SUBMIT
Submissions are now open for Everything is Index, Nothing is History.
Deadline Friday, March 2
Selections will be conducted by the Recession Art Jury led by Guest Curator Melanie Kress and Art Director Ani Katz. Everything is Index, Nothing is History will be held June 3 – 17 at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. Accepting Work in All Media Including Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Performance, Installation, and Video.
About Everything is Index, Nothing is History
Everything is Index, Nothing is History is an exhibition about writing and interpreting history, specifically contrasting histories written through language with histories inscribed on the physical world. Beginning in 1867, the philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce defined “index” as a sign that bears a causal relationship to the thing to which it refers. An index may be a footprint or a scar; an index may be a photograph—a document pointing to a moment in time. (As a sign, index differs from language, as language consists of symbols that bear an arbitrary relationship to the thing to which they point.) Everything is Index explores how we experience the world as an accumulation of physical traces, and as an alternative form of history.
There are many ways in which we, both as individuals and as groups, decide what we do and do not believe and believe in. As CSI and Law & Order have taught us, a few matching fibers and a fingerprint found at the crime scene will speak louder than any personal testimony. What grants these unwritten documents their authority? Everything is Index raises many questions: In a time when personal histories have the same accessibility as institutional ones, how do we produce and process history? What does history look like when it doesn’t depend on language? What are the implications of treating contemporary culture with methods previously reserved for historical inquiry? Can the internet be seen as an extension of philosophy’s mind-body dichotomy? Indices appear in myriad locations: archaeology, geology, the Big Bang and expansion of the universe, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Dageurreotypes, sonic booms, stretch marks, gentrification, erosion, internet servers, document shredding, hand-me-downs, craters, potholes…. What do each of these things tell us about their, and our, history?
As with the industrial revolution and the explosion of urban life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, again we face our own revolution. There now exists a single homogeneous system by which personal communication, books, and academically organized archives are all coded according to the same systems of information translation. Through this homogenized distribution of information and communication, our relationship to history, and the present, is altered: experience is approached in its potential to be translated into and concretized as information, and the present produces such an immensity of information that it is necessitates methods of archiving and processing formerly applied only to the past.
As our relationship to history and the present change dramatically, Everything is Index offers its alternative, indexical definition of history in order to explore the ways in which we determine veracity and significance in an expanding sea of information. Of special interest are works that engage in alternative modes of writing, framing, and interpreting history, and question how we assign truths and untruths. Works may address topics such as archive, information systems, story telling, the natural sciences, and photography.
