Constant (Nicolas Malevé and Michael Murtaugh) have developed a series of experiments in connection with the archive of Erkki Kurenniemi, the Finnish artist and technology pioneer of the 1960s. Over the years, Kurenniemi has obsessively documented his everyday activities, collecting vast amounts of audio-visual-textual material to make a digital 'back-up' of his life. The archive is an attempt to provide the necessary materials for someone in the future to be able to reconstruct human life once computers are powerful and intelligent enough to perform the task, reflecting what Kurenniemi considers to be inevitable by 2048, and thus enacting the fantasy of artificial consciousness.

Over the duration of dOCUMENTA (13), Constant explore Kurenniemi's work as a database-body in progress - as a living archive in the spirit of his project. Their approach to this task is not to follow standard archiving procedures of processing, ordering and classifying data but to speculate on the nature of the materials themselves by running a series of experiments using human and machine processes. Their interpretation of Kurenniemi's archive is aimed to uncover aspects of what is not directly apparent.

A project page and a blog documenting their ongoing experiments can be found at http://kurenniemi.activearchives.org/logbook/

On Friday 14 September 2012, 11 am - 1.30, at La Lutherie, Constant give a workshop on Active Archives, the Kurenniemi project, and invite participants to explore different interpretations of archiving.

The project is initiated by Joasia Krysa, commissioned by KURATOR (Joasia Krysa) and dOCUMENTA (13) in partnership with Central Art Archive of the Finnish National Gallery (Perttu Rastas), and Contemporary Art Museum KIASMA, Helsinki. Supported by Arts Council England.

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