Climate Archives and Performance

I want to explore the archive of climate data and excavate its other names through film performances. I say excavate because performance allows you to reveal the different names of an archive by providing different vantage points. Depending on how you look at a collection of climate, the material data can conceive a plurality of archives. An ecological economist could see it as an archive of market failures, an environmental scientist could see it as an archive of the earth’s climate, or a tin-foilist could see it as an archive of state lies.

By theorizing about archives that way, I argue that performance then is a form of pedagogy. The performance gives the performer’s viewpoint of the archive, which is achieved through materiality and how it invokes the memories of the archive. In my case, the film allows me to grapple with the archive’s conception as just data and modify its name to be an archive of pressing problems. Given a time where the public sees data through a very static and empirical lens, it is important to show that climate data, in extension climate archives, are not simply the measurements of precision sensors but also deeply implicated in the political, the social, and the economic.

Performing Archives

The most abstract but still functional definition of archives is any “concept” with a “history” in relation to material(s). That is, the fundamental pieces that make an archive are a memory function and a historical function, with material as its conduit whether it be practices, actions, or objects. 12 For example, the Ginkgo tree near the Chapel is a part of an archive of place. Whether that be UVA, Charlottesville, or the USA, the Ginkgo tree is a part of each archives of place. In my definition, I say materials and not bodies because, to me, an archive encapsulates a collection of usually extracted, externalized knowledge. Going back to Diana Taylor, she also wrote:3

“The fact that archival memory succeeds in separating the source of ‘‘knowledge’’ from the knower—in time and/or space —leads to comments, such as de Certeau’s, that it is ‘‘expansionist’’ and ‘‘immunized against alterity’’”

The strongest implication from the definition is that there is a normalizing force in archives and archival knowledge. A lot of the readings we covered throughout the class talk about how the archives are misused as tools that legitimize narratives. Epistemological violence is a word often used when questioning an archive because of how they were shaped. Knowledge production, and especially storage of knowledge, is socially implicated. That is why we covered concepts like refugee epistemology, the repertoire, and visceral logics precisely because archives, for better or worse, are created and interfaced with by people. In asking and answering, “What is an archive?” I ask myself, “What are archives?” and from class, the answer is that archives have been historically/presently tools that legitimize and reify logics of ideological dogmatism.

Going back to my definition earlier, I wanted to give some clarifying examples of what I mean by: “any concept with a history.” What that means is an archive is always an archive of something. And to reiterate another point: “Materials can conceive for many archives.” For instance, archives can be related to collections of documents, artifacts, stories, or memories. But when considering what can be archived, even the concept of a nation, a community, or an event can be legitimately considered.4 However, not all concepts get memorialized, and not all materials are archived.

Taking a look at indigenous oral storytelling, it can be said that their stories contains many archives. Archives of Sky Women, Sweetgrass, and the Land. 5 Not only that, indigenous modes of being open-up new archives by changing what valid sources of information are: the body, the land, the life.

“Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember,””

Mar de Vang’s intervention into the state archives is an example of how “materials can conceive for many archives.” She demonstrates how state documents were not a neutral archive of Hmong peoples but how the archives had another being as an archive of Hmong violence. Archive(s) shape from the things that are said and not said, found or forgotten, material and immaterial.

Then, the performance modifier of performing archives acts as a pedagogical function that gives knowledge of and necessarily modifies the archives. A phrase often used and is a good description in explaining performance is that each way of performing offers a way into the archive. The difference in method changes the materiality of how you come to know the archive, but the total memory stays the same regardless of methodology. However, the different techniques can illuminate different memories the archive holds to each of their strong suits. A clarifying example I look to is Christina Sharpe’s “Wake Work” and how she uses it to approach the afterlives/archives of slavery. The substance and material here is the approach as a way of coming into knowing and reclaiming history. She writes:

“the precarities of the ongoing disaster of the ruptures of chattel slavery. They texture my reading practices, my ways of being in and of the world, my relations with and to others.”

Material invokes the archives, guides you towards what was lost; surrogates for knowledge.

Film as Performance

Film as a method works, providing additional information that contextualizes the archive.6 These methods of adding more information through the materiality are dependent on the method, but for film in particular, the fundamental operations are that of layering and cutting. The memory that an archive evokes can literally be implanted into the performance via splicing in visual and auditory information, while the materiality/texture is how the experience of the film gets structured. The ways that layering different sounds and spicing information create a narrative structure for how the archive is experienced. The editor makes a curated experience in the archive via visual tensions, temporal senses, and sound collages. The film can take climate record archives, which are commonly viewed as apolitical, and change how the archive is itself interpreted.

Climate Discourse Needs Fresh Eyes

I chose NOAA and EM-DAT Climate Archives as it seems the world is once again coming to critical mass on the topic of climate change. The problem is the old narratives have not succeeded or “feasibly” brought us to a world where the climate isn’t a looming problem. Narratives from green economists, scientific researchers, and most importantly, politicians; have not actually changed the way we relate to the climate. Even though I have gone to an environmental governor school, I still roll my eyes when I see the CO2 chart, not to the data but to the political-economic discourse faced in the light of its implications. To counter such apathy, I look towards ecological film in particular, as it has the power to show something raw; bare nature is something that can’t be refuted. Also, what time is better to do this work than now? The Sahara has been flooded. Mathematically improbable hurricanes are commonplace, and day after day during Summer, the Earth experiences record-breaking temperatures. If not now, when?

Conclusion/Justification

To my teacher because, I was supposed to write this as a standard paper. Hope this is a good reason!

Throughout the blog, I have talked about the nature of archives: what is and what are, the powers of performing and performance, and how they are connected to memory and materiality. In a traditional paper, I would continue to write and talk about the plentitude of ways I can use film performance to disrupt the normative conception of climatological archives. I would continue to speak on why performance must be applied to provide new insights into the archives. The thing I wouldn’t be doing is actually making the film.

So, here is the short film experience I created:

Creative Process

This does not have to be graded

One of the most important things I do whenever working with information is to ensure I am honest about what I’m displaying. I think back to a class I took at the School of Architecture: SARC 5400 - Data Visualization, particularly Tufte’s principles of information integrity.7 The first five are about causality, relationships, multivariate ness, evidence, and what the question is. These principles can be mapped to doing information work in films, like considering what are the thematic objects, their relations, and the layered narratives, but the most vital element for me was documenting each clip. Going in and doing research to learn about the aftermath, not only what it was as a singular data point, helped ground the work.

I had to learn Davinci Resolve, but using the tools to create the video was easier than I thought it would have been.

The beauty of creation lies in the journey, not just the end result. As I navigated through this project, I found that the teacher often learns more than the student. This process of writing, performing, and creating, even if the end product seems useless, is still productive and generative. That’s why I even started this blog. It serves as a platform for me to delve deeper and force myself to reflect on the things I come across-it’s a form of pedagogy in itself.

The hardest thing I am currently facing in finishing the short film is the problem of scope. I originally set out to accomplish one task related to my definitions of archive and performance. That task is showing how the climate archives, particularly the ones invoked by scientists, has other names. Because if you only see climate records as an archive of climate (which is debated), you miss out on any other ways of experiencing or interfacing with the records. Latour would say you are othering yourself from the processes of knowledge creation.

AI Usage

I should probably write a blog for this and just link it.

I treat ChatGPT as a more convenient Google search, but you always have to be skeptical of what it gives. Given the underlying stuff that constitutes AI and its current boundary of being unable to generate anything novel, I find it odd how people justify using it to produce for them. The reality is probably that I don’t care about this task to do it. In a way, it makes sense, you could just throw in whatever you got from a Google search. In the coding context, that means skipping writing “boilerplate” code, which is valid, but educationally, just seems like a form of indifference. Also, it’s plagiarism. Imagine training an AI on one blog post.

My workflow for thinking of new ideas usually follows this pattern:

  1. new idea!
  2. hey chatgpt, let’s discuss this idea.
  3. semantic scholar to find current papers.
  4. reflect on the idea.
  5. synthesize or draw relations.

Before GPT, Step 2 was Google, but I found the point of GPT’s ability to have semantic similarities helpful in then going further on what to look up. I remember that for my Learning Forward and Backwards blog, the initial concept I had thought about randomly was ontological structures in a domain, and I was able to map that onto new knowledge, along with being able to create the initial constructs. I asked what theories were related to the concept I had thought up, and lo’ and behold, I am not original. But, if I put that into Google search, I would not have found what I was looking for.

There is a large category of facts in the world that are difficult to find, but easy to verify once you’ve found them.

I mainly used it to do archival “research”, like asking it extreme weather events before 1900. Post 1900 I had the EM-DAT to pull from and write scripts on. Even then I fact checked against https://premium.weatherweb.net/weather-in-history-1800-to-1849-ad/ which is a site that has human resources backing it.

Other than that I did ask it some random questions I had on linguistics and repeat back the core concepts of my writing. I like making it summarize what I wrote because it acts as sort of a mirror.

Citations

AP Archives. (n.d.). https://www.youtube.com/@APArchive

Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. (2014). Choice Reviews Online, 51(10), 51–5594. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-5594

British Pathe. (n.d.). https://www.youtube.com/@britishpathe Guha-Sapir, D., Below, R., & Hoyois, P. (2016).

EM-DAT: The CRED/OFDA International Disaster Database [Dataset]. http://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/16183

Reuters. (n.d.). https://www.youtube.com/@Reuters

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. http://read.dukeupress.edu/content/in-the-wake

Taylor, D. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA64891742


  1. A physical archive’s history, memory, and material is found as the object itself, the plurality comes in how it’s signified is perceived. An immaterial archive’s history, memory, and material is traced more metaphorically, and spiritually, but still relates to practice. ↩

  2. As we get further along in class, I get more convinced I need to study some linguistics. i.e. difference in saying something is an archive vs an archive of and so forth. ↩

  3. I find it funny because after going through half the course my own conception of an archive seems to have aligned with what the author wrote. ↩

  4. An archive of the US could our financial debts, memorials, there is a a lot of records. An archive of a major could be the alumni list. An archive of a date could be any memoria from it ↩

  5. I have to point out that even indigenous conceptions of the archives heavily challenges Western conceptions of them. As Sky Women and the land can be said to have knowledge, but the temporalities are more fractured and non-linear. ↩

  6. The additional information is information that is not “found” inside the archive. ↩

  7. My final project actually can be thought of as performing global archives as well: link ↩