#mesh archive
How We Mesh - Arundhathi
Mesh is characteristic of its name. Mesh is not defined by the solid whole, but simultaneously is the whole. Mesh is held together by its meeting points, and strengthened by closeness and multiplicity. Mesh is a safety net. We are supported while offered visibility.
For me, Mesh came out of a desire to have the intersections of a community be the strongest points rather than their weakest. In my experiences, the tendency to retreat when intersections meet weakens communities, and causes them to collapse. Sometimes, being a part of a group has meant stifling parts of my identity that do not mirror the collective. And sometimes, being a part of a group has meant ignoring identities that do not mirror mine. Dialogue is easy where experience is similar, but it isn’t productive. Mesh is a response to this. Mesh is about solidarity through honest discussion of each person’s authentic experience. This can only be realized with a transparency and willingness to offer safety without the condition of silence.
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Mesh Archive is a mixed media collective founded on the concept of community exploration and identity building. We are interested in the intersections of communities, how to strengthen them, and how the manifestation of our identities online influence this ability to engage in dialogue.
Currently working towards our website and first issue launch we are looking for a second graphic designer who can work with our publication layouts, covers and website. For any and all who are interested please submit an application here.
With our first focus on identity and the internet, we would love to hear from designers with an interest in these areas. For more information send us an email at [email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you!
“A podcast about Clayton and Kelley, two lost millennials, and their never-ending conversation about the questions that keep them up at night, from the history of v-necks to ethical mourning to media curation.” Check out conversationstarterscast on Tumblr.
“Lynch Law in America” by Ida B. Wells (1900)
“Not only are two hundred men and women put to death annually, on the average, in this country by mobs, but these lives are taken with the greatest publicity.”
Against Students by Sara Ahmed
“Complaining, censorious, and over-sensitive, university students are destroying their own institutions. Wait, seriously? People think that?”
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Beatrice Martini - On tech tools for social justice and rights
Material beings: objecthood and ethnographic photographs by Elizabeth Edwards
“Photographs are both images and physical objects which exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience.”
“codedoodl.es is a showcase of curated creative coding sketches. The aim of these doodles is to exhibit interactive, engaging web experiments which only require a short attention span. No loading bars, no GUI, no 5MB 3D models or audio files, just plain and simple doodles with code.” Read more about the project from Neil Carpenter.
Inspecting the Nineteenth Century Literary Digital Archive: Omissions of Empire by Adeline Koh
Adeline Koh examines the use and operations of archives alongside the developments of digitization. Specifically, Koh discusses “the politics of digitizing the literary nineteenth century.” Koh outlines three different components of her study, which are “(1) how the politics of the literary nineteenth century archive interact with and reflectissues within Victorian studies; (2) existing issues with interfaces of existing literary digital projects that limit their correlations with colonialism or the literary productions by the colonized; (3) the contrast between digital literary projects and broader historical digital archives, and the urgency of dealing with this gap (385).”
Check out more resources here.
I’m not sure it ever occurred to me when I was younger how critical the internet and online experience would be to me. It was always there; it was a privilege to have and use, and it was almost seemingly natural. I didn’t start using it more for its other features until I reached the end of middle school and onto high school; prior to that it was for games or perusing through online shops to build myself an ideal lifestyle, to plan an ideal future.
In high school, I realized that I spent a lot of time online and began utilizing it, mindlessly, as a primal tool for communication. I had a lot of speech insecurities, and I still do, but using messaging and chat systems made talking a lot easier for me. I never realized that writing was a form of communication until the internet became that for me. It is now, more so than ever, my primary resource for more aspects of my life than I can count.
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Madsoncurating identity, speech, andaccesson the internet.
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Hello everyone! While we are working on our first issue, we wanted to share with you what has been informing our thought processes, what inspires us, and some resources we have been working from. At Mesh Archive, we want to provide as much access to resources as we can, and many of these resources are typically under the radar. These are our personal archives; we hope to bridge these gaps with you and encourage you all to share with us what informs yourlearning!
The Hyper-affective Turn: Thinking the Social in the Digital Age
Nestor García Canclini and Maritza Urteaga discuss the shift of many 21st-century social theorists toward affect studies and how this has affected as well as been formed by digitization.
‘I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked’: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social MediabyLisa Nakamura
“Memes that depict the black body in abject and bizarre poses and situations are part of the long history of viral racism that spreads using user and audience labor.”
Pao Out as Reddit CEO; Co-Founder Huffman Takes Over
“The social news service has thousands of loyal, unpaid moderators who produce and curate the lion’s share of content on the site. But a staff firing and the controversy that erupted thereafter yesterday has moderators of some of the most influential and important parts of the site closing off their sections in protest, posing a serious problem for Reddit’s future … “
Monoskop is a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities (Monoskop About). This is a large database of resources that can helpful in exploring some other concepts in relation to what we have been talking about.
Mindy Fullilove – Reading about Displacement
A collection of research and resources by Mindy Fullilove, who has provided a profound amount of her research online for access concerning displacement in relation to black women and community, housing, family, and AIDS.
Center for Art and Thought is a network of artists, scholars, and activists who use the internet as a platform to showcase the variety of works being produced out of the Filipinx diaspora (CA+T About). They have collections of work, art, essays, and exhibitions speaking to the digital era and importance of access to resources that inform learning.
Jane Jin Kaisen is Korean transnational adoptee who works with a variety of artforms that explore representations of memory, history, and transnational subjectivity (Jane Jin Kaisen About). She has produced an incredible amount of works surrounding this fairly difficult concepts such as her film The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, which can be found here.
Chapter One of Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed
Queer Phenomenology explores orientation — a turn of the body toward objects — as well as the significance of objects’ physical impressions upon the body. Much of Ahmed’s work focuses on the occupation of spaces and bodies and the politics of those spatial-material interactions.
Donate!
As a community based organization we are working to provide as much content and material as we can to everyone. We want to be able to bridge gaps between the levels of access in our community, but we are going to need some help!
If you’re able to donate, it would allow us to further our goal as a community that strives to provide access to materials that could help and inform our growth. We want to produce a publication that could be widely accessible to those who might not have regular access to our online materials as well as other multimedia works. We hope to foster a community that can share and exchange our ideas, works, and creations, so a donation would bring us a little closer to, at least, a physical publication!
The donations we receive this time around will be used solely for physical productions of our premiering publication. We want to be able to distribute and reach as much as we can geographically, so donations for our first issue would be very helpful!
However, if you’re just as excited for this project as we are, would like to see more physical developments, and have something to spare, it would help us along the way to provide us input on what we can provide and how we should engage our community. When you donate, feel free to leave us a suggestion! Let us know what youwant to see come out of Mesh.
Right now, we are in the process of incorporating audio/visual elements and interactive design into our projects and developing games and web apps, podcasts, and video that further contribute to our mission to explore identity and community, cross medium.
Follow us on twitter for updates.
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About Us
The internet is a phenomenon fundamentally bound to our experiences. This binding has made identity central to the internet, and has destabilized identity from geography.
What is Mesh
Mesh is a digital archive of community knowledge and a learning project. Our aim is to create a resource and a place where people to feel safe enough to start participating in their own liberation.
Why We Created Mesh
Conversations and writings about identity building and community, especially regarding the internet have been historically whitewashed and detached from larger narratives that inform various media and forms of communication on the internet. However, there has been a plague of antiblackness and transmisogyny in spaces (including internet spaces) dedicated to practicing solidarity and ensuring the safety of people of marginalized identities. While the internet does allow a greater amount of resources to be accessible to people outside of academic institutions, information still fails to be understandable and can be further alienating to people (similarly to how we have been alienated and silenced within the classroom).
Our Process
We seek to integrate discourse about the IRL/URL experience (especially regarding identity building), to create an archive where people can reference and have access to historical resources about identity, liberation, etc. Simultaneously, we also seek to document and save contemporary and non-academic works regarding our experience, that may be harder to preserve, but may be more accessible and equally valuable due to the greater accessibility of self publishing.
Our Goals/Mission
Our goal at Mesh is to both engage people more and to engage people completely, through honest dialogue about identity centered on intersubjectivity, that is facilitated through a variety of mediums. Mesh is an exercise in asking questions, and in attempting to answer them through discussions and practice in our communities.
Submit
We are currently We are currently looking for artist, writers, photographers, and videographers, etc. to submit to our first publication! More information can be found here.
Feel free to ask us any questions on our blog or shoot us an email at [email protected]
Follow us on twitter for updates.
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How We Mesh - Asha
The formation of Mesh was conceptualized around discussing communication and community cross medium, and not only where they allow us to participate in forming our selfhood differently than we would without contemporary forms of communication, but also how our understanding of ourselves cross dimensionally fails us. The coexistence of spaces and bodies, of ideas and oppressions–is something that has intrigued me for a long time. As I continue to experience more and become a part of more and as I negotiate my own identity on the internet and in my physical life, I’m realizing how pertinent it is to my own liberation to answer questions about the interconnectedness of our world.
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How We Mesh - Ginny
Mesh is the product of my journey towards defining identity, and also the means through which I explore it. Mesh has taught me that I don’t need to have all the answers. It is based on shared community knowledge that is constantly being explained, defined, and changed depending on our collective experiences. There is a sense of security in this continuous growth that I have yet to experience in my persistent engagement with academia; Mesh is a collective system that is based off individual experiences. We strive to create discourse that is accessible, and theory that invites discussion. It subverts the idea of identity being a limitation or a single instance in space and time that defines us forever - Mesh will grow and learn for as long as we continue to do so.
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How We Mesh - Mads
When I think about Mesh I think about the ability to be both transparent while overlapping at the same time. I think about the material and how it has its own color, or entity, and can stand on its own but can still resonate, accompany, overlay, or embellish another without detracting from a greater piece or concept. With Mesh, there is a multiplicity and oneness at work because we are individually working to better each other as a whole. Mesh’s multiplicity is integral in our formation because our identities themselves have multiplicity.
Mesh is a malleable network of safety, belonging, and love. It’s home, especially with my sisters, or my team. I have found that Mesh has become not only a destination of home and belonging, but a process of home and belonging. I’m learning that where I am now, and where I will be, will always be in transit. Being in transit allows for flow and growth. There’s a consistency in construction because we are always engaging with each other at a pace that ensures comprehension.
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