Date of Award
Spring 6-2-2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Alicia Cheng
Second Advisor
Paul Soulellis
Third Advisor
Doug Scott
Abstract
I’ve always loved the conjunctions unless, yet, however, although. Grammatical interventions, they subvert all things certain, rational, and indisputable, opening a series of syntactic doorways into new, undetermined possibilities.
The pieces in the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y’s archive function like those conjunctions. They refuse and destabilize easy categorization, pointing, like a rhizome, toward a thousand different possible pasts — and just as many futures.
To be clear, the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y does not have a physical site. It is a network of psychic locations materialized through its archive. It is, in other words, what I have gathered.
I have taken great care to arrange these materials in a manner that reflects the spatial, temporal, and psychic proximity in which I found them. You will find that I have preserved the original folders, including their labels — Capitalism, Climate, and Time; The Unstable Image; Resistance; Critical Optimism and Self-definition; Memory, Inheritance, and Hope; and, lastly, Conversation — but have also taken the questionable liberty of adding my own notes.
Perhaps it would have behooved the Institute to hire an archivist with more linear and obedient inclinations. But I’m thankful, for my own sake, that they did not.
Recommended Citation
Weiss, Melissa, "Monument for feeling : Notes from the Archivist" (2018). Masters Theses. 219.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/219
Creative Commons License
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