Inventory Arousal

James Hoff, Danny Snelson

In February 2008, James Hoff delivered a lecture on minor history in Oslo, Norway. His lecture arranged rare publications, ephemeral artworks, and the history of concept in writing and the arts within a dense mesh of anecdotal relations. There was no set agenda or prefigured instructions for the material that would or wouldn’t be used. Instead, the lecture responded to hundreds of images and hours of artists’ curated video – improvising an anectodal narrative while browsing through digital artifacts. Explring the commingled archive or artwork, publication, and recording, Hoff arguies for the ways in which minor histories function as primary information while secondary information becomes the source material for primary history. Given the nature and content of this improvisational lecture, Danny Snelson mirrored the spoken performance with a coterminous transcription 5,220 miles away in Tokyo, Japan.