Archive Talks VI: E-flux Index: Archiving the Present and Indexing the Arts Wann: 12.02.2025 ab 17:30 Uhr Wo: Lichtbrücke HfG Karlsruhe

Since the late 1990s, the Internet has increasingly dominated our everyday lives and restructured how we communicate with one another. Today it’s almost impossible to think without it. The entrance of e-flux to the art world also dates back to this moment of “coming online” in the late 1990s, first as a platform for distributing press releases from a curated list of institutions, museums, and galleries, and later as a publisher in its own right—through the e-flux Journal (established in 2004) and e-flux Books.

The curatorial and publishing activities of e-flux.com have since branched out in innumerable directions, mediating discussions both on- and offline and helping to track and even establish critical trends in art and theory. It now has 6 regular commissioned publishing strands: e-flux journal, e-flux Architecture, e-flux Notes, e-flux Film Notes, e-flux Criticism, and e-flux Education.

One question raised by digital publishing at this sheer volume is how to deal with such a mass of information? How to structure it and help draw out parallels across current discussants in art criticism, architecture and design, and philosophy?

The e-flux Index is one attempt at answering these questions. It is a new quarterly print publication that sets itself the task of untangling the mess of the contemporary. Now in its fifth issue, Each issue of the Index recombines commissioned essays, reviews, and articles drawn from the five separate e-flux sections to draw out new strains of inquiry. The printed edition of the Index is available in select art and design bookstores, as well as museums, throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. In this event the editor of the e-flux Index, George MacBeth (HfG), will share the editorial and archival logic behind this new publishing venture, and how it fits into a broader constellation of archival activities in the arts. George MacBeth is the editor of the e-flux Index. His film and art criticism has appeared in Art Monthly, Spike, Screen Slate, Asymptote Journal, and Texte Zur Kunst, amongst other outlets. Together with Sezgin Boynik he is currently at work on a forthcoming publication on the films of Sylvain George. He lives in Berlin.