n
040
MIT Press, 2012), Johanna Drucker et al claim that research has
to be reconfigured to also include design, modeling and curation
as productive tools of knowledge. In an age suffering from
information overload, the new masters are the strong curators
of data. Dividing, segmenting and ordering information into
meaningful entities is in itself a formidable task and a way to
new knowledge. We can find inspiration in the history of the
avant-garde. Avant-garde artists were always in the business of
reimagining knowledge, practices and images into collages,
montages and cut-ups. Crucially, the avant-garde was good at
visualizing their findings, combining an aesthetic and audiovisual
approach to knowledge. They address all our senses. They
exhibited relationships, paradoxes and collisions in our culture.
This is cultural curation at its best.
How can we use all possible means to visualize the documents
and the histories hidden in our repositories? How can we make
a nation's memory tangible, present, graspable? The human
senses are the brain's windows to the world. How can archives
use new forms of visualization and curation as interactive
windows into our collections? Jeffrey Shaw's T_Visionarium,
prototype collaboration with the National Library in Australia, is
a good example. Shaw created a multimedia interface into the
library's tv-programs collection enabling the aesthetically
immersed user/viewer to reorganize the content on the fly
according to certain given parameters. The human senses are
activated and choreographed interactively with the collection in
order to create new knowledge.
Aesthetics in its deepest sense, as the study of how humans use
their senses to receive and produce knowledge, is urgently
needed in a computational environment based on mathematics
and programs. We need to embody codes and numbers
viscerally as well as logically. How can we feel, think, see, smell
and hear our cultural heritage in new ways? We need more
prototypes, but we also need to make our repositories and files
available in their multiplicity, i.e. we need to construct, access,
display and exhibit the files in ways that harness the power of
curiosity, potentiality and knowledge, rather than delimit or
reduce their relevance. We need to enable our users and
co-researchers to misuse our collections, relink and reconnect
them to other things and associations. New media should open
archives in new ways. The human/nonhuman assemblage of
the contemporary archive is not an assemblage with restricted
access, but an assemblage for new beginnings and new
becomings. Let us make archives a new art form.
This article is based on my lecture notes for the Royal Society
of Archivists in the Netherlands at the National Archives of
the Netherlands in The HagueNovember 2015. Thanks to
Theo Thomassen for inviting me to his archival science programs
at the University of Amsterdam and for preparing with his class,
questions that sharpened my arguments, to Charles Jeurgens for
valuable comments on my manuscript, to Karin van der Heiden
for conversations and train rides to various archival venues
and to the participants at the workshops at the National Archives
of the Netherlands, the City Archives Rotterdam, and the
Brabants Historic Information Center.
Eivind Rossaak is universitair hoofddocent en staflid van
het onderzoeksdepartement van de Nationale Bibliotheek
van Noorwegen.
Eivind R0ssaak tijdens KVAN lezing op
11 november in het Nationaal Archief, Den Haag
Foto: Angeline Swinkels, Den Bosch
