ARCA [archive]

Interactive installation and digital archive of 52 TB

– In collaboration with Julia Weist –

STATEMENT

Julia Weist and Nestor Siré explore creative social strategies surrounding connectivity in Cuba, where a majority of the population has little to no internet access. Their projects capture and contextualizes the most significant of these phenomena, the Paquete Semanal or “Weekly Package”, a one-terabyte digital media collection newly aggregated every week and circulated across the country via in-person file sharing. Unlike previous iterations of the paquete archive, ARCA [archive] enables artists and researchers to spend extended periods of time (on their own computers) browsing and analyzing the contents of the Paquete Semanal to develop related work.

ARCA [archive] maintains the exact folder structure used by the OMEGA paquete and contains 52 terabytes of media aggregated between August, 2016, and August, 2017. In addition, ARCA [archive] includes a supplemental folder, !!!Extra, with collections created by the artists during their research and covering the following categories:

— Original content: a complete collection of original content created in Cuba for the paquete, including digital magazines, advertisements, and shows devoted to entertainment bulletins, celebrity gossip, and topical banter.

— Matrices: an archive of the promotional logos of Cuban distributors, or matrices, ranging from 1980s VHS rentals to DVD vendors to the the Paquete Semanal studios.

—!!!Sección ARTE: a complete archive of the artist projects presented in !!!Sección A R T E, a project by Siré to circulate contemporary art in an eponymous folder as part of the paquete.

—Paquete Semanal (national archive): a collection of content and screenshots that documents the architecture of folders of every sub-matriz, or regional distributor, in Cuba.

—Selection of photos: a collection of high-quality images related to the Paquete Semanal, including photos of the PCs used by matrices and of boxes that are built by hand to transport hard drives from one city to another.

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