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=Online archives: power and remixes=
=Online archives: remix the power =  






negotiation of aspirations within online archives
==Introduction==


the role of remixes within the archives
In this essay I will center my discussion on the relation of online folkloric archives to power and the role of artistic intervention within the archive as strategy for bringing in to them a more human and disruptive logic.


The essay will begin by tracing the archive's historical ties to power and demonstrate how these relations are still present in apparently democratic folkloric online archives. Following that section it will look at online users' intervention within the archive, and how can these constitute a challenge to the archive's authority. Lastly it take at some examples of artistic projects that aim to bring the archive into more human proportions.


==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===
==Archive and Power==  
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 ??
In <i>Archive Fever</i> Derrida traces the meaning of the term "archive" to the Greek "arkheion" 'the residence of the superior magistrates, the <i>archons</i>, those who commanded'. It is in this location where official documents are written and safeguarded. The <i>archons</i> 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 <i>The Archeology of Knowledge</i> follows similar lines. Foucault describes it as a validating system, which determines what is entitled to constitute a statement. The archive is not a repository of 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 and organizes them, inserts them into a lineage and a context, makes them relevant (pp:7-8). Such a process will inevitably bring an authority and an unquestionable statues to the document. Those  who are given permission to interpret the documents, the contemporary <i>archons</i>, are entrusted with the knowledge system that both documents and archive legitimate. The archive gives permission to those reading the documents to impose their interpretation 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) .






==Introduction==
==Online Folkloric Archive==  


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


Norman Klein however adopts a more skeptical position, and sees the hidden agendas covered by the democratic possibilities offered by the online folkloric archives. Although allowing, or even being mostly constituted through the users' intervention, online archives are often scripted spaces, with an underlying ideology. By looking at what is excluded from an archive the ideology becomes apparent; The example of Facebook where pictures of smashed heads are acceptable while nudity or "photoshoped" images are censored (Gawker) gives us an idea of the ideology ruling it. In short, the limits of what can and cannot be stated constitute the ideology governing online archives. Such a predetermined space will inevitably restrict the range of possible discourses, and thus turn the online folkloric archive into a ideological space. 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 be said that while creating the illusion of an empowering and liberating space where citizens can openly express their views, the online folkloric archive has the capacity to mislead and control their political efforts. We can classify this process as soft-control, a modulation typical of a 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. 


==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 <i>archons</i>, those who commanded'. It is in this location where official documents are written and safeguarded. The <i>archons</i> 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 <i>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)




==Remixing the Archive==


Although most online archives are, like most physical ones, not neutral sites and do 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 relevant difference comes from the fact that the contained documents are digital entities, which makes them infinitely reproducible, allowing for their storage in any hard-drive, while they still remain present 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 possibilities offered by digital manipulation, we are in the presence of an open invitation for the appropriation and manipulation of the (digital) documents present in the archive. 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 <i>Versions</i>.


 
[[File: laric-missile-01.png]]
==Online Archives==
[[File: laric-missile-02.png]]
===folkloric archive - still a power structure===
[[File: laric-missile-03.png]]
[[File: laric-missile-04.png]]


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).


Although the possibility for such an appropriative process marks a clear distinction from the physical archive Quaranta adverts for dangers of letting the majority of online archives be managed solely by databases and algorithms (p.14). 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 that through an incessant activity of appropriation, indexation, and transition, users transform the online database or repositories into living archives.


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


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


Digital manipulation also allows for the materialization of a multitude of versions of an image, that range from the subtle to the explicit, or even the absurd. These versions have the effect of not only bringing us to ask whether the official "original" document might also have been a product of manipulation, but they also have the capacity to question the archive's authority. In presenting more than one variation of a document the official version might begin to loose its "original" status. Once it began, the questioning process will eventually spread to the figure of the archive as "the last word". And by allowing fictitious documents to enter its space the archive begins to adjust to human collective memory, it starts to become a space of dialogue between facts and fiction, a site of emergence of discourses, rather than a figure that legitimates power and knowledge. 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'


====remix and challenging the scripted space===


Digital archives:


* access - possession - manipulation - appropriation - versions
===Radio Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé===


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.  
My recent project [http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/radio/ Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé (LEB)] constitutes of  a prototype of an online radio station, created from audio material continuously retrieved from [http://archive.org/ archive.org], and arranged in a semi-random stream of hourly programs.
[[File:Radio_LEB.png]]
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 a fairly neutral and non restricted (although religious content thrive and one comes hardly across nudity).  


While exploring the possibilities of archive.org I began to ask myself whether it could be considered an archive, or if it was an 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 to human memory, through a process of appropriation, manipulations, indexation and transmission, archive.org, as well as many other online projects such as Wikipedia, Open Street Map, or even Youtube, can be considered as archives, since the users intervene heavily on its contents. The community of users determines if the database is a repository or an archive.


Nonetheless, I see LEB fitting within a different type intervention within the archive. LEB tries to approach the archive at large, by taking as its material the whole audio collection. It does so not by picking random items from the entire audio collection, but trying to form groups of coherent document, which are turned into programs. However, this is just one among many current artistic projects which deal with online archives by approaching vast areas of their databases. I believe these works have the potential to open cracks within the mathematical logic and overwhelming dimension that characterize these structures and mold them into humanly comprehensible forms. They are able to create other types of interfaces to the database. Examples of these artistic approaches to the archive's database can be found in the project such as James Bridle's <i>The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelog 2006-2009</i> in which the change log of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq war is compiled into several books. Or [http://sebastianschmieg.com/searchbyimage <i>Search by Image</i>] by Sebastian Schmieg where Google Image Search service is used to create algorithmic videos, based on Google's "understanding" of the fed images.


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 <i>Versions</i>.  
It is nonetheless curious that these works employ algorithms to deal with the database, in order to re-arrange it under a less mathematical and algorithmic logic. And it is even more ironic the inherently narrative structure that these projects adopt – a radio station, a book collection, and a video – that seems almost opposed to the horizontal and nonlinear nature of the database. As pointed out by Lev Manovich 'the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as database - but it is also appropriate the we would want to develop the poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database' (p.40). It seems that in order to approach the database in a meaningful away, to make sense out of it, to question it, we are still recurring twentieth century media and narrative formats. Nonetheless, these approaches seem to constitute answers to the question posed by Manovich of how can the new possibilities for storage and organization offered by digital databases lead into new kinds of narratives (p.54). Probably in near future we will see the artistic exploration of databases break away from the narrative, and finding other ways to critically and critically approach these colossal data collections.  
[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 <i>Version</i> 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:
   
==Bibliography==


'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'
Appadurai, A. (2003) 'Archive and Aspiration'. In: Brouwer, J. And Mulder, A:  'Information is Alive'. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI, 14-25.
Bridle, J. (2010) 'On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography' [online ] available from <http://www.urlesque.com/2010/09/08/books-wikipedia-iraq-war/> [10 April 2012]


It is not without reason that Jos de Mul affirms that the value of a digital object is proportional to its openness to transformation.
Derrida, J. (1995) 'Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression'. Diacritics, 25 (2), 6-63.


Deleuze, G. (1990) 'Postscript on Control Societies'


Foucault, Michel. (1969) 'The Archaeology of Knowledge'. London: Routledge.


Gawker (2012). 'Inside Facebook's Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where “Camel Toes” are More Offensive Than “Crushed Heads”' [online] available from <http://gawker.com/amine-derkaoui/> [10 April 2012]


----
Klein, N. (2011) 'Imaginary Futures and the Archive'. Pages, 8


Laric, O. (2009) 'Versions' <http://www.oliverlaric.com/versions.htm> [10 April 2012]


 
Manovich, L. (1998). 'Database as a Symbolic Form'. <http://manovich.net/articles/> [10 April 2012]
===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'
 
   
   
Schmieg, S. (2011) 'Search by Image' <http://sebastianschmieg.com/searchbyimage>  [10
April 2012]


===database and archives===
Quaranta, D. (2011) 'The Artists as Archivist in the Internet Age'. In: D. Quaranta, ed. 2011. Collect the WWWorld.
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.

Latest revision as of 16:45, 1 May 2012

Online archives: remix the power

Introduction

In this essay I will center my discussion on the relation of online folkloric archives to power and the role of artistic intervention within the archive as strategy for bringing in to them a more human and disruptive logic.

The essay will begin by tracing the archive's historical ties to power and demonstrate how these relations are still present in apparently democratic folkloric online archives. Following that section it will look at online users' intervention within the archive, and how can these constitute a challenge to the archive's authority. Lastly it take at some examples of artistic projects that aim to bring the archive into more human proportions.


Archive and Power

In Archive Fever Derrida traces 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 is entitled to constitute a statement. The archive is not a repository of 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 and organizes them, inserts them into a lineage and a context, makes them relevant (pp:7-8). Such a process will inevitably bring an authority and an unquestionable statues to the document. Those who are given permission to interpret the documents, the contemporary archons, are entrusted with the knowledge system that both documents and archive legitimate. The archive gives permission to those reading the documents to impose their interpretation 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 of the archive as a tool for enforcing law and validating knowledge, Appadurai also takes into consideration the everyday life archive, the archive that belong to the individual, to the family, to the community. In his view, this mutant online folkloric archive, which allows individuals to play an active role '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 archives. Although allowing, or even being mostly constituted through the users' intervention, online archives are often scripted spaces, with an underlying ideology. By looking at what is excluded from an archive the ideology becomes apparent; The example of Facebook where pictures of smashed heads are acceptable while nudity or "photoshoped" images are censored (Gawker) gives us an idea of the ideology ruling it. In short, the limits of what can and cannot be stated constitute the ideology governing online archives. Such a predetermined space will inevitably restrict the range of possible discourses, and thus turn the online folkloric archive into a ideological space. 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 be said that while creating the illusion of an empowering and liberating space where citizens can openly express their views, the online folkloric archive has the capacity to mislead and control their political efforts. We can classify this process as soft-control, a modulation typical of a 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.


Remixing the Archive

Although most online archives are, like most physical ones, not neutral sites and do 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 relevant difference comes from the fact that the contained documents are digital entities, which makes them infinitely reproducible, allowing for their storage in any hard-drive, while they still remain present 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 possibilities offered by digital manipulation, we are in the presence of an open invitation for the appropriation and manipulation of the (digital) documents present in the archive. 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.

Laric-missile-01.png Laric-missile-02.png Laric-missile-03.png Laric-missile-04.png


Although the possibility for such an appropriative process marks a clear distinction from the physical archive Quaranta adverts for dangers of letting the majority of online archives be managed solely by databases and algorithms (p.14). 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 that through an incessant activity of appropriation, indexation, and transition, users transform the 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 mentioned users' activity. The archive administrators are still the ones who decide what stays and what is discarded. Nonetheless storage, transmission, and manipulation are decisively empowering features offered by the online archive.

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

Digital manipulation also allows for the materialization of a multitude of versions of an image, that range from the subtle to the explicit, or even the absurd. These versions have the effect of not only bringing us to ask whether the official "original" document might also have been a product of manipulation, but they also have the capacity to question the archive's authority. In presenting more than one variation of a document the official version might begin to loose its "original" status. Once it began, the questioning process will eventually spread to the figure of the archive as "the last word". And by allowing fictitious documents to enter its space the archive begins to adjust to human collective memory, it starts to become a space of dialogue between facts and fiction, a site of emergence of discourses, rather than a figure that legitimates power and knowledge. 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 of a prototype of an online radio station, created from audio material continuously retrieved from archive.org, and arranged in a semi-random stream of hourly programs. Radio LEB.png 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 a fairly neutral and non restricted (although religious content thrive and one comes hardly across nudity).

While exploring the possibilities of archive.org I began to ask myself whether it could be considered an archive, or if it was an 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 to human memory, through a process of appropriation, manipulations, indexation and transmission, archive.org, as well as many other online projects such as Wikipedia, Open Street Map, or even Youtube, can be considered as archives, since the users intervene heavily on its contents. The community of users determines if the database is a repository or an archive.

Nonetheless, I see LEB fitting within a different type intervention within the archive. LEB tries to approach the archive at large, by taking as its material the whole audio collection. It does so not by picking random items from the entire audio collection, but trying to form groups of coherent document, which are turned into programs. However, this is just one among many current artistic projects which deal with online archives by approaching vast areas of their databases. I believe these works have the potential to open cracks within the mathematical logic and overwhelming dimension that characterize these structures and mold them into humanly comprehensible forms. They are able to create other types of interfaces to the database. Examples of these artistic approaches to the archive's database can be found in the project such as James Bridle's The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelog 2006-2009 in which the change log of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq war is compiled into several books. 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 images.

It is nonetheless curious that these works employ algorithms to deal with the database, in order to re-arrange it under a less mathematical and algorithmic logic. And it is even more ironic the inherently narrative structure that these projects adopt – a radio station, a book collection, and a video – that seems almost opposed to the horizontal and nonlinear nature of the database. As pointed out by Lev Manovich 'the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as database - but it is also appropriate the we would want to develop the poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database' (p.40). It seems that in order to approach the database in a meaningful away, to make sense out of it, to question it, we are still recurring twentieth century media and narrative formats. Nonetheless, these approaches seem to constitute answers to the question posed by Manovich of how can the new possibilities for storage and organization offered by digital databases lead into new kinds of narratives (p.54). Probably in near future we will see the artistic exploration of databases break away from the narrative, and finding other ways to critically and critically approach these colossal data collections.




Bibliography

Appadurai, A. (2003) 'Archive and Aspiration'. In: Brouwer, J. And Mulder, A: 'Information is Alive'. Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI, 14-25. Bridle, J. (2010) 'On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography' [online ] available from <http://www.urlesque.com/2010/09/08/books-wikipedia-iraq-war/> [10 April 2012]

Derrida, J. (1995) 'Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression'. Diacritics, 25 (2), 6-63.

Deleuze, G. (1990) 'Postscript on Control Societies'

Foucault, Michel. (1969) 'The Archaeology of Knowledge'. London: Routledge.

Gawker (2012). 'Inside Facebook's Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where “Camel Toes” are More Offensive Than “Crushed Heads”' [online] available from <http://gawker.com/amine-derkaoui/> [10 April 2012]

Klein, N. (2011) 'Imaginary Futures and the Archive'. Pages, 8

Laric, O. (2009) 'Versions' <http://www.oliverlaric.com/versions.htm> [10 April 2012]

Manovich, L. (1998). 'Database as a Symbolic Form'. <http://manovich.net/articles/> [10 April 2012]

Schmieg, S. (2011) 'Search by Image' <http://sebastianschmieg.com/searchbyimage> [10 April 2012]

Quaranta, D. (2011) 'The Artists as Archivist in the Internet Age'. In: D. Quaranta, ed. 2011. Collect the WWWorld.