Archive Lucida

The technological revolution, a by-product of late-stage capitalism, ultimately led art to a Marxist destination — the cinema. Unique in its technological reproducibility and inherent ability to escape the bounds of singularity, early cinema achieved an unprecedented populistic appeal amongst its urban proletariat audiences. Film is a democratizing medium, accessible to the masses through the reorientation of dominant institutional hierarchies and cultural exclusivities. Archive Lucida adopts this same objective as a universalizing platform for digital humanities research, preservation, and publication. Our collections are curated and made public for mass consumption, free from traditional barriers to entry. Our platform draws inspiration from the Early Surrealists, French photographer Eugène Atget, Filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy, and the writings of Walter Benjamin, Anton Kaes, and Gernot Böhme. As a freeform, digital archive, we aim to make underrepresented art, time-based media, and academic materials decentralized and publicly accessible.