The drag of the archive

Dragging the Archive: A Personal Re:encounter with Franklin Furnace’s Cyber Beginnings was an exhibition I curated in the Victorian Library at Pratt Institute in New York that showed a range of materials relating to the ‘cyber turn’ the organization took in the mid-1990s and the first few years of Franklin Furnace’s decade-long performance series of work presented online entitled The Future of the Present.1 Keen to highlight the labour involved with maintaining such an archive, my curatorial approach included weaving in my own personal diary entries from that time to provide a 22-year-old’s perspective of New York at that time; my own photographs of both the archive and the people involved in it; a video I made of never before shown slides of the first two years of the Netcasts,2 and e-mails revealing the pushback founding director Martha Wilson and her team encountered in this decision to move from being a physical arts organization with a space3 in downtown Tribeca, to an online organization. A fax from Laurie Anderson expresses dismay at this new mode of presenting work, whilst negotiations with Pseudo Studios revealed how much money was being charged for this pixilated vision of the present moving into the future. This article is a poetic reflection on the personal approach I took to putting this show together a year on, incorporating where I am (was) now (then) as I wrote/write, not very well with lingering COVID-19, feeling myself to be archived, as the digital version of the show lives on. My own labour (for the time being) exhausted.