Archiving the Databody: Human and Nonhuman Agency in the Documents of Erkki Kurenniemi

The paper “sniffs and sneaks” through the archives of Erkki Kurenniemi, elaborating on Constant’s ongoing active archives project that engages with the politics of open data and ethical questions related to the decentralization of resources and the ownership of infrastructures. The working approach is not to follow standardized archiving procedures of ordering and classifying, but to offer a series of speculations on the specific qualities of the materials by running computer programs. The programs uncover aspects of what is not directly apparent in the material, revealing aspects of what is not-yet known. They produce emergent forms of knowledge, operating as ‘probes’ in their terms - more a project of forensics than historiography.