Order by Fluctuation?
Classical Archives and Their
Audiovisual Counterparts1
Technomathematical And Epistemological Options in
Navigating Trans-Alphabetical Archives
introduction: Information practices in media-archaeological
reading
Archives today, can be redefined in terms of negentropic systems: the registration
of physically real signals by audio-visual media for the "analogue" age, and Digital
Signal Processing in our current media practice.
The difference between the symbolic regime of classic, alphabet-based archives,
based on alphabetic letters, and audio-visual archives, based on physical signals, is
a fundamental one. There are new tools of sound- and image-based search engines,
new tools for addressing audiovisual memory, be it cultural, aesthetic, scientific, or
otherwise.
For defining what is different in digital archives compared to the traditional ones,
arises the issue of how to navigate audiovisually in data avalanches, that is, to find
sensual, aisthesis-based interfaces for human-machine-memory logistics.
From space-based to time-based archives
While the traditional archive of predominantly textual records provides a spatial
order ("l'espace de l'archive", as described by the historian Michel de Certeau), to be
transformed into "history" by the act of writing, the audiovisual archive itself takes
place in time, beyond the scriptural regime (which is the realm of historiography).
We can observe an epistemological dimension: the transformation of the classical,
datacarrier based, material storage "archive" into an archive in electronic motion, in
electromagnetic ephemerality and latency. The gain of flexibility and computability
is paid with a loss of durability.
wolfgang ernst
1 This text originates from the following keynote speech, but was substantially rewritten: "'Order by
fluctuation'? Classical Archives and their audio-visual counterparts. Technomathematical and
epistemological options in navigating trans-alphabetical archives", lecture at Swedish National Library,
Stockholm, 19 May, 2009, lecture series Archives and Aesthetical Practices
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