patterns of inclusion and exclusion that are acting on the digital archive so that the violence of these archives effectively emerges from the obscurity preserved by cultural institutions’ operations.

Permission

Free Culture licenses make sure that we do not need to ask for permission if we want to consider, interrogate and discuss the technical details of software or hardware, or when we want to engage for example with the concepts, politics and histories of cultural representation and cultural appropriation. For DiVersions, Free Culture offers a framework to put pressure on the often proprietary behaviour around cultural heritage, and to demand it to be open to change. If digital imagery and infrastructures would be available under conditions that allowed re-appropriation and re-use, we might have a better chance of developing proposals with institutions rather than against them. At the same time, the problematics surrounding cultural appropriation make clear that it might be necessary to differentiate between who appropriates what and how in what context. Such questions are difficult to address in the current framework of copyright AND of copyleft. In addition, the problematic emerges as even more multi-layered when we accept that there are situations where appropriation is not an option. We need to rethink default assumptions about authorship, ownership and access. As the selection of stills included in the contribution Palimpsest of the Africa Museum shows, there are many questions to ask about the connection between Free Culture and white privilege, and how asking for permission might be a way to come to terms with interrelated geneologies of authorship, authority and responsibility.

Queering technologies

For DiVersions, the inevitable definitional elasticity of “queering” has been and still is an important set of tools to engage with the entangled troubles of digital technologies and classificiation. Binary logic is deeply embedded in computation and radiates out to its architectures, interface designs, and imagined functionalites. Queering actively resists the fixity of such binary oppositions, whether they relate to heteronormativity or to the neo-liberal pressure to compute. As an anti-essentialist, counter-disciplinary attitude, queering insists on de-stabilising fixed identity categorisations and taxonomic distinctions. ‘This software is not necessarily designed to reproduce but produce. The development kit aims for the production of new queer ontologies, epistomologies, and political ecologies. Replication is not a constituent, but a possibility. This software may be used to produce new theoretical concepts and systems of knowledge, power, and logic’

Versioning

Versioning is a habitual operation in digital, often collaborative environments. It consists of identifying subsequent versions of digital files and comparing them to point out their differences. The term may refer to version control, sometimes revision control, which is the management of changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, and other collections of information. This type of versioning operates internally in most software applications (think about the “undo” or “⌘command + Z” option available in many programs), or on-line on collaboration platforms (like the “View history” tab in MediaWiki and on Wikipedia pages). The term can refer to specific on-line environments that are developed to manage collaboration on software development, such as gitlab and Subversion. “Versioning” is also used to describe the versioning of a file system, a method to allow computer files to exist in several versions at the same time. And finally, there is the practice of software versioning, which means assigning unique version names to unique states of computer software. For DiVersions, these many versions of “versioning” are inspiring because by meticulously logging workflows, any action can be reversed or repeated at any time; errors or unwanted inputs can be later corrected but they remain legible as part of the process. This potentially changes linear relations between original and copy, redefining questions of authorship and the archive. Versioning invites us to consider digital documents as living objects that over time evolve into archives of hesitations and mistakes.