Observatory of Unidentified Video created its archive over three decades, between 1994 and 2020. It includes diverse materials: texts, media artifacts and the results of various research projects, as well as reveries and unexpected associations. From 2020 onward, the Observatory has extended the archive’s originally intended limits beyond preservation and beyond its own history and contents; it has launched a series of long-term modules under the generic title Archive Readings: a set of explorations in the web space that rethink specific contents through conceptual, temporal and contextual reconsiderations. These interpretations build bridges between past and present contexts, giving rise to projections toward possible future movements.
Archive Readings are non-linear, experimental exercises that engage with areas and concepts related to the archive, its derivations and potential specific contents. Rejecting the static catalogue, these publications take advantage of the possibilities of the web to recontextualize, first and foremost, the very notion of the archive. From a contemporary, dreamlike perspective, assumptions are inverted, parallels are drawn with certain current sociotechnological changes, and persistent tensions in the theory and practice of what, until very recently, we have considered media are explored.
This approach seeks to activate the notion of the archive as a space of contrast. Each interpretation aims to underline how memory also feeds the oscillation between possibility and contemporary critique, challenging simplifications and linear reductions of progress and obsolescence. The series unfolds irregularly, reflecting the non-systematic nature of memory and prioritizing depth over frequency.
