Archival Intelligence, by multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer Budhaditya Chattopadhyay presents a body of work that troubles the notion of archives, and the recordability of ephemeral experiences.
Sounds are energies and social impulses that defy capture, control, categorization, and inscription. Post-colonial theorists and Decolonial critics of archiving consider large institutional archives and museums in the West as potential sites of conflict for centralizing the capture and storage of ephemeral experiences. They are recorded, technologically mediated, and objectified with an extractive relation to colonized lands and people as resources. These archives produce stagnant, often inaccessible, repositories of cultural capital through forced collection, quantification, and legislation that reduce experiences to scientific categories.
Nested alongside a seminar and evening of performances, the exhibition Archival Intelligence intervenes in archives of recorded sounds through situated listening acts of transgression, advocating the liberation of incarcerated sounds through participatory storytelling aided by poetic and artistic interventions enabled by media technologies such as AI.