The Archival Glitch project explores the effects of inequity in the world of art and academia and asks, “how do we fix it?”

This book documents the Archival Glitch seminar series held via Zoom live from Tokyo over four weekends in February and March 2022 that brought together artists, filmmakers, and scholars—all connected to Japan in some way. The topics varied but core to all discussion was the experience of being a woman and creator in an biassed world.

This seminar series grew out of Art + Feminism Wikipedia events that Louise Rouse and Deanna Macdonald hosted in Tokyo since 2018, which aimed to increase and improve articles in English and Japanese about women and non-binary artists, especially those who are or were active in Japan. Training and supporting new Wikipedia editors can only tweak this biased archive, but more importantly, these events drew attention to the ways in which infrastructures of knowledge, especially digitally accelerated ones, repeat and inculcate existing power structures.

The systemic inequality built into Wikipedia and other institutions in art, academia and much more—inspired our Archival Glitch series, exploring intersectional bugs in the global archive related to sex/gender bias. This glitch affects whose stories get told and whose stories are forgotten or marginalised. But we can also think of the glitch as a point of departure/rupture, inspiring new paths.

All contributors to this edition fulfil the potential of the glitch to effect change as intergenerational artists, activists and academics breaking boundaries, asking difficult questions, creating records of experience, pleasure, suffering, love, anger, resistance, and hope.