Making Sense of the (Internet) Archive: Negotiating Meaning, Memory and History in Artistic Practice

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of the work with the archive developed by the artist Daniel Blaufuks, whose work centres around history and memory, with particular attention to the Holocaust. For the analysis a series of photographic compositions, Constellations, created from Internet content was analysed. Two questions—how can the discursive and physical dimension of the archive be explored as an artistic (specific) medium and how does Blaufuks’ work engage with the media archaeology goal of re-presencing the past—directed the research. The construction of a theoretical approach to explore a discursive and non-discursive archive structured the analysis and proved useful to explore the complex ways in which making sense of the world is, to a large extent, a mediated experience.