Archive 404

We invite you to the joint creation of the archives for April 2020: we are collecting photos, videos, personal stories, and any digital materials that illustrate your experiences during the quarantine. Welcome to join the project and co-author the materials about everyday life by documenting your daily routines and what is happening and changing around us within the private and public space.

April 2020 is a special month. We live in uncertainty, stop planning things, build new solidarities, take care of the elderly and the sick in isolation; we learn to interact with each other at a distance and via the media, while our accessible space is often shrinking to the boundaries of a room, an apartment, a house, and the nearest geography for daily needs. For some of us, it is the time for new challenges in our personal security, for re-evaluating our consumption practices, and sometimes it is even a matter of survival. The reality is changing almost every day, and we are trying to comprehend it. We do not want this chapter of our lives to become "the page not available." That is why we chose the project title as "Archive 404".

The Center is an institution researching urban history. That is why we are trying to understand how our perception of the city is changing; what privacy and publicity get to mean for us under the quarantine; how our understanding of the home is either narrowing or expanding. We are also interested in digital history. That is why we are trying to document how our lives are becoming more engaged with the digital world. We find it very important to see the ways that help cope with the situation for those who lost their jobs or whose businesses are suffering losses. After all, the key question we pose and invite you to think about is what our everyday lives are during the epidemics.

We will be grateful to have you share the materials that describe your everyday life under the quarantine. We mean the notes and observations of everyday things: from cooking to eating your meals, work, leisure time, cleaning the house, communicating, and distancing.

You can use any recording tools available to you: 

• photos
• video
• text or audio narratives (audio comment)
• drawings
• screenshots
• Google-maps or maps of space that started owning you
• History of search results or views on your digital devices

Please,  add to these materials the brief description, if possible – what it is and why it is important for you at the moment.

Permit to Use

By submitting your materials, you grant your permit to their further public use and inclusion into the collection of the Urban Media Archive. The data you submitted, and their authorship will be kept. Should you mind such use, or in case of questions, feel free to contact us.

You can stay anonymous by stating this in the letter, or tell us about yourself so that we could mention you as the co-author of the archives.

Send your materials to the email [email protected] in any convenient form – either in attachment or via the file share service.

If you wish to share your ideas and observations with us on a regular basis during April, please, write to us about it.

In the future, the collected materials will be part of the archives that would help interpret and rethink the new social experience. We are running this experiment in response to new challenges, and we cannot know for sure what the outcomes are going to be. However, we do believe they will help uncover new knowledge.

We hope this kind of co-creation of the daily archives will help us live through this time, to comprehend this unique and hard period later.