The covid-19 pandemic has altered rhythms, patterns, and modes of being within everyday life, elaborating while challenging well-practiced modes of archiving and collecting. In a time where trauma is inscribed on the everyday,  how do artists and researchers—engaged in modes of backward turning, historical gazing or making the invisible  visible—archive their present? What new works, records, or methodological developments has this time prompted?  The platform showcases responses by 11 different artists, researchers, and thinkers, and sheds light on experimental practices and research produced within the last year. The works present reflections on the changing conditions brought on by the pandemic and additionally, seek to understand how the artistic tools of documenting the invisible have been revised by the crisis.

DESKTOP ARCHIVES is an online publishing initiative and event series that uses the internet as its first site to reach audiences. This platform is a living archive that will have three editions that will launch in June, September, and November, 2021.

The self-organized platform documents shifts in artistic practices brought on by the pandemic and witnessing catastrophe through multimedia contributions and responses to the prompt: what are you archiving from this time and how has the pandemic changed your thinking about proximity, relationality, conversation, and the archival tools themselves. The works range from social commentary on civil unrest in Central Eastern Europe, surveillance systems, militarized vocabulary past and present, to commentaries on collective rituals created in isolation on the web.

The works expand the themes of intimate connectivity, refocusing presents, and reconfiguring distance. Please come back in September for our second edition and stay tuned for our event in Warsaw at the second launch. The event series will explore Emergence(s) and the ongoing navigation of proximity.