Dragging the Archive - a personal re:encounter with Franklin Furnace's Cyber Beginnings by Elly Clarke

Dragging the Archive was an online/onsite exhibition of materials from the early cyber years of Franklin Furnace Archive, 1996-2002, installed across three floors of the library at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Founded in 1976 in artist Martha Wilson’s living loft in Tribeca, Franklin Furnace Archive continues to support the production, presentation, and preservation of what was once known as ‘ephemeral art’, which included artists’ books and live performance. In the mid 1990s, Franklin Furnace transferred its artists’ books collection to MoMA, sold its physical space, and Martha Wilson made the decision to ‘go cyber’. This major shift from physical to ‘virtual’ ushered in a series of live ‘Netcast’ performances which were presented via Real Player over buffering, dial up networks, broadcast out of Pseudo Studios in lower Manhattan. In this way, Franklin Furnace became one of the first arts organisations (anywhere) to support live art on the world wide web. 

In 1998, 22-year-old Elly Clarke arrived from the UK as a student intern at Franklin Furnace, and began to bear witness to these new modes and methods of performance. Twenty-five years later, Clarke returned to the Archive to display fragments of what she (re)encountered during a research trip in 2019, and again in 2022-23. Clarke’s selections are exhibited alongside extracts from her personal diaries and letters from the 1990s. 

Installed in vitrines across three levels of the building, Dragging the Archive was an exhibition designed to be encountered in any order – (pro)posing a starting point for encounters and interactions with faxes, slides, videos and the heavy boxes in which these materials have been p/reserved. The ex:position is an invitation to the public: to discuss, respond, and reflect. And to be involved: by zooming in via QR codes to give greater clarity to fading faxes, the detail of the slides, the YES / NO / YES notes scribbled on the edges of a rejected proposal dug out of deep storage. You are also warmly invited to share your reactions to these objects via the specially built website, and onsite via the old-fashioned visitor’s book you’ll find on the second floor. 

In physics, drag is a force that pulls in two directions at once: forwards, and back; up, and down. It is also both a performance – with the possibility of transformation – and a burden, or resistance. Within the context of this archive, how to hold this tension? How to re:present evidence of a time, an event, a happening, a performance out of the physical and digital matter that remains?

Link to online exhibition still up: https://franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive/