User:ThomasW/Notes Digital Memory and Archive Wolfgang Ernst

Wolfgang, Ernst (2013) Digital Memory and Archive, United States of America, University of Minnesota Press

For Ernst media archaeology is not only a way of writing but a method that has to do with revers engineering. Page 12

fascination with old technological always risk the danger of leading a blind eye to current technological culture of consumer devices impossible to tinker with. P 14

Memory is not so much a place of rest but a part of a wider setting of calculation–working memory –claims Ernst page 16

The “archive” is no longer simply a passive storage space but becomes generative itself in algorithmically ruled processionally. Page 29

telegraph. “knowing whats is doing in any part of the world as quick as the electric fluid will convey it” This kind technological organisation of public affairs by means of the printing pres, telegraphy and radio was later defined by Martin Heidegger as the essence og historicism it self” page 39

The post-historie of this story continues today: digitalize techniques are absorbing the photographic image. Thus photography as a visual technology in its own right could vanish like the image of a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. P 41

The mechanism of human memory is selective, transformative, and thus productive of historical imagination, whereas the general inventory of photography in according with media logic registers temporal events without demanding a binding historical narrative. p44

The antiquarian sense of loss in the melancholic acknowledgement of the algorithmically gap that separates the past irreversibly from the present, a sense of discontinuity, as opposed to the privileging of continuity of historical narratives. 44-45

Technology. According to Martin Heidegger, is more than instrumental; it transcends the human. P 56

Rather than being nostalgic collection of “dead media” of the past, assembled in a curiosity cabinet, media archaeology is an analytical tool, a method of analysing and present aspects of media that would otherwise escape the discourse of cultural history. P 56

The wire recording devices from the early 1950 in the Milmann Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University is not functional anymore. In such migration between hardware and software, at any point cultural memory run the risk of being interrupted. P 65

Since technologies changes from tool to machines, these techniques have comprised not only text and images but numbers as well. P 72

The primary operations of the archive are no longer the contents of its files but rather their logistical interlinking. P84

The real archive on the internet (in the sense of arches) is its system of technological protocols. P 85

A videotape by Nam June Paaik and the accompanying technical equipment can be archived with considerable outlay of information technology and restoration. But the actual on-site video installation can only be documented. P 85

Computers themselves represent “storage and retrieval” systems–for people as users and as an essential part of memory programmability. Apart from sequential access (the old magnetic computer tapes) there is immediate random access (matrix memory). Every computer is already a digital archive. The archiving occurs in the RAM of the familiar computer, not in the emphatic sense but rather as the precondition for any calculating process taking place at all. P87

Archving with analog storage media (for instance, photographed texts on microfilm) has distinct advantage over digitization in terms of quality and shelf life. The strength of digitized archival lies not in their (highly vulnerable) migrability into the technological future but in their substantially potentized present online accessibility. Longevity is rooted in the materiality of archival–discourse in their immaterial circulation as information. P87-88

Entire generations of data carriers are made obsolete by hardware developments. P90

Norbert Wiener formulated the distinguishing feature of this economy: information is neither matter no energy. The new archive is this cybernetic being with the gift of feedback. p93

The so-called cyberspace is not primarily about memory as cultural record but rather about a performative form of memory as communication. P 99

Hewlett-Packard has now acquired the garage on which the company based its advertising campaign The Garage Principle. This garage is the primal hut of the Californian Silicion Vally, where, in 1939, Bill Hewlett and David Packard began construction technical apparatuses out of which emerged the Eldorado of microchips. The garage is now listed, under the number 976, as a monument of American heritage (inventories count-memory rather than narrating it.) The tragedy of this media monument is that although the garage has survived, the first technical instruments produced by these pioneers have not. P114

Life strem system = online cloud The Lifesteams system treats your own private computer as a mere temporary holding tank for data, not as a permanent file cabinet. P120

The traditional archive has, so far, been a read-only memory–printed texts reproduced throught inscription, not rewritten by reading (a concept still maintaiend by the CD-ROM). In multimedia space, however, the act of reading, that is, the act of re-activating the archive, can be dynamically coupled with feedback” p121

The difference, thought, between all old media like the book and the computer lies in the simple evidence that books cannot be (re) programmed once printed. Thus the computer cannot easily be made compatible with a (media) history; it rather has arche, a (archeo) logics of its own. P124

The archival phantasms in cyberspace are an ideological deflection of the sudden erasure of archives (both hardware and software) in the digital world. According to Jascques Derrida, “The twentieth century, the first in history to be exhaustively documented by audio/visual archives, found itself under the spell of what contemporary philosopher called 'archive fever', a fever that, given he World Wide Web's digital storage capacities, is not likely to cool any times soon.” p137

In Plato's dialogue Meno, Caygill writes, “it appears as if the matter of memory is but an effect of the application of techniques of recall” p138

“ Probably two kinds of memories will remain. One will represent a radical rupture: asin Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a new memory will burn an old one. This nostalgia is of course, a phantasm surviving form the age of print. The alternative is a media culture dealing with the virtual anarchive of multimedia in a way beyond the conservative desire of reducing it to classificatory order again. Data trash is positively, the future ground of media-archaeological excavations. P140

the present is shadowed by the inverse omens of its past. P170

Archives are less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate. P196