ARCHIVE

Some great-grandchild will find this book at the back of the closet. And I will, at least as a pale apparition, come briefly to life.

The term poetic infrastructure has stuck with me. I consider myself someone who thinks almost exclusively in reference. Lines from movies, song lyrics, pages of books, that thing someone said, a picture I took. One thing is always another—a mental web flickering into both well-worn and bright new constellations—so much noise perhaps coalescing itse... See more

Curation has been too focused on the information and not enough on architecture; how we collect, store, augment, and utilize what’s already in our minds.

Lists of destroyed buildings posted by the L.A. Conservancy and USModernist offer a ghost map of a past that extends far beyond living memory.

I used the footnotes like clues in a mystery. You build out from the article, making a web of relationships and then work your way back in. At least that’s how it works for me. When I didn’t understand something, I looked it up. There was a lot I didn’t understand. There is so much I don’t understand.

Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills that demand time, patience, and a willingness to look beyond the surface.

To collect well is to resist algorithmic influence. A true collection reflects deeply personal values and a genuine desire to know... See more

I grieve for many things; the engine of my grief changes, sometimes hourly. I grieve for our increasingly hostile and uninhabitable world, and I grieve for the cruelties that make it so, both structural ones and ones that individuals inflict on one another. But today I am grieving because I struggle to fathom all of the material loss of meaningful ... See more