Rage Against the Archive is an artivist project comprising video, performance, and new media art that critically probes how the New York Public Library's (NYPL) website catalogs, displays and even sells dehumanizing ethnographic photos from the 19th-century colonial-era publication The People of India. This work conceptually interrogates how images can get decontextualized in archives, thus losing their gravitas. Through screen-recorded browser videos, this series also documents the “hacking” methodology employed to insert different texts using HTML to activate NYPL’s digital archives in an act of Electronic civil disobedience.
The People of India, published between 1868-75, is one of the world's oldest and most comprehensive ethnographic books, commissioned by the British colonial government in India after the 1857 First War of Independence. After having experienced violent uprisings and the first challenge to their colonial rule, the British were keen to understand the native tribes and their cultures to rule them better and prevent future rebellions. The camera, masquerading as an objective device, was employed as an imperial tool by the colonial government to document natives, “othering” them in this process. How do these problematic historical images exist in our archives in the contemporary networked image culture?
Rage Against the Archive scrutinizes whether institutional archives like NYPL perpetuate colonial exploitation and the camera's violence, raising ethical questions about how we, as a more conscientious society, should consume exploitative images online. I believe that digital archives, in some cases, instead of being harbingers of free knowledge, can be just another way to amplify the visual violation of some people, and they must be questioned.
This work aligns with TTT2025’s themes of taboo, transgression, and transcendence by addressing the boundaries between art and technology. It reimagines digital archives as sites of resistance, advocating for a more conscientious engagement with historical imagery.
Anshul Roy (b. 1997, India) is a visual artist and educator with an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University in New York. In 2020, he received a B.Tech in Bioengineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, where he became interested in the intersection of STEM and Arts and how these diverse knowledge systems could merge. Roy’s current artistic practice is inspired by Postcolonial discourses, exploring issues like identity, historical memory, cultural representation, and visual ethics. He is interested in probing how British colonizers employed photography in India for “othering” and visual propaganda, and how these ethnographic photos exist in our contemporary institutional archives. Through appropriation techniques, Roy recontextualizes such historical photographs to question and challenge their enduring impact on collective consciousness.
His work has been exhibited in prestigious venues like ACM SIGGRAPH, where he received the “Best in Show” award in 2024 for his project Rage Against the Archive. Roy has also shown his work at places such as the Art Gallery of Peterborough (Ontario, Canada), IEEE VIS Arts Program (St. Pete Beach, FL), :iidrr Gallery (Manhattan, NY), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, UK), Society for Photographic Education’s Media Festival (St. Louis, MO) and Society for Visual Anthropology’s Film and Media Festival (Tampa, FL). In 2024, he was a student at the School for Poetic Computation and an Artist-in-Residence at the ESRC-funded Digital Good Network, where he further refined his new media art practice.
Back
Hosting Institution
Supported by
Ionian University
Secretariat - Conference TTT Webteam
Tsirigoti Square 7, 49100 Corfu
Ionian Islands Region, Greece
av-ttt@ionio.gr
