Visit “hypertextsofia” by Sofia Canale-Parola ‘21.

In doing my independent research on mail art archives at the Smithsonian, I came across the Freudian term empfindung – the feeling inspired by excessive and ultimately gratuitous investment in a perhaps useless archive. The work I put into this project conjured a strong sense of empfindung; I felt it in the countless late nights and weekends spent trying to piece together deliberately inscrutable information, in the endless pitfalls into websites cluttered with dead links and false starts, and in my own self doubt regarding the feasibility of pulling this off. But here it is, as it lives and breathes, and as it will deteriorate with age (here, too, links will die and false starts will crop up.)