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 quickly become from the start ... a rigidly codified act due to the institutionalized aspect of the process. Being the product of institutionalization, 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 is 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 subjects archived 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"[1]. 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", emphasizing a clear separation and hierarchy between what is 'real' and what is 'computer-generated'. In addition, it 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 these interactive experiences explicitly mix the experience of computational information with the experience of 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.

Decolonial

A decolonial practice rejects everything that was taught by the system of racial oppression we are all born into. Decoloniality calls for an active, intellectually strong and unapologetic disobedience in the pursuit of dismantling this centuries-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 perfect example), religion, fashion, food, travel and so many others. In Belgium, the ongoing vigorous presence of the regime of Leopold II 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.

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 archive effectively emerge from the obscurity preserved by cultural institutions' operating.

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 this selection of stills 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.