Interference Archive: Origins and Activation

Recorded on Feb, 10, 2022
Presenters:
Josh MacPhee, co-founder of Interference Archive
Jen Hoyer, Electronic Resources and Technical Services Librarian at CUNY City College of Technology
Moderators: Daniel Menzo, PhD Candidate in Art History and Criticism, Sohl Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art
Sponsored by and the Zuccaire Gallery the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook
How can we use historical objects to engage with and learn from social movements of the past in our tumultuous present? How do we as today’s citizens maintain and activate the visual materials of these past movements? Founded in 2011 as a library, gallery, and archive of historical materials related to social and political activism, Interference Archive offers one viable model for tackling these questions. As an organization run entirely by volunteers, Interference Archive invites all community members to shape its collection and programming. The archive’s mission states: “We work in collaboration with like-minded projects, and encourage critical as well as creative engagement with our own histories and current struggles.”
As a collaborator and primary lender for Printing Solidarity, Interference Archive not only offers a robust collection of materials for research and display, but also provides intellectual inspiration for scholars to engage with the important social histories of our world. Co-founder Josh MacPhee and core organizer Jen Hoyer will discuss their on-going work at Interference Archive.
Josh MacPhee is a designer, artist, and archivist. He is a founding member of both the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements based in Brooklyn, NY (InterferenceArchive.org). MacPhee is the author and editor of numerous publications, including Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now and Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He has organized the Celebrate People's History poster series since 1998 and has been designing book covers for many publishers for the past decade. His most recent book is An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels (Common Notions, 2019), a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production.
Jen Hoyer is Electronic Resources and Technical Services Librarian at CUNY City College of Technology, and has been a core organizer at Interference Archive (Brooklyn, NY) since 2013. You can find Jen’s writing about archives, education, and access in Reference Services Review, the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Archival Science, Radical Teacher, Radical History Review, and the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. Her co-authored volume, The Social Movement Archive, was published by Litwin Books in 2021.