Carrie Bodle

Site/Archive/Cite (2023)

Carrie Bodle + Amaranth Borsuk

with Olivia Oomen

http://www.site-archive-cite.com/

Site/Archive/Cite is an augmented reality art intervention based on the National Archives at Seattle that interrogates the relationship of archive to place and public. At a time when many institutions hold out hope for digital accessibility to broaden the audience for their holdings, the realities of what gets digitized and who has access do not always live up to those heightened expectations. What is cited on a website may only be a fraction of the materials available onsite, providing a partial—and highly subjective—window into a collection that fundamentally gains meaning through public access and interaction. What ghosts haunt the archive? Who has put them there? And how might we both bear witness to and intervene into the construction of a public archive? In two large-scale prints that layer and distort archival holdings, visitors can materialize the spectral presence of digital documents, inviting us to re-envision an archive that is simultaneously here and gone. We invite you to take home a poster and open your own portal into the collection.

Site/Archive/Cite is shown at the 2023 Seattle Art Book Fair as an iteration of the work comprised of augmented reality prints.

Funded in part by a UWB Scholarship, Research, and Creative Practice grant