archiving

The elements that make up this page: theory, visualizations, texts, and data, form the material foundation of the archive.
Each element carries curatorial choices: what to show, how to connect, and how to frame meaning.
Together they demonstrate that archiving is not passive storage, but active composition, where the act of assembling is also an act of interpretation.

Archiving, in this project, is not only about preservation, it is about reflection.
Through the act of documenting and structuring our process, the project becomes aware of its own biases and decisions.
To archive is to choose what is remembered and what is forgotten, turning storage into an ethical and political act.

Drawing on Katrina Sluis’s idea of the digital archive as an industrial system of memory (2017), we understand archiving as a process embedded in physical infrastructures, servers, file formats, and platforms, but also in social and political decisions about access, visibility, and deletion.

Source:
Sluis, Katrina. 2017. “Accumulate, Aggregate, Destroy. Database Fever and the Archival Web.” In Lost and Living (in) Archives: Collectively Shaping New Memories, edited by Annet Dekker, 27–40.

The end product
The end product, this website, is both artifact and archive.
It preserves the traces of how theory, structure, and visual work came together to form our understanding of “Data is non-neutral.”

In that sense, this site does not just display results.
It archives the process of making meaning, showing how every curatorial decision, every visualization, and every classification carried its own bias.

This page is both process and product.
This page reflects on the archival aspect of our curatorial process, how the project itself functions as an archive.
Archiving, for us, was not just the act of storing information. It was a way of structuring relationships between theory, design, and practice. A process that determined what was remembered, how it was presented, and what was left out.

Just as data is non-neutral, so is the archive. Every decision of how, where, and when to archive shapes what this project becomes and what kind of knowledge it produces.

Another important element of this project is our shared economic fundament on this course. We have largely seen data as object excel sheets and files, something we work with, without questioning it. We decided to use the excel format for this project, to show how we have combined our previous knowledge with our new perspective, creating a broader understanding of data as non-neutral.