In Favor of The Small Archive

September 9, 2026 Spring 2026

The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

—From In Defense of the Poor Image by Hito Steyerl

Suppose you fell in love with an artwork. Suppose it was at the MoMA. Or the Whitney. Or the Guggenheim. In this supposition, you’re probably in NYC, but the location you found it in is somewhat irrelevant. Only that it was up for a short period, and that it transfixed you. You take a photo of it with your phone before moving to the next room. You will never look at this photo again and it will sit in your phone for decades. The museum may never show this artwork again and the pieces used to make it will sit in its holdings.

Over the course of ten weeks, Digital Decay and Afterlives examined the question: What happens to a digital artwork when the software it runs on no longer exists? Or, more broadly, how do we document work that is ephemeral in nature, using materials that are constantly in flux, transmute, or transform?

Throughout this class, we critically examined the difficulties of archiving ephemeral work, both from a digital and physical perspective. Whether that was prolific video artist Nam June Paik’s Untitled (1993), which the MoMA described as "a conservator’s nightmare or a conservator’s dream, having every potential problem, from obsolescent exhibition and playback equipment to outdated video technology”, or Mary Flanagan’s [phage] (2000), which exists only through infecting user’s hard drives (with their consent, of course) and is archived in documentation and videos of its process, these works provided significant difficulty for traditional conservators and archivists to maintain and uphold them.

In getting to an understanding of the failures of digital infrastructures and artwork, we looked to the idea of a dependency stack in which a digital artwork sits on top of a combination of technical infrastructures such as storage media, hardware, operating systems, applications, input and output devices, which are all things that can fail independently of the others. This provides exponential levels of failure, where it is possible for combinations of elements to stop working either together or separately.

The course also strove to move through three broad arcs. The first three weeks focused on building a conceptual vocabulary and shared language: digital erosion, technological deterioration, the way artworks survive as behaviors dependent on fragile systems, and what it means to make meaning from fragments and incomplete provenance. Provenance in this context is referring to the originating source of the material itself, typically involving ownership between the artist and institutions. The middle weeks turn toward process and method: web scraping as an archival practice, metadata strategies for describing absence and uncertainty, web languages as tools and fragments for building archive interfaces. The final stretch asked fundamentally harder questions: What can persist when no stable original exists? As we move towards a more robotic internet, what does it mean to create a human archive of things a technological system wouldn't (or couldn’t!) produce? What does it look like to exhibit something incomplete?

One major thread through the entire time is that unlike works that traditionally sit in galleries, such as paintings, sculptures, or completed physical objects which have to deal with physical and material decay, a digital artwork only exists during the performance of its use. Time-based and digital artworks exist beyond being fixed objects, existing as behaviors dependent on technological systems that evolve and erode over time. This changes the work from solely being about what the work is (which is important in it of itself), to something that is almost more of a performance art, in which platform wide failures are evidence of broader changes, things such as economic decisions, platform sunsets, or maintenance failures.

Given the widespread usage of research labs artificial intelligence as a reckoning force within the broader landscape, a big focus of the course was also on fundamentals. Alexa led us through many exercises, such as HTML/CSS, custom fonts, API calls, web scraping with Google Colab, 3D scans and rendering with Luma, and much more. Each week was packed with an interactive exercise so that everyone could learn something (or push their skills further). Despite the fact there was a vibe coding demo for designing UI with Claude and Figma to give optional methods, what stood out was the appetite and desire to learn and teach programming by hand, especially from people who have no prior experience, and a strong desire to push through. Students also mentored each other, setting up time to work through projects or problems, or DM’ing each other on discord.

The spine of the course revolved around each individuals student’s own interest in creating an archive. Whether that was Paul Hwang’s superzoom archive (2026), which documents a collection of “found objects and associated Superzooms” (a feature that no longer exists on Instagram and was mainstay during the pandemic) to Talia Hamburg’s Bags on Trees (2026), which showcases bags on trees through the various NYC boroughs, all of which are hand documented through photos and videos provided by the artist (and the community). Through this process, the work done by the students highlighted two fundamental ideas: the creation of an archive has conceptual, political, and aesthetic implications, especially when looking at what is included and what is left out, and that the data sets, seen as inherently neutral, contain charged meanings.

As you peruse through the student’s digital archives, we invite you to think about the role that archives play in your life, or things that you’re sitting around on that could be archived. And maybe, keep one more thing alive, that would have been lost to the internet, forever.

For more information or additional resources, check out the Digital Decay and Afterlives Are.na page to view literature discussed throughout the span of the course.