On personal archival, continued

2024-07-21

Hi again! This morning my cat reaped what she sowed, and she did in fact shit her pants. Of course, she learned nothing from this and continued to try and have more scone. Thankfully though, she did not poop in the bathtub again, and in this way we learn to take our W's and let L's be bygones, as they say. Last night I spent a good amount of time adding some of my old work to my Toyhou.se and as I did I kept musing on how much of my own work I actually still really love. Had it not been for my effort to better archive my characters (and in extension, my past, my memories, and my connections) I might've not seen myself in that light. With this optimistic view in mind, let's get back to our previous topic of conversation, so we may find a satisfying conclusion between the two of us :)

So, as we'd established last time... Being able to access and understand your own archives is really important, but that doesn't always necessarily corrolate to being able to know when, why, or how the particular archived piece came to be. This might not sound like an extremely important aspect of archival to some, what's really the point of knowing what town a picture was in when the picture itself is proof enough that you went there? Well yes, I suppose for some people that is enough, but at some point in time, for some reason, whatever that may be, you might want to know where that town was. It is in anticipation of these questions that we aim to have good traceability in our archives.

So what is traceability anyway?

Traceability is, by my words alone and with nothing to back me up, the ability to trace back your steps to find information that might be helpful in the future. If you're making a portfolio for instance, knowing what material you used or who else worked with you on a project, can be really useful. Or lets say you're returning to an older project, but have no information on where you bought the fabric to make the original dress. Even something like re-creating a recipe, really comes down to being able to re-trace your own steps, and find out what the ingredients, technique, or any other number of factors, were.

But don't be fooled, traceability is a two way street! Just like it aims to help you retrace the steps you took to make a piece, it can be a method of identification too. Knowing that your work is categorized in certain ways, or tagged with certain hashtags, or in any way ordered and labeled means you'll much more easily be able to find the work that fits certain criteria. Like, for instance, finding all the drawings of a specific oc! In the past I'd always write an attempt at a funny in-joke as my titles for practically every file in my archives. This made for an incredibly annoying realization, that if I wanted to find any art of one specific character, I'd have to write more than their name in the search bar to find it. This is an example of bad traceability! I couldn't retrace my steps in order to find my work. Even though I have all my folders set up by year, which means that when I find one example I'm looking for, finding the rest is easier since I can look at what was made in the same timeframe, it doesn't make for a simple searching experience. As such my folders made my work accessible to me, but the titles did not make it traceable, see where I'm getting at?

Of course, not every single piece you ever make needs to be meticulously easy to track down. Moreso, what I'm saying is that if you know there's something you might want to see again, give yourself something to find it by. A bright physical tag, a special pattern, a hashtag, or even cross-posting online on sites like Toyhouse or tumblr, which can make it really simple to find things you yourself have put away :3.

Last, but absolutely not the least, archives MUST be... Safe!!!

Drill that into your mind, reader! Keep! your! archives! safe!

I mean it, it's important! The whole point of an archive is to have a space to keep your work for a long time, even if that work is initially meant to be ephemeral. If your archive isn't safe, then the whole point is lost.

Let me make that more clear; When I say safe, I don't mean 'safe for work', nor do I mean 'safe from other people' although that may be part of it, what I mean is that your archives need to be safe from the elements, whatever way they exist in your chosen medium. The overall safety of the work being kept is one of, if not the most difficult, thing to ensure in all of archival. It is in itself a science and an artform, and one that has been practiced for as long as civilization has. I know I've said it before, but it's in this context that it means the most: our work hold our experiences, our memories, a precious part of ourselves. In the same way ancient civilizations strived to keep their loved ones' bodies safe, or their monuments and memories, that is the true end goal of all archival. That is how I personally see it at least. Doing this is- and I cannot properly express this in any way that matters- both as worthwhile and as futile as the search for eternal life. Memories are something that cannot survive forever, and in the same way neither can any piece of work we make, whether its physical or digital, set in stone or inked on skin. Even so, we gotta try right?? Right!?

"Jeez, I dunno, it kinda sounds like you're being a bit pretentious about this, I mean this is just yaoi fanart we're talking about right? I just don't think it's that deep-" But it is!!! It really, truly is, my precious reader. There are scholars, historians even, out there right now collating as much yaoi hentai doujin as possible for their archives. People are scrambling to grab every single piece of fanart ever made by influential artists. And regular people, who have no stake in any of this, wish they'd at least kept a picture of the drunken doodles they did the night before cuz hey, maybe there was some promise there at some point! I really do genuinely believe in the importance of all of these things. It might make me sound like an anime brain-rotted little freak but well, culture is culture, no matter how vulgur, how stupid, how silly... We are what we make, and what we make is what we are. At some point in the future, maybe some idiot writing about this very year, this very day, will ask you if you have any art left from those silly times. Maybe that person will feel so strongly about the worth of those doodles, those zines, that cosplay, whatever it is you make... Maybe someone genuinely wants to see those, some day in the future. Maybe that person is you, looking back on days that were fun, hard, painful, peaceful... You don't know what these drawings mean to you in the future, because you're not that person yet! Hell, just from a professional point of view, how many massive icons were doodled first on a drive through napkin? How many stories started from just one sentence?

If people, humanity, is all those little things we do put together, then I, personally, think it's worth keeping those things for the future. Maybe not all of them, but at least the ones we like! Or the ones that we can look back on and say 'I've really changed a lot, huh?'

It's worth knowing these things, to me. And in the same vein, if you want something to last, it's really really worth the effort you can put in to understand just how steadfast your materials are. Not every material will look as good in 10 years as it did the second you finished it, and everything from oil on your fingers to mothballs and the inevitable explosion of twitter could be what takes a lifetime's worth of work and reduces it to nothing. Back up those folders baby! Spray your charcoal, hem your threads, save drawings as .pngs, and do your homework. You'll appreciate it one day, maybe, or it might take up a whole lot of space. Then if that happens, at least you'll get to point and laugh at the things you made as you throw them out, and maybe it might even be a moment of respite.

Archives are... fallible.

While we can talk on and on about how to archive things, the uses of them, the pros and cons... at the end of the day, there is nothing that guarantees that whatever archive you make will never be destroyed. There will always be something down the horizon, a large unforeseen leak, one badly named file you can never find, a single childhood drawing tucked under years of grime... While we can do everything in our power to archive our work, sometimes the world decides for us if it's meant to survive or not.

The only thing worse than losing something you didn't know you still wanted, might be the loss of something you worked quite hard to keep safe. This reality can come at odds with the whole purpose of archival, and really is a complete departure from pretty much everything else I've said in the past two posts. Sadly though, it is a real part of the process, and it can be ridiculously difficult to accept. For myself, personally, I try to hold my work just a little bit at arms length, so if these things happen I don't end up feeling so down it makes me avoid doing anything. I lost quite a lot of my own work, things from before I realized I would care, things that I misplaced, so on and so forth. There's other pieces that, while I absolutely could properly archive, I've decided to leave with the sands of time. The knowledge that they are as fragile as a petal in late spring makes me appreciate them more, and since these particular pieces hold no real academic or professional value, that makes them great candidates for this particular approach.

At the end of the day, great artists didn't necessarily always take care of their own work. Sometimes other people had to be the ones to do that for them. In much the same way, the most important part of your personal archives comes down to what is important to you. One person may keep every single doodle they've ever made, while another may only decide to archive pieces after careful thought. Some people even refuse to take care of their work, either because they feel the need to only look forward, or because caring too much for it can cause them to freeze up and refuse to make any more. I have no reason to tell anyone what to do, really, (despite yes, having done so up till now) because people are people, and no two people have the same values, nor the same means.

But, well... I do still think you should back your computer on something. What do I know! >w<

That's all I've gotta say for today, I hope any of this ended up being helpful, or at the very least entertaining :3 I'll be spending the rest of my day enjoying the summer breeze! See you next time x3

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