UCLA

This dissertation is an ethnography of the inaugural artist-in-residence program (2013-2015) at the Portland Archives & Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon. Despite over the past two decades of abundant artistic engagement with archives, a concurrent increase in artist-in-residence projects within institutional archives, and a rich humanities-centered discourse about artists’ archival endeavors, significant attention has yet to be given by the field of archival and recordkeeping studies to the ways in which artists respond to records; to the kinds of conceptual, aesthetic, and physical work artists do with records; and, to the kinds of social and cultural relations into which archives enter through art practice, production, circulation, and reception. Moreover, the field lacks information about how people respond to records, what records can inspire people to do, what kinds of things can be done with records, and what kinds

of interactions occur and relationships form around the use of records and archives. This project addresses these concerns and explores through data collected from participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis the implementation and management of the residency program and the ways in which poet Kaia Sand and interdisciplinary artist Garrick Imatani engaged and transformed Portland Police Bureau surveillance records into art and literary works in collaboration with activists whose livelihoods are caught in the records and other Portland community members. Further, through engaging object biography and the records continuum, this project considers the affects and effects of the surveillance records over time and space. Key findings indicate that artists’ archival art practices and works open-up archives to different forms of meaning-making processes and productions (e.g., experiential, social, aesthetic), and situate archives as potent stimuli, conduits, and spaces for social, cultural, and political productions that encourage dynamic cross-disciplinary and community interactions where new understandings about the past and present and possibilities for the future can emerge. Findings also reveal that besides being vital tools for evidencing human activity and transmitting memory, records, through the forces of their materiality and the presence of human bodies and activities they invoke, are affectively charged objects able to move people into new ways of being and doing, relations and alignments that can effect changes in personal and social circumstances and foster relationships between people in unpredictable, generative, and community building ways.