(W)ARCHIVES Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art

An investigation of digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes.

Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)ARCHIVES investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses, infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war.

Daniela Agostinho is Assistant Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is coeditor of Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press). Solveig Gade is Associate Professor in Dramaturgy, at the Department for Dramaturgy and Musicology at Aarhus University. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press). Kristin Veel is Associate Professor at the Department for Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and coauthor of Tower to Tower (MIT Press).