An Archive of Racisms, On "Programmed Visions" By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and designed by Raegan Kelly

"You are the mouse, assemble and read the archive," is the charge given to users of "Programmed Visions", an associative collection of texts discussing or illustrating racism in the current issue of Vectors. The user is guided through the articles (never cited or annotated or titled) by clicking portions of the text that lead to another article or portion of an article. The user decides how much of each text to read before clicking on any number of links associated with a specific part of the article. The arguments range from quantifying the social roles Italian immigrants based on region of emigration to the necessity of eugenics. Though the content of this archive is determined by the author and its presentation by the designer, the user dictates the order and extent to which the information presented is read. All archives operate this way, however, "Programmed Visions" makes a point about the way archives are used and experienced: The user is able to click away from the texts at hand to view a map of the archive and where s/he has already visited. Any text may be revisited through this map. But, there is no linearity to the archive, so the user must trace her/his steps by words that are associated with each text. Race is simply a subject matter chosen as an entry point into a discussion about archives and interactive databases.

Depending on how much of each article the user reads the next article in succession will be different or an article may be happened upon multiple times. A most thorough user of "Programmed Visions" will still be frustrated by these events. A user's opinion of racism will certainly be shaped by the order in which the texts are read. The author's opinion of racism is not evident here, but her opinion of archives is clear. Opinions based on research is incomplete, is the argument Hui Kyong Chun is making. Though the database provides a diverse and subtle representation of writings on the topic of racism, it is not a complete archive: It was selected and arranged by individuals who understood that their work would be read by others. None of the articles are objective, therefore, no archive could ever be objective. A user will most likely finish the piece having her/his opinions validated, mostly, by the texts encountered. This is both the strength and flaw of an archive.

This is the same paradox that makes Vectors a challenging and frustrating journal to follow. The pieces are all thorough, but because of their interactive nature take quite sometime to fully navigate and even longer to digest, let alone comprehend. The nature of the interactive database, a medium that many of the texts fall into, is one that complicates the agruments at hand by not manipulating the user's order of experience of the texts. In such pieces as "Blue Velvet" the argument is plainly drawn, however, "Killer Entertainments" presents an information set that the user must navigate and form ideas of her/his own. The topic of racism is inflammatory, and the pieces here seem intended to inflame. One piece suggests that America has just under 1,000,000 "degenerates" born every year (the piece is dated only by the statistics that the globabl population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 billion); another suggests that all "Liberal" studies that are run by white instructors to white students that feature writings by black artists only breed a further subconscious racism. This presentation is often viewed among media producers as being subjective: Give a reader enough information to sort through at His convenience and He will form His own Objective opinion. This writer's frustration with the interactive database is made concrete by Hui Kyong Chun in "Programmed Visions" by presenting a hyper-charged topic in a format that is intrinsically manipulative and flawed.

That does not, however, mean that the writer finds Vectors or any of its presentations to be discredited by this piece. All journalism is just as subjective as Vectors, but this journal has recognised it by publishing a piece that illuminates the flaws in two of its main topics of focus: technology and race.