an-archive has no order, categorization, label or taxonomy to follow. Just by pressing a key or refreshing the site, a new slide will appear. These slides, bits and pieces of the history of The Met, trace a (not the) history of Art and Modern Society, even of New York City, but as Foucault urges us: “We must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased, and hidden…”

an-archive is a quote of a quote of a quote. The digitized slides refer to their analog former self, which are an index of a moment in time of a building, a city an exhibition, an artwork, which are too a representation of a moment in time of an event, a person, a landscape, a notion, and so on. As for texts that are cited, I’ll use a quote from Foucault’s “An Archeology of Knowledge” to explain my use and interpretation: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network”.

As an online project, an-archive.net will continue to grow and feed from the massive Met’s slide archive. True to its nature, this archive produces more archive and remains open to the future.

(1) As Bergson states in Matter and Memory, “there is no perception which is not full of memories.”

(2) Unarchive is a term used to describe the process of restoring files from an archive (compressed file) or backup to their original location, usually a hard drive. To extract from a digital archive.