Reimagining Archives: Radically Rethinking Design, Identity, and Multiplicity

The ever-expanding accessibility and integration of digital technologies in everyday life offers artists the chance to forge new paths of creativity, expression, and engagement between themselves and participants. Digital artists Stephanie Dinkins, Morehshin Allahyari, Adrian Aguilera, and Skawennati demonstrate these affordances by reclaiming forgotten, untold, and silenced identities, stories, spaces, and cultures toward the design and creation of mutable, participatory, archival art projects focused on indigenous, marginalized, and non-western worldviews. Through design principles that foster collective teaching, learning, and creating, their work reflects the world as relational, unfixed, and multiple, wherein many perspectives and knowledges converge and materialize. This essay analyzes these artists’ works to illustrate the possibility for the existence of multiple worlds, the value of participatory design, and the sociopolitical significance of the archive to argue that digital technologies and networks can be creatively and thoughtfully deployed to decenter the dominant worldview of modernity by re-imagining ways of uncovering, preserving, organizing, and accessing cultural knowledge. By doing this, the institutional logics derived from colonial ideologies are disrupted and reflect a new ontology of knowledge acquisition in the form of collaboration, participation, and distributed agency, enabling the co-creation and engagement with multiple realities toward the making of a digital pluriverse.