This web-art piece addresses questions of open access, public accessibility, and fair use by putting proprietary cultural archives into the public sphere. This collection of TIME magazine issues from 1923 to 2014 was obtained at
https://time.thecthulhu.com. While these activists have made the data publically accessible, I am taking it one step further by making the data intelligible and inviting.
Putting the data onto a free user-friendly browsable platform examines the difference between open access and accessibility. TIME Magazine archives are available to those with an institutional affiliation, and to those willing and able to pay; the activists have made the data available to those who have computers and skills to download it. With this work, I am removing all barriers to access, and advancing the notion that valuable cultural historical archives, such as TIME Magazine should ideally be freely available to the public to help everyone fulfill the civic duty of cultivating a well-informed understanding of cultural and political history. Does public pedagogy constitute fair use? If so, to what extent does the public have the civic right to access data about our cultural history?
I invite you to browse the collection. Scroll horizontally across the years. Click on a cover to reveal the full issue. The pages have been altered such that they include a semi-transparent mask, but the words are still readable.
This work is part of a
longer term study examining the history of the magazine.