The idea for RESURRECTION comes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and is a method of maintenance and care based in media archeology that I am exploring.
In the book Viktor Frankenstein is a rich scientist obsessed with creating the perfect
human body
out of 'scraps'
of other bodies. He wants to reanimate the perfect body he has sewn together. He finds
the parts
through abandoned bodies, othered bodies, orphans, prostitutes, criminals. Upon his
surprising
success,
he is so shocked and appalled, he writes in his diary 'What the hell?!' and leaves. This
first act
of
abandonment
and neglect slowly creates a Monster out of the creature. And this is why this method
roots from the
book. What could
have been the ways to prevent this neglect or what conditions could have changed this
process? I
believe
that the Creature needed
a history a name and to know where the parts of his body was coming from.
This is where media archeology comes from. The idea is that in order to create a care
based
methodology
we need to
first investigate the origins of our dead. Where did this computer come from, who made
it, who
designed
it and WHY was it
left behind or deprecated? These are all the questions that base the device in the
techno-political
discard pile. To take care of the creature
we can give it a name, a home, a kin and a history.
I believe that these dead bordering the living share a collective past and common destiny in the veil, and hence also a simultaneity in time.*
This is a quote from The place which is diaspora: Citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism by Pnina Werbner. I'm an immigrant so this resonates a lot. It also makes sense to me since when I'm reading Frankenstein, as many do, I relate to the Creature. Werbner writes that people in diasporas share a collective past, coming from a living of the past within another culture, common destiny of legal ambiguation and laws of abandonment and come together in today -> the veil in which we share a strange purgatory state. I think this phrase really converges all the legal veils I consider bordering and are about neglect in 'ownership' or property laws and facing publics. I believe licenses function in the same way but about owning art. Imagining the dead devices to have had lifes, deaths and afterlifes
As we remember the past, we connect futures of networks and see what are the differences, genealogies that we would like to keep, what did we keep, what can come after.
This is how I explain the importance of the archeology part. We need to look into the origins of these dead technologies to understand what type of politics they have created within and around their existence and culture. This is sort of like creating a speculative narrative but it is deeply rooted in the origins of this very real world that we deal with every day.
Taking space and time with them, dead tech could help us become more aware of the contemporary history of deprecation and cultural/digital waste and inspire us to dig deeper with every peck of the keyboard.
This is a phrase from Sarah Keenan's Subversive Property. 'Taking space and time with them' is used for again diaspora communities where people carry their cultures and histories of their past livings to their new environments. This is a connection between laws of 'property' ownership and laws of national governmental borders. I find it interesting that borders have similar understandings when it comes to legal ramifications. I don't think it is surprising, but it is a point of entry for us to understand our own definitions and counter-definitions of borders in general.