CØDEshop

Colm Lally & Sissu Tarka


CØDEshop in its present form is a series of interconnected events and activities initiated by Verina Gfader and Colm Lally that emerges out of a concern with event-structures; These are conceived as fundamental to address contemporary issues on the sites of cultural producers, audience, institutions. While the separation of these different nodes in an expanding network does not operate any longer, the mutation and becoming of other sites opens out a discussion of re-addressing the very context, the parameters and conditions in which these new or variable sites operate.

CØDEshop extract: segment of discussion on archives [2pm Fri 23rd November 2007 @ E:ventGallery] with Verina Gfader, Beryl Graham, Colm Lally, Peter Lewis, Uriel Orlow and John Seth

VG: Maybe the question is how to escape the archive? How to escape being archived?

PL: Exactly. The anti-archive.

UO: Email is all archived somewhere. The FBI can get to it in five years time. Every email that we send.

BG: Why would they bother though? Its a self-filtering... time...

UO: But its there.

PL: You've to remember the oral tradition. You know Homer - there's no such person. It was a number of different stories that were brought together.

UO: Like the bible.

VG: Also Socrates...just this dialogue.

JS: Maybe that's what will happen in the future. There will be an invented archive that will bear no relation to what we've done. Maybe that doesn't matter.

PL: That's what the existentialist says.

JS: Well yes the existentialist says it won't matter. But I'm beginning to think that its not a worry.

PL: Or why are we worrying?

JS: Yes, why? When Kafka wanted all his work destroyed and Maxwell comes along and publishes it...and of course we've got a fantastic body of work that we can look at and Deleuze can read it and give us another reading of it. But what is it that's saved in a sense? And at what point does that saving find its limitation? In the case of Kafka it certainly bred into other things that were not meant for publication and so we get this proliferation of an archive around an artists work, their letters, their diary entries...and that will obviously now stay for ever ...and maybe there is some huge hole between when all this material is saved and this time when nothing is saved. I'm really thrilled when my...when I look back and I've had two crashes of a computer where I lost everything and I kinda feel relieved...

PL: Yeah in the end you do. Little bit of a shock at first...

JS: Oh it is a shock at first. I was actually running a temperature and i was thinking what is going on? Why am i so traumatised by this... death?

PL: I was teaching in a school in the 90's...supply teaching...and they said you've got to go in there...in the computer room...and all the work was on the main frame! (...goes spinning round ?)...and they said don't whatever you do when you go out turn that switch off - you turn that switch of there you're turning off the main frame!...and the longer its off the more knowledge gets lost...and of course at the end automatically on the way out you go flick to the switch...you just do it automatically. Its a teachers thing. ........I lost the students work from that term

[laughter]

JS: You can just see the urgent bits of narrative in SiFi films: "the main frames down!!!" "the main frames down!!!"

PL: "We're losing everything!!!|"

UO: And someone is running with 45sec to go...!!

JS: And it seems to take 3 or 4 hours...