Archiving as Exercise

This summer session will interrogate new forms for archiving online and IRL and explore those possibilities for the legacy brand Nike.

The practice of archiving has typically been situated and maintained in major cultural and academic institutions with many rules, and the rigor is intense. As technology advances, digital archives have replaced or buoyed the ubiquitous physical cataloging of historical documents and objects. With more than 1.5m objects in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, almost 500,000 artworks have been digitized in their Open Access Initiative for public domain use.

Faster and easier, digitizing documents, blueprints, images, and objects has allowed communities outside of the status quo to design and engineer their own archives — expanding the forms of engagement. Some are informal, like architect Andrew Bruno’s One House Per Day on IG or multi-hyphenate Virgil Abloh’s website Canary—yellow.com, documenting all his projects. Others are reinventing how an archive can behave. Kinfolk aims to retell the underrepresented histories through AR monuments of impactful black and brown trailblazers. As we all become content makers — soot.com is a new internet platform in beta, providing a digital space to reorganize your own content into an immersive experience.

While many legacy fashion houses hold archives, it’s rare if they are made public. Nike can change that. It is both an obligation and a privilege to create an archive for the annals of history, inspiration for future generations, and contextualization. At 60, Nike’s rich, robust, and singular vision has impacted sports and culture. It can lead and invent a hybrid archive — physical & digital, private & public, demonstrating a best-in-class approach.