Anarchival Scripts

This paper presents a series of experiments performed at conferences, seminars, and in the classroom, where I as a speaker invited the audience to modulate the course of the talk by editing, commenting, adding to, and deleting the prepared manuscript in real-time. One aspect of these experiments was to play with the affective relation between speaker, audience, and technological support to see what would happen when an audience is empowered to manipulate an exposed body at their own will. Another aspect was to experiment with a reflexive capture of memory traces that might encompass more of a situation’s dynamic form than traditional documentation. These experiments work to inform speculations on the potential for real-time interfaces to facilitate ways of collectively inhabiting the affective passage from the privacy of the body to publicly accessible form. The paper takes its point of departure in the prevalence of mobile digital devices that allow for an affective attunement to the diverse speeds, rhythms, and flows of information of the Internet. Rather than simply regarding this distributed presence as disengaging, the paper explores what new possibilities for thinking together and attuning to each other that is enabled through the intensively extended attention span enabled by digitally networked technologies. The notion of the anarchive creates a leeway for working experimentally and conceptually with the excess (of memory, affects, belief and desires) that is produced when sharing and remembering through technological means. Beyond the archive’s conservative ordering of memory, the paper explores the potential for authoritarian rupture and collective thought enabled by the anarchival slips, spillages and mutations of memory in real-time signal transmissions. It is argued that the real-time modulation of the manuscripts in the experiments becomes immediate transcripts of the situation’s dynamic form which might enable an interfacial materialization of a common ground.