What is an archive in the 21st century? What cultures of body/ land/ algorithm/ sky/ memory/ story/ material are at stake in the creation of an archive? Philosophers, poets, scientists, and artistshave grappled with this for years. What matters matter the archive?

The Archive
In 2025 the Cambridge Posthuman Network took the vast material of three years of events, workshops, meetings, and discussions of what used to be the Arts & Creativities Research Group, Chaired by Dr. Annouchka Bayley at the University of Cambridge and implemented a multilayered experiment that asks: what would a posthuman, new materialist archive look like? What would it experiment with? How would it consider the entanglements of body and knowledge, algorithm and material, pedagogy and practice?

The Archive Looks Back
What you'll find in this site (alongside a repository of talks, workshops and events hosted by ACRG 2021-2024) are three key experiments, each taking as material an event that took place over the period. The archive material is engaged with not only in terms of what is selected, but how engagements here, now with it continually shape the knowledge produced from it. The archive breathes! It is eternally on the move!

Each experiment has been run by a small team asking how we know what we know, what kinds of creative archival practices emerge from the entanglements of archivist, archive material, and archive project. You'll also find pedagogic notes to help teachers, lecturers, facilitators, artists and interested bystanders develop their own new approaches to posthuman archival fevers...

Tags: postqualitative practice; posthuman archive; new materialist archive; creative archive; epistemology

About Us (BIO)

Experiment 1 Palimpsest

Experiment 2 Silence

Don’t look in here

Experiment 3 Brainwave