New Archive Interpretations
In 2014 Het Nieuwe Instituut launched New Archive Interpretations, a series of commissions for artists, designers and researchers to examine the influence and impact of the digital archive in relation to its analogue predecessor, the paper archive. Over a two-year period they investigated the challenges and opportunities of digital archives.
Het Nieuwe Instituut asked artist Erica Scourti to contribute to the New Archive Interpretations project, in relation to the exhbition Temporary Fashion Museum. Erica Scourti utilises social-media networks as raw material, probing and testing their data-processing alogorithms to create self-portraits for a hashtagged age.
Dark Archives
With the project Dark Archives, Erica Scourti activates an automatic, constantly updated archive to foreground the algorithmic outsourcing of personal media organisation and its implications for networked, distributed memory. Throughout the exhibition period of Temporary Fashion Museum, she uploads her entire fifteen-year personal media archive, consisting of daily photos, videos and screenshots, to platform monopoly services like Google photo.
About Erica Scourti
'Ultimately, all of Scourti's work asks a series of fundamental questions. How do institutions seek to define forms of representation? How has technology, and specifically social media, affected our understanding of identity and subjectivity? Where does our agency reside in an online environment where our data is tracked and our behaviour is persistently manipulated?' Interview in December 2014, Art Monthly.
Interview
Read the in-depth interivew Annet Dekker made with Erica Scourti.