In archives
Archives - the store rooms of humanity - what has come down to the present.
Archive - a place where records are kept, a record so preserved, to place or store in an archive. The architecture of access to the remains of the past.
A lot of my work in archaeology has dealt with archives - that is, how they are organized and how they work - archival practices.
archive - architecture - archaeology
The prefix arche (found in archive and architecture and archaeology) is Greek for beginning, origin, foundation, source, first principle, first place of power, authority, sovereignty. It represents a starting point or founding act in both an ontological sense ("this is whence it began") and a nomological sense ("this is whence it derives its authority").
Archives are all about narratives of origin, identity and belonging, and the politics of ownership, organization, access and use.
I see us moving into a new phase in the history of archives.
Archive 1.0 - bureaucracy in the early state - temple and palace archives - inscription as an instrument of management
Archive 2.0 - mechanization and digitization of archival databases - with an aim of fast, easy and open access based upon efficient dendritic classification and retrieval - associated also with statistical analysis performed upon the data
Archive 3.0 - new prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of archival resources - the animated archive
- a reemphasis on personal affective engagement with cultural memory.
There is an emphasis here on interface - but not solely as a human factor of ergonomics or of behavioral efficiency and conceptual transparency - an issue now of richness of engagement.
Animating the archive
Rather than static depositories I see archives as active engagements with the past -
What is involved in bringing archives alive?
- recollection, regeneration, reworking, remixing
- developing rich modes of engagement, rich architectures
- involving matters of visualization, interface and interaction, presence effects
- and all these have profound implications for processes of record and documentation.
An essential dimension of the new archive. Archives have always been collective. New factors -
- digital archives are now dynamic - with a shift from from classification and organization to search and remix
- a paradigmatic shift is occuring from a principle of curation and managed access to archives (the orthodox model of stewardship) to one of the co-production of archives
Involved are matters of
- cultural property and ownership - who owns the stuff in archives and on what basis of value
- access, stakeholder interests - who should be able to use what archival resources
- authority, authenticity, trust - who organizes what for whom
in relation to
- cultural heritage and its politics
- identity and belonging
- digital citizenship
- democratizing information
Inside the Hershman archive in Second Life - Life Squared
- new architectures of engagement
The fungibility of digital media, as the text becomes interchangable with image and sound, is intimately connected now with
- how data and information might be managed
- an elision of research, pedagogy and publication
- historiography - how we make history using archives
- the new (art) museum - conserving creativity in the absence of a definitive material form for the art work
- the future of the book and of publishing
- the new library - cybrary - beyond books and shelves
- the figure of the cybrarian - mediating engagement with the archive
- the material culture of the archive - media archaeology and the new architectures of engagement
- memory practices - from personal memory books to national archives
- the possibility of dynamic searching of free-form records (in addition to efficient retrieval of efficiently organized categories)
- creative reuse (re-mix, re-generation, re-collection) of archival re-sources
- presence/absence and archaeologies of the contemporary past in multiple mediated forms of record - in what form might the past now confront us?
Archive 3.0 enables the articulation of specialised focus with matters of common concern - connecting the local and global.
This implies a transdisciplinary scope - a thematic approach to big questions such as urban experience, visualization and the human senses, intercultural translation, the shape of history, presence/absence and the documentation of experience, memory practices ...
Stanford Strategy Studio - mobilizing broad humanistic knowledge and social science expertise to provide context for more effective high-level corporate and government planning and decision making as well as grass-roots cultural change
Art and the early Greek state - from classification and catalog to design, engineering and cultural ecology - the life of things - when I discovered that the categories of understanding the early cities of the Mediterranean are tied more to nineteenth century metanarratives than a genuine engagement with their archaeological remains, and when I tried to develop a new methodology for generating such a rich empirical encounter
Three Rooms - three forensic portfolios - what such an encounter with the past might involve
Traumwerk - collaborative authoring, creative content management ... dreamwork - and an extended experiment in Web 2.0 technologies
The Three Landscapes Project - when we experimented with the representation of temporal topography - the topological percolation of archive that is place - deep-mapping three landscapes - Stanford Humanities Center 2000-2001
The Presence Project - presence/absence and the archaeology of experience - a major international collaboration with performance artists
Life Squared - animating the archive of artist Lynn Hershman in the online world Second Life - an exploration of the future of the museum
Burtynsky at Stanford - a collaborative encounter with the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky as an experiment in participatory museum and arts curation
Brith Gof - media archaeology and a multimedia performance arts company
Cocreating cultural heritage - participatory media and pedagogy and Web 2.0 technologies enabling people to build their own pasts
Behind the locked door - a collaborative excavation of the store rooms of the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford as another experiment in the museum without walls
43 relics - dumpster diving 2006 - what will remain of us all
The locked door: San José 2004 - a forensic archive and an experiment in memory practices
[link] - information is a verb - comments on archival practices from my weblog
[link] - agile design and the archaeological encounter
Posted at Apr 07/2011 05:37PM:
MS: interactive
research driven
social
collaborative
open source
Posted at Feb 18/2010 01:06AM:
MS: I have taken out the over-emphasis here on material remains - it is crucial to recognize that the distinction, in cultural terms, between the material and immaterial, tangible and intangible, is a tactical one.
