perception (time and space) are not that distinct at all, but rather relativistically interlaced (like the dynamics of the electromagnetic "field"). The Internet today corresponds to the principle analysed by Innis - the "Carthage" option which means hyper-linked exchange in ports across the sea, as opposed to the land-based Roman territory (empire). Here the act of transmission is the message (telecommunication telos) - exhausting itself in operation, in contrast to long time teleological monumentality as embodied by the Egyptian pyramids. In the age of transnationally networked economies and cultural exchange by technological media, the term "tradition" is subject to a dramatic change of meaning. Emphatic macro temporal („historical") tradition is being replaced by time-based and time-basing micro-mechanisms of transmission. While tradition has been associated with long-time memories across deep historical time so far, this emphatic horizon now seems to shrink to a mere extension of the present (as its re- and protentive short-time "working memory") - a dramatic shifting of the temporal prefix. The expression "cultural transfer" already implies a causal relationship, a traceable chain of the channels whereby cultural goods as materialities or cultural knowledge as information are negotiated between cultures. By using the term "transmission" instead, a technological co-significance comes into play which has arisen with the epistemology of electric and electronic media since nineteenth century telegraphy: the idea of "wireless", that is: immaterial transmission of signals. Whereas this corresponds with the sender-receiver model in communication engineering, an alternative option is a theory of co-original emergence of structurally similar technologies without direct exchange of knowledge, according to the principle of the communicating tubes (and resonance). The development of printing with moveable type in ancient Korea already took place before (and independent of) the Gutenberg press, and principles of the wheel-driven clock were developed in China before it emerged in late-medieval European monasteries - without mutual knowledge transfer. Archival materialism versus streaming electrons High-technological media culture is characterised by the dichotomy between materiality based endurance and electronic immediacy. Emphatic transmission over time ("tradition") is based on the materialities of the archive. On the other hand, immaterial electronic "live" media (transmission across space), by definition (and essentially) are rather memoryless. Different from the legal record which is tentatively meant to last for eternity, the quick notice on a random access data carrier (starting with the ancient wax tablet) already fulfils its function as intermediary storage. Thus, a new kind of evidence emerges: fugitive moments of the past which were never meant to enter the discourse of history. An example is the "direct recording": the immediate engraving of phono discs in the 1930s and 1940s. The material recordings were not used for long-term storage but for short-time delayed replay in broadcasting across temporal zones or on different program places, since magnetic tapes were not yet available. Their function was wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material (micro-)transmission fulfilled (actually exhausted) in the act of intermediary storage - just like the intermediary film with washable emulsions on celluloid in early television transmission of outdoor events by daylight; emphatic tradition here is replaced by delayed transfer. It would be a misunderstanding to categorise them under material storage media; they were rather intermedia in the temporal sense (the time channel). The more informative they are when, by accident, they were not effaced but frozen over time, to be discovered in the present. Their information value is reciprocal to their (non-)intention as "historical" records. We can observe a transformation of an epistemological dimension: the transformation of the classical, datacarrier based, material storage "archive" into a literally e-motional archive (that is: in electronic motion), in electromagnetic ephemerality and latency. The gain of flexibility and computability is paid with a loss of durability. When recently the Cologne Municipal Archive materially collapsed, it became apparent that most records, though being dirty and mutilated, materially survived this catastrophe, astonishingly resistible against the pressure of stones. In a similar way the first generation ("analogue") audio-visual storage media turned out to be surprisingly resistant against temporal entropy (like the Edison-cylinder and gramophone records, as well as daguerreotypes, photographic negatives and film on celluloid). More delicate is the destiny of cultural memory based on electromagnetic storage; digital media, finally, tend to divest themselves completely from their material embedding - losing the "touch ground" by becomingtechnically "virtual". Traditional physical storage media have been materially inscribed (graphein in its old Greek sense): "There must be a writing means by which the information to be stored is introduced into the device" (Sage, 1953, p. 141-149 (141).; against this invasive inscription, storage devices such as magnetic tape for audio and video only reveal their memory content in the dynamics of the electro-magnetic field. Electro technical storage media take place in a sphere which is different from the scriptural regime of the classical archive - until, on the level of alphanumeric codes, alphanumeric writing unexpectedly returned within techno-mathematical machines. This return is a temporal figure which cannot be reduced to the linearity of media history; as a Möbius loop, we are confronted rather with a media- archaeological (re)configuration of times present and times past: a contemporalisation.5 There are two complementary approaches to the conservation of analogue memory carriers. The one cares for preserving the physical, especially chemical and electromagnetic properties of the concrete media body - since all media technologies are hardware in the first place. The other, sometimes opposing approach is to preserve media-based memory as information, up to the extreme point of view that the material body might be abolished after its essential transformation into its pure binary information units. archives in liquid times 142 5 To experience the past both in its characteristic difference and at the same time as present in actual co-presence is a double-bind proposed by T. S. Eliot, 1949, p. 64 143

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 73