Good exhibitions transport viewers to another time and setting. This one went further: it transported me to curator Farzin Lotfi-Jam’s own encounter with the archive. Visiting the “Interactive Entertainment Architecture” exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Octagonal Gallery, I found myself immersed in the electric, eclectic atmosphere of the Culture Lab—a multi-year symposium series led by University of Toronto’s Brian Boigon, which unfolded in the back room of a rock club in the 1990s Toronto. More than that, however, I found myself witnessing the curator’s research-creative practice.

I saw the exhibition as a curatorial proposition of how to exhibit the archive itself—and specifically, the multimedia archive. Digital archives resist the stable, self-contained objecthood that museum collections have traditionally privileged. Attuned to this archival condition of interconnected and distributed materiality, Lotfi-Jam did not cherry-pick and glamorize individual artifacts or technologies as architectural exhibitions of the “digital” have often done. Instead, the curator exposed the mixed media ecosystem—photocopies, microfilm photos, computer simulations, magazine spreads, a video game, a television animation series—that together fed Boigon’s architectural theory and practice. 

The curator’s conversation with the archival materials—and resistance to present singular artifacts—is most apparent in the centerpiece of the exhibition: a thirty-six monitor installation lined across four walls of the gallery, effectively surrounding the visitor who enters the octagonal space. Instead of isolating a few clips from the twenty hours footage, Lotfi-Jam programmed a custom playback system—what he calls the “Culture Lab Machine”—which deconstructs and remixes the audiovisual “architecture” of the symposia. In this remix, the content of the recorded talks becomes equally important to the materiality of the recordings and processing of the archived media. Thus, the creator, the curator, older media, and newer technologies all participate in meaning-making through a performative dialogue. 

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