liquid archives
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|I am Jaimey Hamilton Faris, an Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Art History, at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. 

|Liquid Archives collates some of my current  conversations and writing about the ocean as archive of climate change.  I am interested both in the oceans as media (primary geo-archives) and media about oceans (secondary interpretations by artists, scientists, activists, and more).  Both archives act as accumulating records of the long duration of petro-capitalism's effects on the earth.  A la Allan Sekula and his foundational study of our global port system in Fish Story (1989-195), Liquid Archives attempts to bring a renewed visibility and consciousness to the ocean and ocean knowledges in ways that will challenge the our current dominant conceptions of the ocean.   

|Along with "liquid archives," I'm interested in "liquid  thinking and seeing" a kind of attention learning through the medium of water, related to new feminist materialist critical theory which embraces the viscous and immersive conditions of co-existence, collaboration, creativity, and discovery.   On a superficial level, liquid thinking could be considered  the quintessential mentality of our time.  We live in a world which demands of us to "stay fluid," innovative and connected in our competition-based world.  But the typical notion of liquid thinking as merely "innovative" enterprise thinking, does not do justice to the radical potential of watery thought.  Liquid thinking could also be a transversal critical technique in breaking through the most dominant mental maps of our time.  The ocean offers ways to think about the value of being suspended in and immersed in the between.  It's expansive and unknown liquid offers models for delimiting our understandings and values in ways that open to new conceptualizations of our blue world.  

|I am proposing a kind of liquid thinking that rolls upon itself like waves, a kind of thinking that is self-critical about its own processes.  Can we use liquid thinking to not only think outside the (container) box of capitalism, but also to turn that thinking back onto current modes of capitalism so as to generate more sustainable models of cultures, economies and ecologies? This method is fundamental to my approach as a writer, teacher, speaker, curator, and community member.
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|You can also find my published writings/talks as well as as past projects (exhibitions I have curated, conferences and visiting artist projects I have organized,  and other  community efforts).

|Hawaii Artists provides an overview of my other ongoing archival project, collecting the oral histories of artists of Hawaii.


LINKS

jhamiltonfaris@gmail.com

uhm art department

academia.edu
                                   
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  • bio
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