Conversation

#searchunderoccupy is a participatory initiative that explores the implications and ambiguities of Occupy Wall Street as a “living archive.”

Occupy Wall Street (OWS), like other social and political movements of our time, is instantly archival. Continually documented by traditional and new forms of digital and social media, OWS produces an active dialogue with itself, even as it engages with events that unfold in cities across the United States and around the world. How do research, artistic and documentary practices creatively interact with this ongoing, vital, and mobile conversation? What are the possibilities and tensions in creating such a living archive?

Across The New School, there has been a wide spectrum of engagement with the movement—from direct involvement at Zuccotti Park and beyond to teach-ins to scholarly commentary to classroom activity—and for a brief time, the university and its galleries even housed an occupation. In an open call in November 2011, a group of faculty members invited TNS students to submit work exploring the implications of creating a living archive of OWS and to actively reflect on the university’s relationship to these events. This call resulted in a collaborative effort among faculty and students to organize an exhibition and a web archive that would encourage continued interchange at the university.

The work in the exhibition represents the response to the call which ranges from video, photography, audio, sculpture, text-based work such as live feed tag clouds, posters, blogs as well as performance projects that examine the participatory techniques of OWS. To this, we added a preliminary set of keywords thereby launching an archival imperative—a continual process of pinning and eluding, fixing and contention.

We invite you to occupy this archive and to share new ways of inhabiting it here.

Organizers
Brianne Cole, Melanie Crean, Julia Foulkes, Melissa Friedling, Piril Gunduz, Reena Katz, Carin Kuoni, Daniel Kim, Nitin Sawhney, Radhika Subramaniam, and Laura Trager.

Exhibition Designer
Lee Gibson

Exhibition Team
Nelson Choi, Chun Wei Fu, Bairon Garzon, Jacqueline Hon, Kristina Kaufman, Veranai Srilapa, and Daisy Wong

Web Design and Development
Nicholas Brewer, Laura Scherling, and Dan Selden

Graphic Designer
Laura Scherling

Sponsored by CuratorialDesignResearch Lab, School of Art Media and Technology, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design; the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and Office of the Dean; and The New School for Public Engagement.