Society. Spaces. Screens
Abstract
To study the concept of virtual polis, we frame this research using our case study which is an artist-focused community of practice, digital platform, and archive space (archiveThing). The driver for this emergent digital space is to reframe and rethink how archival systems have been formal cultural productions and spaces usually not from the perspective of the artist’s practice, and usually not focused on process, relationality, or as active space for knowledge sharing practices. The virtual polis, we argue, needs active citizens (participation) and hence archiveThing is this type of space – open, communal, collective, social, with principles such as ethics and care as collaborative potential. The archiveThing project sits at the edge of interdisciplinary discourse and practice. Our tagging and metadata systems allow artists to position projects across many domains and media situating disciplines as ‘equal’, not privileging any one approach to production of creative and discursive works. We ask how practices, artefacts, events, can be archived to include process, reflective frameworks and other discussions that are often peripheral. We ask how to translate material works into digital forms. What is lost, what is gained and whose voices (works) are privileged? And importantly, how does a virtual presence (exhibition, output, works) complicate and complement the virtual polis? The paper will reflect upon insights from our case study of building the platform, started in the pandemic, now continuing on as a social collective practice. We will look at some theoretical framings that draw from 4th wave feminism and collective social-spatial practices.
Barbara Rauch holds a PhD (2007) from the University of the Arts London. Through collaborative research she pursues art/science/technology topics that include cross-disciplinary theories such as nature/culture divide; affect and consciousness studies; the manifestations of environmental ethics. Rauch is Associate Professor at OCAD University, where she teaches in the Faculty of Arts and Science. She is co-director for the Data Materialization Studio/Lab that houses practice-led research projects concerned with digital humanities’ converging and diverging lab/studio cultures.
As an artist-activist-researcher Michelle Gay embodies an interdisciplinary practice to consider the physical-political-emotional implications of the planned city; activates and messes about in the practiced city through sustained collective and participatory commoning projects; and studies the potential for future urban spaces through the lens of a contemporary art practices. Michelle is working on a PhD in Environmental and Urban Change at York University.