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 sens of arche) is its system of technological protocols. P 85

A videotape by Nam June Paik 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