The Khajistan Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

For its Session at Recess, Khajistan opens the doors of The Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development, a provisional research institute modeled after a computer education center set up inside auntie’s living room. It will serve as a public workspace for developing the next phase of Khajistan’s digital archive which will soon comprise over 2 million pages of content.

During the residency, Khajistan will build the Khajistan Portal, a connected digital environment for accessing and moving through the archive. The Portal brings together a Reading Room of digitized books, magazines, comics, and periodicals; a Screening Room of films and other moving-image media acquired for the archive, spanning documentary, narrative film, commercial cinema, and smut; and a Born-Digital Archive of memes, images, videos, and social media materials collected from across the Middle World. These collections will be connected through a shared interface and a mapping tool of the regions of the Middle World. Visitors will be able to move through the archive geographically while following connections across language, format, subject, and time period.

Visitors will be invited to search the collections, test new interfaces, offer translations and context, trace sources, identify gaps, and help determine how the Portal should function. At two public working sessions over the course of the residency, visitors will be guided through the three areas of the Portal in development and contribute directly to the process of refining it. Additionally, on two Saturdays, Khajistan members will hold Office Hours where they will make themselves available for questions and comments from users in a more informal way. These encounters will become part of the archive’s ongoing evolution. What visitors recognize, question, connect, or cannot find will help shape how Khajistan organizes and makes its digital collections accessible in the future.

Material from the digital archive will also move into the physical space. The public will be able to print, handle, and arrange images, memes, and other born-digital material from the portal. These will accumulate over time, creating a physical record of what visitors searched for, recognized, and returned to.

Throughout the residency, open hours and public programs drawn from Khajistan’s collections will allow visitors to browse, ask questions, and spend time with the material, while witnessing the archive being built. A selection of Khajistan’s Bazaar merchandise including totes, apparel, and publications will be available for sale in Recess’s lobby.