User:Sebastians/rwrm/essay

Intro

With digital data being easily created, copied, manipulated, and stored, the archive, and the act of archiving have become somewhat omnipresent. New archives are built, and new data is submitted constantly by filling in all kinds of forms, by uploading photos or videos, and by tagging, categorizing, and rating what we submit, and what we consume. Whereas action “in real life” (e.g. communication) not necessarily produces a record, almost everything happening online will be stored in a database by default.

But what exactly is an archive? What is its relation to power? And do all the input fields, asking us to contribute to the archive, make it more open, more democratic?

What is a possible attitude towards the archive and the process of archiving, now that our present somehow is lived as an anticipated memory, and now that we rely on algorithms and services to manage, store, and maybe delete our memories?

In this essay, I will explore the notion of the archive – however without reaching a final conclusion. What the essay aims at is establishing a basis from which the questions above can be explored, and from which an informed artistic and design practice can operate.

The Origin

When looking at “the archive”, the word itself offers a good starting point. Björn Quiring (2008, p.2) traces it back to the Greek word arkhē, denoting both “origin” and “command”. This leads to archon, and further on to arkheion, the former being the name for those representing the law in the Greek city state, and the latter being the place where not only the archons met, but also where all the official documents were stored. The arkheion was closed to the public. In the Roman empire, the archivum wasn't only a place to store what belonged to the state, but also a place to store what they took from conquered nations.

Foucault: The Historical a priori and the Archive

In The Historical a priori and the Archive, which is a chapter in his Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1969, pp.126–131) introduces what he calls the historical a priori, and describes his understanding of the term archive. His historical a priori however is not to be confused with a formal a priori, which describes knowledge that is independent of experience. It is not a condition of validity for statements. Instead, Foucault describes it as a condition of reality, and in fact the whole set of rules determining which statements and things can be part of a discourse, how they persist, how they are transformed, and which statements and things are excluded, forgotten or overlooked at a certain point in time. The historical a priori is a limited space of communication encompassing way more then individual books or authors, but not, for example, the whole universe of a science.

Regarding the emerging of statements and things, Foucault observes that they neither emerge only from the order of the mind nor only from the order of things, but are introduced through what he calls systems of statements. He proposes to call these systems archive, introducing a different notion of a term, that often describes the mere sum of documents making up the past of a culture, or an institution collecting and organizing these artifacts.

In order to find out why certain statements appeared, it is necessary to look at the conditions under which they appeared, and not at what they denote, or who made them.

Consistently, Foucault writes that the archive of one's own culture can not be described. A description becomes possible on the basis of discourses that have ceased to exists in our culture, and thus are somehow placed outside our language. He calls the methodology for analyzing an archive archaeology. However by using this term, he is no referring to a search for a beginning, but to a carving out of conditions (the aforementioned systems and functions).

Reading an Archive

Allan Sekula, both a writer and an artist, with photography being his medium of choice and study, provides us with an example on how to read and analyze an archive. He might not keep the temporal distance, however possible keeping it might be anyway, that Foucault calls prerequisite for analyzing and describing an archive. But his essay provides us with many hints on how to read and understand an archive, and on what an archive can be in a more narrow – and maybe more tangible – sense than what Foucault described.

Sekula (1983) basis his essay on the analysis of a photography book that compiles photos taken by Leslie Shedden, the owner of the biggest and the only financially sustainable photo studio in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. All photos had been taken in this region dominated by industry and coal-mining between 1946 and 1968. Shedden's biggest client was the local coal-mining company. Further customers were the miners and their families, and local shopkeepers.

Authorship and Ownership

An important observation that Sekula makes is the fact that in an archive, authorship and ownership not necessarily coincide, and that it is the latter that makes an archive an entity. With changing ownership, context gets lost, new interpretations arise, and the original use and context of the archive's items – in Sekula's case photographs – is only residual: “New meanings come to supplant old ones, with the archive serving as a kind of 'cleaning house' of meaning” (1982, p.445).

I think this distinction between authorship and ownership is especially interesting when looking at our current online activity. We are constantly adding new content to the web. Unlike Shedden's customers that are now appearing in the photography book, we are in fact the authors of these “archive items”. And unlike Shedden himself, we deliberately choose to include them into a specific archive. However, as this archive is almost always some company's website or web service, we aren't really the owners anymore after clicking the submit or upload button. This is not a problem of ownership in the classic sense, not an opposition to the copying, pasting, appropriating, and remixing of content online. Yet, with our communication and our memories becoming data in a corporate environment, we have little clarity concerning “our” data's future context, use, modification or existence/deletion.

Archiving the Truth

Convinced that finding and documenting the truth is a matter of quantity, archiving projects almost always claim or strive for completeness, says Sekula. While the belief that photographs depict reality might be vanishing, he claims that there is still a belief in the archive to organize its contents in a meaningful manner. Furthermore he claims this “archival perspective” to be closer to the capitalist, the bureaucrat, the engineer, etc. than to the worker, as such an archive can only be managed by bureaucratic means.

A hidden Connection between Knowledge and Power

To Sekula, archives are far from being neutral as they embody the “power inherent in accumulation, collection, and hoarding as well as that power inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of language” (Sekula 1982, p.446). Through their structure, archives maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power.

An interesting example given by Friedrich Kittler (1989) in his talk Die Nacht der Substanz is Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind: Gutenberg's invention of printing with movable type (around 1450) allowed for every word in a book to have an address as every copy now had exactly the same number of pages. This made possible footnotes, tables of contents etc. According to Kittler, knowledge was in fact “scrolling, quoting, excerpting, and compiling” (1989, p.511). Footnotes helped to make transparent such a formation of knowledge. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind however, published in 1807, contained next to no references to external sources. Kittler claims this to be an attempt to replace all other books on philosophy by simply erasing their “addresses”. This attempt at making his book irreplaceable becomes even more interesting when Kittler looks to Hegel's Biographer Rosenkranz, who describes Hegel's knowledge to be based on an extremely extensive “Zettelkasten”, a collection of transcriptions and excerpts, that were cataloged by keywords, and arranged in alphabetical order.

Another example that comes to mind is the algorithmic archive that is Google's search engine: Performing a search is a bit like looking at a “Wunderkammer” (cabinet of curiosities). Of course, this comparison is not really apt as the search results mostly aren't curiosities (in fact, they should be more often). However, the search results page is an assemblage of things found in a space, that has expanded to such a degree, that we can't make any sense of it anymore without the help of search engines. This space is in fact our externalized collective memory.

By crawling the web, and by analyzing, categorizing, and storing what they find along the way, search engines try to create a paradigm (in the linguistic meaning: a collection of signs) out of which answers to our questions can be constructed. The construction of meaning depends on the existence and availability of elements, and on the rules applied in order to construct the answer. However, these algorithms are far from being transparent. In fact they are well kept secrets, often being regarded as a myth. In this sense, the comparison to the Wunderkammer starts to regain some meaning, as Wunder in German not only means curiosity, but also miracle.

From a Position of Solidarity

Returning to the photography book, Sekula looks for a way how to read the archive, and how to read the images with the described problematic in mind. He discusses two approaches – on one hand treating the photos as historical documents, and on the other as aesthetic objects – just to show how both of them fail in understanding the underlaying archive (systems of power). Even though this might sound rather specific to photography, I want to briefly reflect his observations as I think they are helpful nonetheless. Moreover, I think that when Sekula speaks about cameras and photography, we can also think about how his observations might apply to Internet-specific concepts (e.g. algorithms, interfaces, “user-generated content”).

Archive Items: Historical Documents

According to Sekula, treating the photographs as historical documents implies a belief in the camera producing scientific and objective data regardless of the context or aim that lead to their production. It also implies that the historically decisive moments are those that can be photographed. Assuming such a perspective, the archive represents a linear progression from the past into the future. The viewer however loses her/his point of view from which she/he could make a critical judgment, and therefore identifies her-/himself with the camera and the perspective it offers because it provides a coherent experience. As a result, Sekula concludes that the historical documents become aesthetic objects.

Archive Items: Aesthetic Objects

Sekula identifies two ways in which the photographs could be established as aesthetic objects (and not historical documents as above): firstly by declaring Shedden to be a hidden artist which would however lead to an overlooking of the intentions those speaking through Shedden's craft had in the first place; secondly by shifting the aesthetic understanding from the author to the viewer. Sekula isn't happy with the latter option neither: “The aesthetically informed viewer examines the artifacts of mass or 'popular' culture with a detached, ironic, and even contemptuous air. For Pop Art and its derivatives, the look of the sophisticated viewer is always constructed in relation to the inferior look which preceded it. What disturbs me about this mode of reception is its covert elitism, its implicit claim to the status of 'superior' spectatorship.” (1982, p.449) Leaving the reference to Pop Art and “its derivatives” aside (in order not to complicate matters), I think this is a quote to keep in mind when working with the vernacular web, and with “user-generated content” in general.

Sekula's final conclusion again emphasizes an attitude of solidarity: “The archive has to be read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.” (1982, p.451)

The Human Factor

To me, relating Foucault's and Sekula's analyzes to the web – and other parts of the Internet that function as networked archives – highlights the necessity to isolate, deconstruct, and analyze the material conditions that shape our “collective memory”. Speaking of material conditions, it is in fact mostly algorithms and interfaces, that include and exclude items, and then assemble those items into statements. The wonderful thing about the web however is that we aren't limited to analyzing it passively because (in theory) it's an open archive to which everybody can contribute, distributing its inherent power equally among all users.

Domenico Quaranta, an art critic and curator in the field of media art, just recently curated a show called “Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age”. For the accompanying catalog, he wrote an essay in which he addresses algorithmic archives as power systems. Quaranta (2011) considers the power system which search engines are building to be a real problem. Based on algorithms, they regulate and manage our private memories, and they decide what we remember and what we forget. He highlights the importance of communities of people that “collect, reorganize, vote, tag, remix, manipulate, and redistribute Internet content”, an involvement he considers to be a means of fighting the power system that is the archive, and of making it more human. As an example, Quaranta describes how discussions on 4chan, that usually aren't stored longer than a few minutes due to algorithmic decisions, can be preserved by people through relaunching them, or by storing them on 4chanarchive.org.

The preservation of threads on 4chanarchive.org is a good example of how the problem of non-coinciding ownership and authorship, that Sekula described above, can be solved. Additionally, it highlights the importance of human initiative and decision-making in the process of archiving.

A new Archival Practice

In Moving beyond the artefact. Lessons from participatory culture, William Uricchio (2007) follows a similar path. He calls for systematic initiatives to preserve “our latest new media”. Not only would this enable cultural historians to reflect upon the past, but also “assist the functioning of our political lives by allowing us to go back to the record and check instances of manipulation.” (2007, p.138)

What Uricchio asks for is not a traditional institutional archive that serves to reproduce culture, and simultaneously the hierarchies of power. Instead, he suggests to establish a new archival practice. An early and visionary example he points to is the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org), initiated by Brewster Kahle in 1996, that allows for analyzing the history of social protocols, homepage page formats, early games, etc.

What complicates the process of archiving at the moment however is the nature of social media. Due to its ever-shifting state (which in fact makes it so valuable to Uricchio as Zeitdokumenten [sic]) and its collaborative nature, the characteristics of social media resemble those of oral cultures, which are hard to preserve with the archiving techniques and institutions currently in place. Yet, despite the similarities, social media produces actual data that can be stored. Therefore Uricchio proposes the possibility of using the networks that enable people to share and store data peer-to-peer, in order to create a “decentralized memory institute”. In his eyes, such an archive could “better reflect a wide range of social values, not just the ruling elite.” (2007, p.144) Moreover would it assume a “wider range of social granularity” (ibid.) as it wouldn't be confined to corporate media only.

Conclusion

http://www.google.com/?q=conclusion

Bibliography

Quiring, B. (2008). Reframing the Open Archive: A Live Show . PDF Available: http://gentiliapri.com/publications/reframing_the_open_archive_a_live_show/. Last accessed December 8th, 2011.
Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Allan Sheridan Smith., 1972. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sekula, A. (1983). Reading an Archive. Photography between labour and capital. In: L. Wells, ed. 2002. The Photography Reader. London: Routledge, pp.443–452.
Kittler, F. (1989). Die Nacht der Substanz. In: C. Pias, J. Vogl, L. Engell, O. Fahle and B. Neitzel, eds. 2004. Kursbuch Medienkultur. Stuttgart: DVA, pp.507–524.
Quaranta, D. (2011) The Artists as Archivist in the Internet Age. In: D. Quaranta, ed. 2011. Collect the WWWorld.
Uricchio, W. (2007) Moving beyond the artefact. Lessons from participatory culture. In: Y. de Lusenet and V. Wintermans, eds. 2007. Preserving the digital heritage: principles and policies. Den Haag: Netherlands National Commission for Unesco, pp.135–145.