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Online archives: power and remixes

negotiation of aspirations within online archives

the role of remixes within the archives


Outline(unfinished)

Archive and Power

Online archive: a negotiation of aspirations: between authoritative archive figures and a popular everyday communitarian archive Examples: web2.0 services: youtube, flick, facebook

The role of the remix

Does the remix of the archive plays a role in this negotiation? Is it challenge the authority behind the archive? Do glitches create short-circuits 

- 2 versions of the same image ??



Introduction

In this essay I will like to discuss the online 'communitarian' popular archive. I will argue that for the majority these are still entities related to and representing authority, although built and shaped by the users. I will present the remix as strategy for, not only for gaining an understanding of the archive, but as glitches, that can defy the archive's authority.


Archive and Power

  • Derrida

In 'Archive Fever' Derrida traces back its 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 in 'The Archeology of Knowledge' of the archive follows similar lines, according to which it is a validating system which establishes what constitutes a statement. It is not a repository remainings from a culture or civilization, but a institution that validates the interpretation of documents contained in it; "it is ... rather 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 archive as a power institution becomes even more prominent if we consider Foucault's remark at introduction in which he states that the document has gained a similar status, in contemporary history, to that of monuments in traditional history. Now-a-days history takes documents of the past and studies, organizes them, inserts them in a lineage, and context, and makes them relevant (pp:7-8). This process will inevitably embed the documents with an authority; they authoritative and unquestionable figures, and those who are allow access to them, who are given permission to interpret them, the contemporary archons</i, are entrusted with the powers of the document. From these two readings we can see the archive forming as power figure, granting, the possibility for those who were allowed to interpret its documents to impose their reading on those who aren't 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 Archives

folkloric archive - still a power structure

Although acknowledging this role archive as a tool for enforcing law and validating knowledge, Arjun Appadurai takes also into account the every day life archive, the archives that belong to the individual, the family, the community. In his view, this 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 adopts a more skeptical position, and sees beyond the democratic possibility of online folkloric archives, revealing them as scripted spaces. Although allowing, or are even being mostly constituted by users' intervention, online folkloric archives are often scripted spaces, with an ideology behind. By looking of what is excluded from archive a picture of the ideology scripting the archive is revealed. Take the example of Facebook, where pictures smashed heads are acceptable while nudity or photoshoped images are censored (Gawker); Such choices of what can and cannot be stated, reveals a particular ideology; such predetermined space will consequently restrict the range of possible discourses allowed, and turns the online folkloric archives into highly ideological spaces. As a consequence, as Klein depicts, "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". Therefore it can be said that by appearing to empower citizens the online folkloric archive has the capacity to diminishes the citizens political strength. While creating an illusion of an empowering and liberating free space, where one can express his/her views, it actually functions as control and continence tool.

We can see here a 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 filtered (of 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.


=remix and challenging the scripted space

Digital archives:

  • access - possession - manipulation - appropriation - versions

Although most of the online folkloric archives are not neutral and still play a role of control and validation, there is a fundamental difference: they exist online and therefore can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Another major different comes from the fact that the documents contained in online archive are digital, and because they are digital users can posses in their hard-drives without removing them from the archive.


The online archive puts in motion a process by which once a document is place online it no longer belongs to its owner, but the whole online community. 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). Consequently digital documents present in online archives, in combination with the manipulatory possibilities offered by the digital, are an invitation to the appropriation and manipulation of the document by the community. 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. [images]

Although this freedom of expression exists Quaranta adverts for the power system, through databases and algorithms, which still regulates the majority of online archives(p.14). It is once again the online archive appearing as a space scripted by an ideology. 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'. He seems them as the human element necessary to the database, to make '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). In other words the online community by appropriation, indexation, and transition transform online database or repositories into living archives.


Let's not fool ourselves, the archive administrators are the ones who decide what is kept and what leaves the archive. But the community of users has two very powerful tools in its hand:

They have the capacity to store and re-transmit; so once a document has integrated an online archive, it spreads to others archives, user's blogs, emails, and user's hard-drive. One can say that a document once online not only stops belonging to its author but also to the archive, where it first appeared.

And they have the possibility of manipulation. Unarguably versions of the image with hundreds of missiles being fired or a dancing missiles, as seen in Laric's Version are digital fabrications, but their presence, as well as a multitude of more subtle versions have an important effect withing the archive; Not only the versions, bring 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 official version begins to be questioned, a process that spreads to archive figure as "the last word" [Foucault and Kleiner ++]. By allowing "fictitious" documents to enter its space, the archive begins to open up a space of dialogue between facts and fiction, and I believe that to be point where it role a power instrument begins to fade. 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'

It is not without reason that Jos de Mul affirms that the value of a digital object is proportional to its openness to transformation.




Thoughts / Notes / Etc

  • the remix as the aspiration/desire. It turns the archive and into site of negotiation, between the ideology, the authority behind the archive and its users


site of emergence

Klein however acknowledges relevant shift from the traditional archive to online one. It sto pped being a site of preservation to become a site of emergence, of what is still to be inserted into it. 'If archives are incomplete, is is no longer because the documents did not survive the passing of time, but of what is still to be inserted and re-invented into them'


a transmission medium

Given this scenario, where archives are no longer sites of preservation of memories, what can be said to be their function? Perhaps they are more TRANSMISSION medium, that allows one's views to quickly and efficiently reach large audiences. It has 'site for the production of anticipated memories and connectivities' 'a document is posted and re-posted several times'


database and archives

Can this sites be defined as archives or are they simple repositories, information databases?

  • organization
  • classification



  • product of negotiated aspiration: users vs. archive institution

desire is suppressed (Klein)

Examples: web2.0 services: youtube, flick, facebook

We cannot say that an online communitarian and popular archive is no longer attached its past as a power figure, never-the-less the uses users make of it transforms it. The archive becomes a site of negotiated aspiration. Users and the institution behind the archive negotiate their different and often conflicting aspirations.


The role of remix

[ If such is the case, the 'oficial' original becomes no different from a copy, there is simply no difference between the two. Even if differences exist, if the original hasn't been visibly transformed, when faced with large numbers of versions, the status of original begins to blur and might eventually disappear. Faced with multiple versions in the missiles' image it becomes impossible to detect which one gave origin to the variations. ]


From my experience in creating 'Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé' - a radio station ... - I can see that I become empowered, I am allowed to interpret the archive, to create statements [FOUCAULT] from the objects that are contained with the archive. Does then such an approach empowers also the listener? I presume it doesn't. What does it do then?

* the interpretation of the archive * the interface the way you navigate * what the interpreation says [LARIC]



Bibliography

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

Foucault, Michel 'The Archaeology of Knowledge'

Derrica,

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



  • Foucault (where?)

Appadurai popular archive

LEB empowerment

  • does it transfer to the listenrs


Design of the archive - a result of its use

  • the interpretation of items from the archive - tells more about the interpreter
  • Laric - Versions
  • Foucault (p.145)

Maintain an object in circulation

the faults/glitchs of the archive

Derrida- p.10



Foucault in exposing his notion of the archive as system from which statements can emerge as events and things, uses as an example the different interpretation one past event ('so many things said by so many men') can acquire in the act of interpreting it.

As OLIVIER LARIC states in his piece Versions: 'How an incident happens may reflect nothing about the incident itself, buts reflect something about the person involved in the happening and supplying a how ... In the telling and retelling people reveal not the action but themselves'


Foucault 'The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.(p.145) '[The archive] reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is in the general system of the formation and transformation of statements'(p.146)

  • archaeology - 'discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive'(p.148)

Appadurai - intensified archive - a place to sort out the meaning of memory


Steve's notes on further developments:

  • later Foucault (1984) - constructing of the neo-liberal subject

liberalism produces freedom that we consume it produces another subject self-contained individual

organization of society as organization of flows


What can be done until the 11th of April?

Formulate a text:

  • negotiation of aspirations within online archives
  • The role of remixes within the archives.
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