MoMA R&D
Salon 51 Off the Record
Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Matthew Connelly
Julia Weist
Mabel O. Wilson
Eduardo Cadava
Q&A
Video Contribution: New Models
Video Contribution: Joshua Craze
Video Contribution: Tamara Kneese
Video Contribution: Charles Broskoski
Video Contribution: Jess Whyte
Video Contribution: Jack Self
In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) was the ultimate punishment: any trace, record, and depiction of an individual’s existence was expunged from collective memory. Even today, we demand for public figures to be “canceled” when they have breached certain moral codes and for monuments to be torn down when they represent repugnant prejudices and condemnable crimes.
When every move is seemingly documented, recorded, and bought and sold, however, the power, and perhaps impossibility, of total erasure takes on new value. Whether in the height of the Cold War or in the morass of contemporary social media, the ability to redact becomes a necessity and a privilege. Removing something from the record is, moreover, as powerful an act as refusing admittance to it. Many in the world today, whole peoples and nations, are still fighting for the right to exist, be seen, heard, and recorded for posterity.
Does control over what is off the record, through expungement or omission, remain the supreme force of power that the ancient Romans believed it was?
Some of the questions that we ask include: What is the record and who gets to decide if something is removed from it? Is the ability to be forgotten a right or a privilege? Should we be able to control our own record, as the European “right to be forgotten” affirms? Is it still possible to exist without leaving a trace? What is the lifespan of things recorded digitally? Should they have an expiration date? A statute of limitations? Is there erasure through excess? Does canceling (people) or tearing down (monuments) serve a valuable social function? Is damnatio memoriae still possible? In today’s world, would it be considered a punishment or a gift? How is power wielded through record-keeping and -erasing? How can we have better accountability for those who abuse this power?
This Salon took place on December 9th, 2024.
Speakers
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Eduardo Cadava
Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English, and an Associate Member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the School of Architecture, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He also serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in Media and Modernity, the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Program in Jazz Studies. He is a faculty member in the summer program at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and he has been the Benjamin Menschel Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at Cooper Union, a Professor in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and a Visiting Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Athens. He was the Head of Wilson College from 2009 – 2017, and the curator of the Wilson College Signature Lecture Series. He specializes in American literature and culture, comparative literature, media technologies, literary and political theory, and theory of translation. He has written extensively on literature, philosophy, photography, architecture, music, democracy, war, memory and forgetting, race and slavery, human rights and citizenship, and the ethics of decision.
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Matthew Connelly
Matthew Connelly is a professor of international and global history at Columbia University, and has been co-director of its social science research center, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, since 2016. Connelly is also the principal investigator of History Lab, a project that uses data science to analyze state secrecy, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, and weapons of mass destruction. Previously, from 2009-2013, Connelly directed the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, a research program on the history and future of planetary threats, including nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, which won five prizes, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, an Economist and Financial Times book of the year, and The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets, which was published in February by Random House. Connelly received his B.A. from Columbia in 1990 and earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1997. Since then, he has been a professor at the University of Michigan and the London School of Economics, and has also held visiting positions at the University of Oslo, the University of Sydney, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. Connelly has written research articles in Nature-Human Behaviour, the Annals of Applied Statistics, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review française d'histoire d'Outre-mer, the Journal of Global History, and Past & Present. His courses include “The History of the End of the World,” and “The Future as History.”
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Julia Weist
Julia Weist is a visual artist whose work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (acquisition in progress) among others. Her work explores how the process of record-keeping reveals social truths around shared systems of knowledge and power. Recent exhibitions include Governing Body, Rachel Uffner Gallery, which focused on the relationship between artists and government; ARCA, in collaboration with Cuban artist Nestor Siré, at galleries in Havana and New York; and Parbunkells, 83 Pitt Street, New York. Public artworks include Campaign (Times Square) and Public Record, both in New York City; and View-Through, Miami. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues throughout the United States and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Madrid, Taiwan, St. Louis, Antwerp, and Chicago. Commissions, grants, and residencies from Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Ox-Bow; City of New York Department of Records and Information Services; New York State Council on the Arts/Wave Farm; Jerome Foundation Fellowship at the Queens Museum; and many others. Weist’s writing has appeared in publications such as Triple Canopy, Frieze, Rhizome, Art in America, BOMB, and the artist book Sexy Librarian: A Novel, Critical Edition. She and her work have been the subject of articles in, among others, Artnet (“Artist Julia Weist Is Protesting the R Rating of Her New Film by Advertising the Project on a Times Square Billboard”); Document Journal (“Julia Weist’s Governing Body Questions What We Deem Indecent in the Scope of Mainstream Cinema”); Hyperallergic (“Julia Weist’s Public Record Probes the Impact of Artists on Cities”); Art in America (“Julia Weist Transforms New York City’s Archival Records into Artworks That Live in Digital Public Space”); and the New York Times (“Artists as ‘Creative Problem-Solvers’ at City Agencies”). She previously taught at Pratt Institute, and has served as MFA studio adviser at the Maine College of Art & Design. Weist also served as board member of Shandaken Projects from 2012 to 2021.
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Mabel O. Wilson
Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and chair of African American and African Diasporic Studies at Columbia University. Wilson joined the faculty of Columbia in 2007 and she has held fulltime and visiting appointments at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Princeton University, Ohio State University and the University of Kentucky. She is trained in Architecture and American Studies, two fields that inform her scholarship, curatorial projects, art works and design projects. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio &, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire. Her research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America; race and modern architecture; new technologies and the social production of space; and visual culture in contemporary art, media and film.
Video Contributors
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Charles Broskoski
Co-founder and CEO of Are.na, an online Montessori school for adults.
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Joshua Craze
Joshua Craze is a writer currently finishing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions about war and bureaucracy in Sudan and South Sudan.
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Tamara Kneese
Tamara Kneese is the director of Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program. Previously, she led Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impacts Lab (AIMLab). Building on the participatory impact assessment frameworks developed at AIMLab, she is the principal investigator of a NSF ReDDDoT planning grant that will engage the communities most impacted by AI’s infrastructures, including data centers, to go beyond technical measurements of carbon emissions. Before joining D&S, she was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation, director of developer engagement on the green software team at Intel, and assistant professor of media studies and director of gender and sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco.
Tamara’s research juxtaposes histories of computing and automation with ethnographies of platform labor. Her first book, Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, was published by Yale University Press in 2023. Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, the International Journal of Communication, and Social Media + Society and in popular outlets including LARB, The Verge, Wired, and The Baffler. In her spare time, Tamara is an organizer with the Tech Workers Coalition. She holds a PhD from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
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New Models
NEW MODELS is a media channel and community addressing the emergent effects of networked technology on culture.
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Jack Self
Jack Self works through brand and creative strategy, material production, cultural capital and mass communication. He was previously lead for impact strategy at Balenciaga and CCO at Pangaia. His clients include Prada, Carhartt, LVMH (Virgil Abloh), Alyx (Matthew Williams), Deloitte, JP Morgan and IKEA. He founded Real Review magazine.
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Jess Whyte
Jess Whyte is the Digital Assets Librarian at the University of Toronto, where she previously held the position of Digital Preservation Intake Coordinator, obtained her MI, and worked with the Digital Curation Institute as a Research Assistant. Before coming to the University of Toronto and librarianship, Jess worked in community and public radio, as a resource coordinator with the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group (NSPIRG), and co-authored Building OpenSocial Apps, one of the first books on developing applications for social networks.
Reading List
CANCELLING
Chait, Jonathan. “The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age.” Intelligencer. June 11, 2020. (Available online)
Downey, Tom. “China’s Cyberposse.” The New York Times Magazine. March 3, 2010. (Available online)
Kantor, Jodi and Megan Twohey. “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.” The New York Times. October 5, 2017. (Available online)
Kinney, Dale. “Spolia. Damnatio and Renovatio Memoriae.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Vol. 42 (1997): 117-148. (Available online)
Klein, Ezra. “Shame, Safety and Moving Beyond Cancel Culture.” The Ezra Klein Show. APril 27, 2021. (Available online)
Mishan, Ligaya. “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture.” The New York Times Style Magazine. December 3, 2020. (Available online)
Romano, Aja. “Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture.” Vox. August 25, 2020. (Available online)
Vogles, Emily A., Monica Anderson, Margaret Porteus, Chris Baronavski, Sara Atske, Coleen McClain, Brooke Auxier, Andrew Perrin, and Meera Ramshankar. “Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment.” Pew Research Center. May 19, 2021. (Available online)
ERASING
Beil, Kim “Street Views: Urban photography and the politics of erasure.” Cabinet Magazine, October 14, 2021. (Available online)
Burnett, D. Graham, and Sal Randolph. “The Memory Hole has Teeth.” Cabinet Magazine. Summer, 2011. (Available online)
Boissoneault, Lorraine. “The True Story of Brainwashing and How it Shaped America.” The Smithsonian Magazine. May 22, 2017. (Available online)
Curtis, Adam. “You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough.” The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past. BBC, 1995. (Available online)
Dillon, Brian. “The revelation of erasure.” Tate Etc, no. 8 (September 1, 2006). (Available online)
JC. “Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text.” The Brooklyn Rail. December/January, 2019-2020. (Available online)
Paglen, Trevor. “Society of the Psyop, Part 2: AI, Mind Control, and Magic.” e-flux Journal, no. 148 (October 2024). (Available online)
Schultz, Keli. “Dhaka’s Revolutionary Makeover Pits Visions of Peace Against Violence.” Bloomberg. October 21, 2024. (Available online)
REDACTING
Craze, Joshua. “Redaction as Symptom.” ASAP/Journal, vol 7, no. 2 (May 2022). (Available online)
Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Northwestern University Press, 1998. (Available online)
Lee, Pamela M. “Open Secret: The Work of Art between Disclosure and Redaction.” Artforum 49, no. 9 (May 2011). (Available online)
Mattern, Shannon. Reparative Redaction. Library Stack, 2023. (Available online)
Min, Lisa, Franck Billé, and Charlene Makley, eds. Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State. Punctum Books, 2024. (Available online)
“Redaction Codes.” National Archives. (Available online)
Storr, Rhea. “Redaction.” Black Aesthetic Strategy: Images that Move. July 20, 2021. (Available online)
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016. (Available online)
KEEPING SECRETS
Connelly, Matthew. The Declassification Engine. National Geographic Books: 2023.
Connelly, Matthew. “State Secrecy, Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It.” The Perilous Public Square: Structural Threats to Free Expression Today, ed. David E. Pozen. Columbia University Press, 2020.
Farrow, Ronan. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
Fuller, Matthew and Eyal Weizman. “Secrets.” Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. Verso Books, 2021. (Available here)
Paglen, Trevor. “Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media.” e-flux Journal, no. 147 (September 2024). (Available online)
FALSIFYING
Bytwerk, Randall L. “Believing in ‘Inner Truth’: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Nazi Propaganda, 1933–1945.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, Issue 2 (Fall 2015): 212–229. (Available online)
Eclott, Noam. “Arthur Jafa: Seeing is Believing in the Age of A.I.” Lecture at e-flux. May 14, 2024. (Available online)
Franks, Mary Anne. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape: Deep Fakes and Free Speech Delusions.” Maryland Law Review 78, no. 4, (2019). (Available online)
Jasper, Adam. “Photoagentur Potemkin.” Cabinet Magazine 25. Spring 2007. (Available online)
King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. Canongate Books and Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1997. (Available online)
Kramer, Mark. “Lessons From Operation ‘Denver,’ the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign.” The MIT Press Reader. May 26, 2020. (Available online)
Macdonald, Fiona. “The early Soviet images that foreshadowed fake news.” BBC. November 10, 2017. (Available online)
Shapiro, Jacob N. and Chris Mattmann. “A.I. Is Coming for the Past, Too.” The New York Times. January 28, 2024. (Available online)
COUNTERING
Andriopoulos, Stefan. “Rumor and Media: On Circulations and Credence (via Kant and Marx).” Grey Room 93 (Fall 2023): 7-25. (Available online)
Andriopoulos, Stefan. “The Multiplication of Monsters: Misinformation from Gutenberg to QAnon.” Public Books. March 20, 2024. (Available online)
Correal, Annie. “A Movement to Fight Misinformation…with Misinformation.” The Daily. Podcast audio. February 8, 2022. (Available online)
Fisher, Max. “The Journalist Who Tried to Fight the Nazis with Radio Stories.” The New York * Times. March 9, 2024. (Available online)
Gross, Terry. “'How to Win an Information War’ details fighting with — and against — propaganda.” NPR. March 14, 2024. (Available online)
Pomerantsev, Peter. How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler. London: Faber & Faber, 2024.
RECKONING AND REMEMBERANCE
Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, “Report to City Council, December 19, 2016.” (Available online)
Equal Justice Initiative, Community Remembrance Project. (Available online)
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14. Project MUSE. (Available online)
Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. (Available online)
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: The Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.
Wilson, Mabel. “Bulletproofing American History” e-flux Architecture. September 2020. (Available online)
TAKING DOWN MONUMENTS
“All Monuments Must Fall.” Syllabus, 2020. (Available online)
Axel, Nick, Ludo Groen, Nikolaus Hirsch, Marina Otero Verzier, eds. Monument. e-flux Architecture and Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2020. (Available online)
Cañas, Tania. “Constructing Absence: Enforced Temporariness in the Destruction of a Salvadoran Community Mural.” The Avery Review, no.55 (2022). (Available online)
Fortin, Jacey. “Toppling Monuments, a Visual History.” The New York Times. August 17, 2017. (Available online)
Taylor, Alan. “The Statues Brought Down Since the George Floyd Protests Began.” The Atlantic. July 2, 2020. (Available online)
Zhang, Alex. “Damnatio Memoriae and Black Lives Matter.” Stanford Law Review 73, (September 2020). (Available online)
CENSORING
Berube, Chris. “Episode 504: Bleep.” 99% Invisible podcast. August 23, 2022. (Available online)
Bustillos, Maria. “Curses! The Birth of the Bleep and Modern American Censorship.” The Verge. August 27, 2024. (Available online)
Edskids. “New study finds self-censorship among US psychologists.” Committee for Academic Freedom. August 29, 2024. (Available online)
Friedman, Jonathan. “This Talk May Be Banned in Schools.” TEDx Talk. October 18, 2022. (Available online)
Galison, Peter. “The Theater of Forgetting.” Cabinet Magazine 42, (Summer 2011). (Available online)
Nayar, Pramod K. “Burning Books and The Nazification of Literature.” The Wire. July 14, 2024. (Available online)
Restuccia, Andrew, and Rebecca Ballhaus. “America’s Top Archivist Puts a Rosy Spin on U.S. History—Pruning the Thorny Parts.” The Wall Street Journal. October 29, 2024. (Available online)
SLJ Staff. “Missouri District Approves Book Banning Measure, Restricts Conversations About Gender Identity | Censorship News.” School Library Journal. August 27, 2024. (Available online)
ERASING CULTURES
Farago, Jason, Sarah Kerr, Ainara Tiefenthäler and Haley Willis. “Calculating the Toll of Russia’s War on Ukrainian Culture.” The New York Times. December 19, 2022. (Available online)
Fordham, Alice. “In Northern Iraq, ISIS Leaves Behind An Archaeological Treasure in Ruins.” NPR. November 26, 2016. (Available online)
FT Reporters. “How China is tearing down Islam.” Financial Times. November 27, 2023. (Available online)
“Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024.” Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. February 1, 2024. (Available online)
Melikian, Souren. “Taleban’s Act Flies in Face of Islam’s Tenets.” The New York Times. March 7, 2001. (Available online)
Poberezhnyi, Vitalii. “Opinion: Why Russia’s memory policy in occupied territories leaves some Ukrainian monuments standing.” The Kyiv Indepdendent. October 3, 2024. (Available online)
RESISTING ERASURE
Abbas, Basel and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in conversation with Tom Holert. “The Archival Multitude.” Journal of Visual Culture 12, 3 (2013): 345-363. (Available online)
Amnesty International. “Slovenia: Amnesty International’s Briefing to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 35th Session, November 2005.” November, 2005. (Available online)
Cadava, Eduardo, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Aaron Levy, Fazal Sheikh, Gerhard Steidl, and Duncan Whyte. Erasures. Al-Ma’Mal Center for Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Pace/MacGill Gallery, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Slought Foundation, and Storefront for Art and Architecture: 2015. (Available here)
Cadava, Eduardo. “Trees, Hands, Stars, and Veils.” Paper Graveyards. The MIT Press, 2021. (Available here)
Sheikh, Fazal. The Erasure Trilogy. Steidl, 2015.
Sparapani, Grace. “Archiving Otherwise, Against Genocide.” The Avery Review, no.68 (2024). (Available online)
IS THE DIGITAL FOREVER?
Chapekis, Athena, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy, and Gonzalo Rivero. “When Online Content Disappears.” Pew Research Center. May 17, 2024. (Available online)
Howard, Jennifer. “What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?” EdSurge. August 10, 2017. (Available online)
Lassere, Monique, and Jess M. Wythe. “Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2, (2021). (Available online)
Mattern, Shannon. “Empty Pedestals & Plundered Platforms: An Obituary.” Monument Lab Bulletin 1 (Summer 2024): 46-9. (Available online)
Stokel-Walker, Chris. “We’re losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?” September 16, 2024. (Available online)
Vaughan-Nichols, Steven. “Leave the Internet Archive alone!” Computerworld. October 29, 2024. (Available online)
SHOULD IT BE?
Chen, Brian X. “How to Set Your Google Data to Self-Destruct.” The New York Times. October 2, 2019. (Available online)
Kneese, Tamara. Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. Yale University Press, 2023. (Available online with institutional access)
Policinski, Gene. “The Right to Be Forgotten: Everything to Know About Erasing Digital Footprints.” Freedom Forum. (Available online)
Toobin, Jeffrey. “The Solace of Oblivion.” The New Yorker. September 22, 2014. (Available online)
Upton-Clark, Eve. “The New Generation of Digital Hoarders Are Harming the Planet.” Atmos. April 18, 2023. (Available online)