By Elly Clarke, CHASE funded PhD Candidate at Goldsmiths

**(Click on image to enlarge)** Still from screen recording of Franklin Furnace History of the Future of the Present with Founder Martha Wilson alongside Future of the Present fund winning artists Irina Danilova (1999), Joshua Fried (1999), Rae C Wright (1998) and Diane Ludin - (2000 and 2007). Via Zoom was Toni Sant, and Future of the Present artist Lynn Cazabon (2003).

In September 1998 I went to New York for a 3-month internship at Franklin Furnace Archive – arranged by email. Although I had one actual letter to confirm this, some friends were doubtful of me going there, asking how I knew if this place was for real, and how could I tell it wasn’t just some bloke in his bedroom - because the organisation had (only) a website as its public face. When I arrived, Franklin Furnace was housed in an office very close to the site of the World Trade Centre, grey archival boxes of various sizes lining the walls, desktop computers, phones that rang - and a history going back to 1976. Working there was Franklin Furnace’s founder, Martha Wilson, and Harley Spiller; Michael Katchen, the archivist; and Alice Wu, Webmistress. And then us interns, who pitched in whenever we could, helping out with whatever needed doing that we fancied.

My arrival coincided with the second season of the ‘Future of the Present’ artist netcasts that were broadcast out of Pseudo Studios, a webcasting outfit that took up the entire 5th floor of a huge warehouse on the corner of Broadway and Houston. Each netcast presented a 40-minute live performance or screening followed by a round table (/round computers) discussion about the performance, and about what art on the internet is – viewable via RealPlayer (™). I was there in the end for nearly 9 months, and the work I did, and the performances I witnessed, continue to influence the work I make today, as well as my perspective/s on live performance and expression of self over the internet - which ultimately led to me doing my PhD, exploring the drag of physicality in the digital age.

In Autumn 2019, supported by CHASE, I returned to Franklin Furnace to look back at this time. I spent a month in the archive, digging through artist files, peering at sheets of 35mm slides and watching pixelated recordings of netcasts. Sometimes I encountered my 22-year-old self there - in videos, photographs, handwriting, or emails. I concluded my month by hosting a Netcast direct from the current Franklin Furnace HQ on the campus at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and on Zoom - with Martha Wilson and five Future of the Present artists, who I invited to reflect on the work they made for the series.

Dragging the archive – a personal re:encounter with Franklin Furnace’s cyber beginnings by Elly Clarke’ was displayed in museum vitrines across three floors of the beautiful Victorian library at Pratt and showed a range of materials looking back on the ‘cyber turn’ the organisation took shortly before I got there in the 90s. Drag/ging – understood as both a performance and a burden - was employed as a tool and a lens on the materials presented.

**(Click on image to enlarge)** Installation view of vitrine_2_3 showing a picture of me in the archive age 22 and my stack of diaries from 1998-99, from which (redacted) extracts were shown in the exhibition. Photo: Tsubasa Berg.

When I finally wrote up some of my findings from this trip which became the first draft of a chapter entitled The Drag of the Archive, the work emerged as a set of textual fragments with images, and I realised that it would be better presented in 3D, as an exhibition. I sent an extract of the chapter to Harley Spiller, current Director of Franklin Furnace, and suggested my desire for it to become a physical exhibition. He took this suggestion seriously, and after a couple of redrafts, a proposal was sent on to Pratt Libraries for me to curate an exhibition exploring Franklin Furnace’s cyber beginnings as the 8th Live at the Library exhibition – a series I knew about since an artist book of mine had been exhibited in the previous year’s edition[1]. Once the proposal was accepted by Pratt Libraries, I applied to CHASE for support for me to return to Franklin Furnace to put this exhibition together as my (second) PhD Placement. After a couple of months of ‘dialogic remote curating’ – from memory, mobile phone photos, notes, and my diaries from the time I was there – as well as many trans-Atlantic Zoom meetings, I arrived in mid-December (2022) and spent 7 weeks in New York pulling it all together. ‘

The placement with Franklin Furnace (and by association with Libraries at Pratt Institute) was a truly incredible experience. Because of my long-standing relationship with Franklin Furnace, I was trusted to work very independently, and was fully supported in my ideas. So much that the project expanded beyond all expectations to include several collaborative side events alongside the main exhibition - which was also in itself both online and offline. These side events included a workshop on how to read archival materials by Pratt archivist Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez’; a virtual opening with video tour, a remake of Halona Hilbertz’s Future of the Present performance exactly 25 years later to the day, and a collaborative seminar run with professor Professor Kim Bobier, which brought together my MFA Curating students from Goldsmiths with Bobier’s Art Since the 90s BA students from Pratt via Zoom and RisePad to create alternative interpretative texts for a few objects in the exhibition.

**(Click on image to enlarge)** Installation view of vitrine_3_2 showing faded faxes relating to the planning of Halona Hilbertz’s performance in Feb 1998, press releases and an (In)complete Index of screenshots from Future of the Present performance videos in the archive. Photo: Tsubasa Berg.

Dragging the Archive ran from 19th January to 6th April and the online version can still be seen here. On April 5th, UK based artist network Axisweb hosted an Instagram Livestream, which I invited Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez’ to lead, who passed through the exhibition every day on her way to work. See this here.

Doing this exhibition was very exciting on many levels. To have the chance to interact so intimately with this archive that remains so important to my own development as an artist, and to have my vision for how I would like to curate this show – which included claiming items from Deep Storage as my own readymade sculptures, the inclusion of my own diary extracts and all the side events that took place during the run - has been truly a gift. Extremely hard work and very little sleep was got for quite a few weeks in the lead up to it (!) but it was a wonderful experience that really helped me put my research into physical form/at whilst providing a public and prestigious platform for me to explore, expand, and exhibit my ideas of drag/ging in relation to the archive.

Dragging the Archive – a personal (re)encounter with Franklin Furnace’s cyber beginnings by Elly Clarke was supported by Michael Asher Foundation; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; The New York State Council on the Arts, the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; Pratt Institute; The Silicon Valley Community Foundation; CHASE, and the Board of Directors, members, and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive. The design – of posters, labels and the website was by recent Pratt design graduate Yunjia Yuan, who worked so closely with me on it, it really was in the end a collaboration.