Online archives: remix power

Introduction

In this essay I will center my discuss on the relation of online folkloric archives to dominance and the role of artistic practices within the archive with a human and disruptive logic.

The essay will begin by looking at the archive's historical ties to power and demonstrate how this relations is still present in seemingly democratic online archives. It will be followed by the presentation of the users intervention as a strategy that can defy the archive's authority. And lastly it look at some examples of artistic project that try to bring the archive to human scale and can result in strategies for evading the ideologies a ties attached to any archive.

Archive and Power

In 'Archive Fever' Derrida traces back the meaning of the term "archive" to the Greek "arkheion" 'the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded'. It is in this location where official documents are written and safeguarded. The archons are not only entitled to secure the official documents, but also to interpret them in order to validate them. From such interpretations the law was called and applied (pp: 9-10).

Foucault's critic of the archive in The Archeology of Knowledge follows similar lines. Foucault describes it as a validating system, which determines what constitutes a statement. It is not a repository remainings from a culture or civilization, but a institution that validates the interpretation of the contained documents; It is 'the reason why so many things, said by so many men, for so long, have not emerged in accordance with the same law of thought, or the same circumstances'(p.145).

The role of the archive as a power institution becomes even more prominent if we consider Foucault's introductory remark stating that the document has gained a similar status, in contemporary history, to that of monuments in traditional history. Contemporary history takes the documents of the past and studies, organizes them, inserts them into a lineage and context, and turns them relevant (pp:7-8). This process will inevitably embeds the documents with authority and an unquestionable statues. Those who are allow access to the documents, who are given permission to interpret them, the contemporary archons, are entrusted with the powers of the document.

From the readings of both Foucault and Derrida we can clearly see the close relation of archive to power figure, granting, the possibility for those who are allowed to interpret its documents to impose their vision on those who are not granted such privilege. 'No matter how open or repressed, the official archive was the last word ... It was a secular cognate of the divine word: its matter-of-fact was equivalent to the word of God'(Klein)

Online Folkloric Archive

Although acknowledging the role archive as a tool for enforcing law and validating knowledge, Arjun Appadurai takes also into consideration the everyday life archive, the archives that belong to the individual, to the family, to the community. In his view, this mutant online folkloric archive, which allows for users an active role within its construction, 'is gradually freed from the orbit of the state and its official networks'(p.16).

Norman Klein however adopts a more skeptical position, and sees the hidden agendas covered by the democratic possibilities offered by the online folkloric archive. Although allowing, or are even being mostly constituted by users' intervention, online archives are often scripted spaces, with an underlying ideology. By looking of what is excluded from archive a picture of the ideology behind it begins to appear. Take the example of Facebook where pictures smashed heads are acceptable while nudity or "photoshoped" images are censored (Gawker). The limits of what can and cannot be stated constitutes the ideologies governing online archives. Such a predetermined space will consequently restrict the range of possible discourses, and turn the online folkloric archive into highly ideological spaces. As a consequence, as Klein notes, 'in the US, archiving has turned into collective schizophrenia; into ten thousand unofficial lies and racist innuendos, guided by wealthy right-wing investors ... a blizzard of factoids that poisoned what remained of our national politics'. It can then be said that while creating the illusion of an empowering and liberating space where citizens can express openly their views, the online folkloric archive has the capacity to mislead and control their political effort. We can easily classify this process as soft-control, a modulation typical of the society of control as depicted by Deleuze. The individual is not deprived from the right to express her view, but her view will be modulated by the channel used to make it public. If her view fits within the ideology it can stay, otherwise it disappears surreptitiously and painlessly as if it has never existed before.

Remixing the Archive

Although most online archives are, like most physical archives, are not neutral and still play monitoring and validating role, there is a fundamental difference: they exist online. This simple fact can completely change the rules of the game, since it allows access to anyone with an internet connection. Another difference comes from the fact that the contained documents are digital entities, which makes them infinitely reproducible, allows for their storage in anyone hard-drives, while maintaining its presence in the archive.

The online archive also puts in motion a process by which once a document is put online it ceases to belong to its owner, and begins its own online life. As Domenico Quaranta puts it: 'Archives, libraries and museums came into being expressly for this reason: to preserve our collective externalized memory for future generations. However, the Internet does more than refine this process and make it more inclusive. Everything we put on the Web ceases to belong to us'(p.13). If we add to this concoction the endless possibilities made possible by digital manipulation, we are in the presence of an open invitation for the appropriation and manipulation of digital documents. Such possibility results in the materialization of different versions of a document, as in the image(s) of missiles being fired by coalition forces, portrayed in Olivier Laric's piece Versions.

[File: laric-missile-01.png] [File: laric-missile-02.png] [File: laric-missile-03.png] [File: laric-missile-04.png]

Although the possibility for such an appropriative process marks a clear distinction from the physical archives Quaranta adverts for dangers of letting the majority of online archives managed solely by databases and algorithms (p.14). Once again the online archive appears as a space scripted by the logic of the database. Quaranta argues for the necessity of 'professional surfers ... that vast community of people who collect, re-organize, vote, tag, remix, manipulate, and redistribute Internet content'. Quaranta sees them as the human element necessary to the database, which can 'redirect it, discipline it, and make it less mathematical, and more aleatory. In a word, they need to adapt it to human memory'(p.16). One could say the by a incessant activity of appropriation, indexation, and transition users transform online database or repositories into living archives.

Let's not fool ourselves and think that the democratization of the archive can be achieved by the previously mentioned users' activity. The archive administrators are still the ones who decide what stays and what is discarded. Nonetheless store, transmission, and manipulation are decisively empowering features offered by the online archive.

Digital storage and online transmission makes possible a document, which has once taken part of an archive, quickly spreads to other archives, blogs, emails, tweets, hard-drive, etc. The document ceases not only to belong to its author, but also to the archive where it first appeared.

And digital manipulation allows for a multitude of version of an image, that range from the subtle to the explicit and even the absurd, to materialize. These versions have the effect of not only bringing us to ask whether the official "original" official document might have also been a product of manipulation, but they question the archive's authority. In presenting more than one variation of a document the official version might begin to be put into question, and this process process will spread to the figure of the archive as "the last word". By allowing fictitious documents to enter its space, the archive begins to become a collective memory, a space of dialogue between facts and fiction, a site of emergence of discourses, rather than a power and knowledge validating figure. According to Klein:

'Archive is often collective memory. It is material culture; which is quite different from a divine instrument of that state. Collective memory is displacement, erasure, evasion and distortion. To some degree, in archives, fact and fiction coexist strangely, in what historians used to call collective psyche'

Radio Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé

My recent project Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé (LEB) constitutes a prototype of online radio station, created from audio material continuously retrieved from archive.org, arranged in a semi-random stream of hourly programs.

My decision to employ the resources and content offered by archive.org to create LEB, was based on the fact that this archive offers a great diversity of easily accessible of audio-visual material, mainly collected and maintained by an active community of users; and so far it has appeared as fairly neutral and non restricted (although religious content thrive and one comes hardly across nudity). But can then archive.org be considered an archive, or if it is only a online repository of audio-visual material? If we follow Quaranta's previously mentioned statement that the online database can only become an archive if it adapts itself to human memory through a process of appropriation, manipulations, indexation and transmission, archive.org as well as many other online projects such as Wikipedia, or Open Street Map, among many other possible examples, possess such a community, who work hard on making this project living archive.

Nonetheless I see LEB fitting within a different category of actions within the archive. LEB tries to approach the archive is a large scale, taking as material the whole audio collection. It tries to do so not simply picking random items from the entire audio collection, but trying to form groups of coherent groups of document, which are turned into programs. This is one among many projects current artistic which deal with online archives, by approaching their database within the vast lengths of its area. By doing so they open cracks in the mathematical logic and overwhelming dimension that characterize these structures and mold them into humanly comprehensible forms. Examples of these artistic approach to the archive's database can be found in the project such as Booktwo by James Bridle, which compiled in to several a set of books the change log of the Wikipedia article The Iraq War. Or Search by Image by Sebastian Schmieg where Google Image Search service is used to create algorithmic videos, based on Google's "understanding" of the fed image.

It is nonetheless curious that all this work (need to) employ algorithms to deal with the database, in order to re-arrange it under a more human logic. And it is even more puzzling the inherently narrative structure that these projects adopt - a radio station, a book collection, and videos. It is if the challenge resides in simulating through machines the chaotic and unpredictable the collective human interaction with the archive. [Manovich and databases]

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. 2003 'Archive and Aspiration'. Edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI, pp.14-25.

Derrica, Jacques. 1995 'Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression' ...

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990 'Postscript on Control Societies'

Domenico Quaranta 'Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age'

Foucault, Michel. 1969 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' London.

Klein, Norman 2011 Imaginary Futures and the Archive Pages Magazine 8

http://gawker.com/amine-derkaoui/ Inside Facebook's Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where 'Camel Toes' are More Offensive Than 'Crushed Heads'

Booktwo

Search by Image

http://sebastianschmieg.com/searchbyimage

User:Andre Castro/research/1.2/essay-archive

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