Archive Reindex Archive (ARA) is a web-based platform that presents a collection of photographic archives from the National Geographic Magazine issues dating from 1945 to 1955, where visitors can leave annotations of “what they see.” The images are masked with a fungus-like layer that represents how a machine sees them, with the aim of reassembling the perception of internalized movements of general viewers’ eyes upon encountering the images for the first time. ARA unearths archived remnants of the aftermath of WWII—“expeditious” human movements of global colonization and imperialization and the discrepancies between raw materials, human resources and capital. It collects contemporary annotations that correct, question, and confront the uncomfortable gazes and the given semiotic relationships in the archive to bring a collective means of slow, gentle recuperation to those subject to alterity.

Started as an extended iteration of Proposition 2: Index, ARA has evolved into a full collaboration between Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Kii (Wonki) Kang through which Ivetta’s interests in linguistics, poetics, and ethnographic indexicality studies and Kii’s interests in the critical use of computation and embodied semantics converge and intersect one another.

ARA is a platform for growing collections of texts through which authors, poets and writers respond to the latent concepts and emotions, emerged from, stuck to, and imbued with the artists throughout the entire creation. ARA is only presented through a performance/participatory performance (worksho) entitled Memex Room.