TD: Why are archives that cross international boundaries important?

CT: I think it's about facilitating dialogue and cross-cultural exposure. The work that's in the archive is coming from very personal perspectives, but together they create evidence of certain mind-frames within cultures, certain issues important to particular cultures. The more these videos are watched the more understanding we gain.  For example, a lot of the works in the archive are from Israel or Palestine, the Middle-East and Eastern Europe, and for them to come to New York right now while the US is at war with Iraq and Afghanistan and in an economic war with the entire world makes it extremely urgent that we establish dialogue between cultural producers from those parts of the world.

GE: For me, the traveling archive grew out of a desire to share with other places and also out of the idea that other institutes would contribute something we were not aware of or we don't have the possibility to communicate with because it is from another country. All of this was especially important given the geopolitical context where I come from, where there is not much dialogue between countries. By having the archive travel it is easier to engage in dialogue. Already the archive has contributed quite a bit in this way.

CT: It's also interesting to think about the economy of these archives. A lot of artists don’t upload their videos online because this is not a framework they'd like their work shown in—they would prefer exclusivity for their work, for it to be presented in a gallery—but they do want the exposure that a traveling, exhibited archive provides for. And the archive is more like a library since none of the works were purchased, but given to the archive by artists for distribution. You could think of it as a library of viewing copies of these works which otherwise would have market value but do not because they are not editioned. But they do have value. They are physical things, and we have them. Someone may have paid $5,000 for them and it's in their house, or a museum may have purchased them. It's sort of a parallel economy.

TD: So it's somewhere between the YouTube model and the exclusivity of a private collection?

GE: The archive foregrounds the symbolic value of art works. In fact, we may distinguish a collection from an archive in terms of an archive's symbolic value. The former is dealing more with market value, the later with symbolic values. This is one way to imagine a different economy. What if we distribute works without instruction, without a manual? The value of works of art become determined more and more by how they are shared.

TD: Something interesting you said the other night during your presentation at Parsons' Vera List Center for Art and Politics was that the archive's quality grows throughout time. So the time-sense of the archive, and the archive's overall evolution, are critical to any value it has or will have.

CT: The archive used to be open, that any artist could mail in their work, and it would be processed for the archive. This submission policy has been temporarily stopped because it was too much work. Now the works coming into the archive are works that Galit’s brought in. It's actually turned from a very open archive to a fairly closed one.

GE: But it's still very open. It's not everything...

CT: It's not the Internet...

GE: ...but it's a lot. The question of what is related to our work takes precedence over the question “Is it good or is it bad?” Of course it's also a question of taste. I won't say that we've gotten beyond that but I think questions of “good” and “bad” are less relevant when one is trying to have a dialogue. There aren't good or bad comments within a dialogue. In cultural exchange what happens, happens.