Archive and memory in virtual worlds - for the Media X Conference, Stanford - discussion with Pat Hanrahan, Vladlen Koltun, Byron Reeves and Jeremy Bailenson - March 2008
Artereality - a manifesto for arts education in the US - written with Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford Humanities Lab) for a new collection - What Is Art Education? A 21st-Century Question, edited by Steven Madoff, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008)
Life Squared - an animated archive - a talk in Manchester - Manchester Whitworth Gallery - November 2007 - A symposium on Lynn Hershman - 
Life-squared-Manchester.mov
Life-Squared - the future of the museum explored as we revisit with artist Lynn Hershman a hotel room in 1972 and build an archival experience in a virtual world
Keynote lecture - 'University Museums and the Community' International Conference September 2008
Hosted by: The Manchester Museum and The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK with the University Museums Group UK
Venue: The Whitworth Art Gallery
Animating the archive: mixed reality museological futures
New media offer a fascinating architecture for the museum.
There is a convergence between a trend in new digital media towards participatory sharing and collaborative authoring (Web 2.0, Open Source and P2P) and what I see as a sea change in Cultural Resource Management away from a custodial paradigm of stewardship and site and collections management towards a paradigm of participatory involvement and design of cultural heritage.
From collection and curation to community and cocreativity.
I am going to unpack the implications for hybrid alliances in museums and collections in the academy as well as for new kinds of memory practice associated with what I call Archive 3.0. I will use the experience of my humanities labs at Stanford as illustration.
The main point to what I have to say today is about the political economy of new media.
SLIDE
Metamedia, in Stanford Archaeology Center, pursues archaeological research in design history and media materialities. An archaeological media lab – because the past lives in the present through its mediation – translations of the remains of the past into accessible forms – illustration, text, whatever.
SLIDE
Stanford Humanities Lab is a diverse, collaborative ecology of experimental research and pedagogy. The Lab operates as a kind of incubator for work that links the Arts and Humanities to Science and Technology not in abstract terms, but by means of large-scale, hands-on projects with concrete deliverables as outputs. Much as in a natural science lab, SHL projects are based upon teamwork. They explore matters of common human concern with a risk-taking ethos that involves a triangulation of arts practice, scholarly research rooted in commentary, critique, and interpretation, and outreach beyond the academy in the form of partnerships with museums, arts companies, public performance spaces, industry, and foundations.
SHL has a tripartite mission to animate The Archive, that great cultural store house of works in the Arts and Humanities, to build bridges to a bigger picture on matters of common human concern, and to foster collaborative cocreation, grounding broad perspective in networked expertise. SHL can be found at shl.stanford.edu.
Labs – team-based research and development, object and practice oriented, experimental and risk taking.
SLIDE (text)
I can illustrate the sea change in cultural heritage management through reference to current work with SFMOMA.
SLIDE (building)
The museum has recently reoriented its mission away from its fine modernist building and its collection towards a diverse program of temporary exhibitions, events and services to its community
SLIDE (lab)
— a much more active role of designing enlightening and engaging experiences.
I think I might have actually used a better example from archaeology – a much more inflammatory matter of the cultural politics of science, development and planning.
SLIDE
Web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing media.
Participatory software – wikis and blogs, for example, refocus creativity upon collaboration and grass-roots involvement.
P2P (peer to peer) is a new name for an old political and productive mode of association — voluntary self-organization in order to create common value. This takes place through use of open and free raw, a participatory process of development of common product, and output oriented towards a “commons”, so that the result is universally available to all and can serve for further levels of refinement and development. While such peer production practices recently became prominent in the creation and sharing of online content and free software, they are being adopted and adapted much more widely. This process of design and making has profound political and cultural implications.
Increasingly embedded, ubiquitous and transparent digital media are producing mixed realities where report/representation/visualization coexist with the experiences they mediate: the distinction between real and virtual, while never absolute, is increasingly irrelevant.
SLIDE (slogan)
Think of all this as a crystallization of our relationship with media technologies – more than ever, we live in media – they are the architecture of our experience – we inhabit media.
Now to two projects.
SLIDE
The photography of Edward Burtynsky.
SLIDE (photos)
Here are some of Ed’s photos.
Extraordinary explorations of a contemporary sublime.
SLIDE
Metamedia built a participatory web site, a wiki, to accompany an exhibition of the landscape photography of Ed Burtynsky in 2005 at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center. Visitors and anyone with access to a web browser could view the photographs, zoom in on them in great detail and add to the web site in the way of comment, new material. We opened up the site completely to anyone who wanted to contribute.
Some features:
Technical ease of set up. Museums need no longer have to build their own software from scratch.
70k interactions over the exhibition.
The discussions, tagging, annotations, links generated some fascinating and revealing points, like when Ed Burtynsky was prompted to connect one of his works with the painter Friedrich.
The crucial importance of design and management. Our research and experience reveals how slight design changes in the web experience can have a considerable effect upon participation – look and ambience matters. There is very little discussion of either this kind of matter, or the management models needed for projects like this.
SLIDE (title)
Life Squared: an animated archive in an online world
SLIDE (archived paper)
I was working with the artist Lynn Hershman in a large international research project called “Performing Presence: From the Live to the Simulated”. I found out that Stanford had acquired 90 odd boxes of her archive: papers, photos, videos, reviews. Lynn didn't want them to sit in the Special Collections of the Library and molder. She wanted to do something more.
This was music to my ears. Lynn wanted to animate her archive. And so began the project Life Squared.
SLIDE – Archaeolog
This was, is an archaeology of a work of Lynn's, an installation made in 1972 in a room in the Dante Hotel, San Francisco. In 2007 a team from SHL reworked the fragmentary remains of this event, experience, and performance as a facility and encounter in the online world Second Life.
I said Lynn's aspiration to animate her archive was music to my ears. Precisely because I am an archaeologist, fascinated by what's left of the past, its presence with us now, and what we do with it.
Let me show you what it looks like
SLIDES (8)
SLIDE (title – Archive 3.0)
I have argued that there is something of a sea change in Cultural Resource Management. You might think that archaeologists discover the past, recover it to care (or decay and absolute loss). They don't. They work on what remains. Archaeology is another kind of memory practice, where past is translated into present.
With Henry Lowood, colleague at Stanford Libraries and with whom I work very closely in SHL, I see us moving into a new archival era. Because we live in Silicon Valley we thought this should be called Archive 3.0. Museums and libraries practice, we suggest, are part of The Archive and its evolution.
Let me explain.
SLIDE
Consider three cognate terms: archive – architecture – archaeology.
I am a Classicist and fascinated by the genealogy of terms. The prefix arche (found in archive and architecture and archaeology) is Greek for beginning, origin, foundation, source, first principle, central location and origin 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, I suggest, are all about narratives of origin, identity and belonging, and the politics of ownership, organization, access and use.
Here is a sketch of the evolution of the Archive.
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.
I cannot overemphasize how political economy and systems of management and administration are at the core of what I have to say today.
SLIDE (new prosthetic architectures)
Archive 3.0 — new prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of archival resources – the animated archive.
What is involved in bringing archives alive in 3.0? Were they “dead” before? What are signs of this shift?
The key features of Archive 3.0 are remix, rich engagement, and co-creative regeneration.
The evolution of Archive 3.0 is so clearly manifested in the reterritorialization of information resources associated with a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 initiatives like Wikipedia and Flickr, with new institutional efforts of libraries and museums to diversify and reach out to users with vast information resources and intelligent customizable search facilities. Clear in the vast and growing heritage industry is a reemphasis on personal affective engagement with cultural memory. There is a recognition of the importance of developing rich modes of engagement with archival, historical and cultural resources. New interfaces involve processes of recollection, regeneration, reworking, remixing in sophisticated visualizations and customized interactive and participatory experiences.
The Life Squared project, to animate part of the Hershman archive in the online world Second Life, is an address to the question of the future of the library and museum in the broad context of memory practices associated with Archive 3.0 — when collections are no longer primarily of books on shelves, paintings on walls, objects in vitrines, but include immaterial forms, intangible experiences, mixed analog and digital forms. As they always did.
SLIDE (lab principles)
Here are some lab principles behind Life Squared.
Project and performance based learning.
Research networks and hybrid alliances – Life Squared involved a diverse design team – an alliance between academic researchers, student, artist, collections curator, information scientist/librarian, exhibition designer, digital technologist, online world residents, visitors. This is regularly the case in the creation of cultural events (I worked with a performance company for many years). But we adopted an agile management methodology that radically changed the design process. I don’t have time to go into this, but it involves complementarity with P2P principles and radically flattened management hierarchies. I am inspired, for example, by improvisation techniques in performance-based media.
SLIDE (slogan)
I want to end with some comments about digital media and bringing the past alive, particularly in connection with 3D reconstruction.
We regularly now see digital reconstructions of sites and buildings. Hollywood CGI technologies can rebuild Rome. They can be very impressive. I think they are mostly superficial. When I talk about engaging and rich experiences in Archive 3.0 I am not talking about a reconstruction of Stonehenge in a virtual world or a CAD system.
I am arguing for the coextension of past and present, real and represented. The archive is and always was a mixed reality of goods and desires.
Collections are the stuff of dreams.
SLIDE
Archival systems struggle to manage disorder, to build order. In this they are part of the utopia that was, and still is, the cosmopolis, the city, as polis (people and urban fabric), body politic, rooted in the cosmos.
We deliberately avoided a mimetic architecture for Life Squared — trying to make the virtual look like it was. The Dante Hotel of 2007 is a testament to reanimation and decay. It is a kind of reanimated ruin, simulacrum of a ruin — an exact copy of an original that could never have existed. Archives have always been such mixed realities, hybrids of past and present. What we were and what we could be, what they recorded and we remember, realities and hopes, materialities and immaterialities, presences and absences.
These dynamics are at the heart of good storytelling. A superb digital rendition of a marble pediment is not, on its own, good storytelling.
A crucial point is that memory and archival practices are as much about managing loss and discard in different kinds of selctive fidelity as they are about curating as much of what remains as possible. A living past is as much about what has gone as what remains.
Archive 3.0 is a new landscape of opportunity for designing rich, engaging and co-creative memory practices that testify to this coextension of loss and care.
SLIDE
Think of the remains of the past as both traces and vestiges.
By trace I mean a track or footprint, the past present in its absence, in the void left by its weight. Traces require an ichnography — the inscription of footprints, tracing out.
By vestige I mean decayed or partial remnant, a bit of the past that is over and done, but present here with us now. Vestiges require archaeology — efforts to pull together, to reassemble and so regenerate what has gone, though it will never be the same.
Archive 3.0 is not a zero-sum scenario of replacing the analog media of the Hershman archive, the boxes in our library Special Collections, with a virtual reconstruction of the Dante Hotel in Second Life. Archive 3.0 is not about the triumph of the digital. It is the potential we are offered today to coordinate ichnography and archaeology.
Sometimes the old technologies of fast access to information through carefully structured metatdata are what we need and want for an affective engagement. Sometimes it is better to rummage through boxes in the attic. A fabulous photorealistic 3D model of a house in Pompeii may fail to transcend the superficial detail of beautifully rendered surfaces, fail to capture the life of a place.
Ichnography and archaeology — these are knowledge practices, memory practices, matters of design, of arranging materials, of managing the manifold of curation and loss, of choreographing engagement, of supplying archival tools and systems, of building architectures that build upon the entropic loss of everything we hope to be.
Here is the conference theme
For much of their history, universities were elite learning environments, sheltered from the outside world by their 'ivory towers', and taking their model from the monastery. Since at least the 1960s, though, universities have been playing an increasingly important role in their local and regional communities. One of their early roles was to form extra-mural departments which offered courses to members of the public. More recently, universities have begun to recognize their cultural, economic and social role within their communities.
Universities are often major employers; some historic universities play a major role in the tourist economy; and some make a significant contribution through spin-off companies formed as a way of bringing commercial applications to university research.
In addition, one of the major ways in which universities make a contribution to their communities is through their cultural provision.
Many universities operate theatres, concert venues, parks, botanic gardens, and museums and galleries. Increasingly, university museums and galleries have become a vital link between universities and their communities. They are important sources of learning outside the classroom for schools and colleges, as well as places of informal learning for visitors of all kinds; they are vehicles for public engagement with academic research; and increasingly they are becoming places where the university can listen to the community and its views on the issues studied by academics.
The theme of UMAC's 8th International Conference therefore focuses on one of the most pressing issues today for university museums across the globe, which is how they can best act as two-way bridges between the world of the university and the many and varied communities, outside the university, within it in the form of students and staff using the museums in their leisure time, and the global 'virtual' community of the Internet.
