As an institutional practice, archival practices often tend to serve to colonization, surveillance and discipline society of the Modern world. In the last ten years, with the digital technology and social movement detecting, recording and accumulating images become a civil activity. Thus, archiving videos and other types of visual images brought also non-institutional practices and as well contemporary discussions related to image, open source, collectivity and forensics. Beside interviews with video activists; this book compiles several writers’ articles on their practices and discussions of archives from several angles: forensics, decolonization and commons.

We write this almost exactly thirteen years after WHARFAGE was first published, as the world is slowly opening up again after a much more dramatic and consequential disruption of life than the 2007- 2009 Global Financial Crisis. At that time, there were stories of cars abandoned at Dubai airport by fleeing expats, but the creeks were alive with activity. We saw this as a reason to do the book. Last year, the creeks were empty, and now are slowly filling up again. Our desire in this book had been to create an account of what was transpiring between Sharjah creek, as ...