Limn Number 6: The Total Archive
Edited by Boris Jardine and Christopher Kelty
Vast accumulations saturate our world: phone calls and emails stored by security agencies; every preference of every individual collected by advertisers; ID numbers, and maybe an iris scan, for every Indian; hundreds of thousands of whole genome sequences; seed banks of all existing plants, and of course, books... all of them. Just what is the purpose of these optimistically total archives, and how are they changing us?
This issue of Limn asks authors and artists to consider how these accumulations govern us, where this obsession with totality came from and how we might think differently about big data and algorithms, by thinking carefully through the figure of the archive.
Contributors: Miriam Austin, Jenny Bangham, Reuben Binns, Balázs Bodó, Geoffry C. Bowker, Finn Brunton, Lawrence Cohen, Stephen Collier, Vadig De Croehling, Lukas Engelmann, Nicholas HA Evans, Fabienne Hess, Anna Hughes, Boris Jardine, Emily Jones, Judith Kaplan, Whitney Laemmli, Andrew Lakoff, Rebecca Lemov, Branwyn Poleykett, Mary Murrell, Ben Outhwaite, Julien Prévieux, and Jennifer Reardon.
While you are at it, don't miss the other quality issues of Limn also available in print versions:
|
|
Issue #5
Ebola's Ecologies
Ebola's 2014 pandemic revealed blindspots in the "ecology" of preparedness. Issue five examines how the 2014 Ebola outbreak has put the norms, practices, and institutional logics of global health into question, and examines the new assemblages that are being forged in its wake.
|
|
Issue #4
Food Infrastructures
Goes beyond simple producer “push” or consumer “pull” accounts of the food system to display the reciprocal relationships among consumer choice, personal use, and the socio-material arrangements that enable, channel, and constrain our everyday food options.
|
|
Issue #3
Sentinel Devices
The polar ice cap rapidly recedes; colonies of honeybees collapse in alarming numbers; androgynous fish are detected in rivers and streams. These reports not only describe recent events, but also function as signs of an ominous and rapidly encroaching future.
|
|
