Short description:

The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation.

Long description:

The Materiality of the Archive is the first volume to bring together a range of methodological approaches to the materiality of archives, as a framework for their engagement, analysis and interpretation.

Focusing on the archives of creative practices, the book reaches between and across existing bodies of knowledge in this field, including material culture, art history and literary studies, unified by an interest in archives as material deposits and aggregations, in both analogue and digital forms, as well as the material encounter. Connecting a breadth of disciplinary interests in the archive with expanding discourses in materiality, contributors address the potential of a material engagement to animate archival content. Analysing the systems, processes and actions that constitute the shapes, forms and structures in which individual archival objects accumulate, and the underpinnings which may hold them in place as an archival body, the book considers ways in which the inexorable move to the digital affects traditional theories of the physical archival object. It also considers how stewardship practices such as description and metadata creation can accommodate these changes.

The Materiality of the Archive unifies theory and practice and brings together professional and academic perspectives. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of archive studies, museology, art history and material culture.

Table of Contents:

Part I - In the Archive: practices and encounters; 1. ?Material evidences surviving in the form of writing?: materiality in archival theory and practice; 2 ?The true object of study?: the material body of the analogue archive; 3 Archival?finding?aids and?perceptual?frames:?extending?material?contact?points through Stephen Chaplin?s?Slade School Archive Reader; 4 Archiving with scissors: materiality and cutting practices in photographic archives; Part II - With the archive: energy; 5 Valentine?s Jacket; 6 The archive as a site of making; 7 Applications of energy:?a study of artists and entropy in the material; 8 Archival endings: erosion and erasure in the film archive; Part III About the Archive: Technologies; 9 The material archive everyday: technologies of the filing system; 10 The materialism of techno-archival memory; 11 Paper tensions: from flipbooks to scanners ? the role of paper in moving image practices; 12 Expressing materiality in archival records; Part IV Beyond the archive: expanding the frame;13 Lost unities: the materiality of the migrated archives; 14 Fabrications: the quilt as archive;15 Performing gestures towards the archive: queer fragments and other ways of mattering; 16 ?That?s special, we?ll keep that?: a conversation about counter archiving and socially engaged practice at Tate Exchange