When a few years ago the Cologne Municipal Archive materially collapsed, it
became apparent that most records, though having become dirty and mutilated,
materially survived this catastrophe, astonishingly resistant against the pressure
of stones. In a similar way the first generation ("analogue") audiovisual 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 becoming
technically "virtual".
Traditional physical storage media, whether with spatial or with temporal "bias"
(as described by Harold Innis) have been literally inscribed; using writing means,
the information to be stored is introduced onto the device. On the contrary, latent
storage devices (such as magnetic tape for audio and video) only reveal their
memory content in the dynamics of the electromagnetic field ("induced").
Electrotechnical storage media used to take place in a sphere which is different from
the scriptural regime of the classical archive - a regime which, on the level of
alphanumeric codes, unexpectedly returns in techno-mathematical machines.
The recording of the acoustically or optically physical signal is "more real", as
opposed to symbolic notation by the alphabet, not only in a technical but also in an
epistemological way: the signal is indexically tied to the physical world, while the
culturally coded symbol is arbitrary. With computing, though, this dialectic
opposition becomes synthesised, since Digital Signal Processing (notably sampling
of audio events) is a function of discrete symbolisation, a re-entry of the "alphabet"
in numerical and logical form. Just like the electronic revolution in mass media
communication devices like radio and television has resulted in a kind of
"secondary orality" (Walter Ong), communication based on the symbolic machine
(computing) has resulted in a (hidden) secondary alphabetic revolution, with bits
and bytes inheriting the typeset, but different from the printing culture in a dynamic
way. This return is a temporal figure which cannot be reduced to the linearity of
media history; we are confronted rather with a media-archaeological
contemporalisation, a kind of Möbius loop.
With computing binary data, the "archival" symbolical regime returns into
audiovisual media themselves, but in a different way: no more signals, but the
alphanumerical code. Trans-alphabetical archives as data spaces are not
predominantly based on the phonetic alphabet any more (which is the message of
the medium archive in the traditional sense - whatever its "content" which is
targeted by historiography). This implies a profound mathematisation (instead of
narrativisation) of the archive.2 The archive based on processing binary numbers
can cope with traditional textual as well as audio and visual records.
wolfgang ernst order by fluctuation? classical archives and their
audiovisual counterparts
No more metadating
Traditional, scripture-oriented memory devices demand "a means of tagging the
information so that it can be easily selected when wanted" (Sagem 1953, p. 141),
such as ordering by tree-like thesauri. Instead of such metadating there now is the
option of hashing, of ordering media from within their genuine media qualities
(f. e. image archives pixel-wise). Whereas the World Wide Web (and the Google
ranking algorithm) reduces hypertextuality to links and statistics between
documents, the original vision developed by Theodor Holm Nelson in 1960
(itself inspired by Vannevar Bush's vision "As We May Think" from 1945) and
finally released in 1998 allows for addressing each single alphanumeric symbol in a
text directly from "abroad", while at the same time keeping a copy of the complete
document at one moment in time in addition to all later variations - a truly
"archival" impulse.
In dynamic data retrieval, it is possible to navigate through large amounts of
photographic and moving images without being guided by verbal language, by
immediate access, unfiltered by words, due to the mode of digital image existence:
the alphanumeric code as the symbolic regime of the digital image. Expressing
pictures by numbers undoes the traditional dichotomy between image and
metadata; both implode into binary numbers.
But on that media-archaeological level, such a two-dimensional set of data is simply
a data format which becomes an "image" only in human cognition, and by verbal
description (ekphrasis). Without iconological interpretation of certain visual
patterns (Erwin Panofsky), an image would just be a cluster of data. Optical signals
become information „in the eye of the beholder" only, while the computer can deal
with the symbolical analysis of physical data without the imaginary.
What digital space allows for instead is the option of navigating images in their own
medium - without changing from visual to verbal language. In digital space, the task
of searching images does not only mean searching for images, but has a second,
reverse meaning as well: images that can search for similar images, without the
interception of words. Navigating in Dataland (as designed in 1973 by William
Donelson), not in the alphabet.
Different from printed letters in a book, the symbols in digital dataland are arranged
and distributed algorithmically - a dynamic that matches the kinetic nature of
orderly movement itself.
How do humans interface to images in a nonverbal way? Let us thus search for visual
knowledge not by metadating images, but within the visual endodata: entering the
image itself (data-immersion).
A critique of the notion of „metadata" draws on the assumption that there is
knowledge already within the digitised or born-digital image, a kind of knowledge
which can be grasped below verbal description. Let the image be informative itself -
by means of operating with values that are already intrinsic to the image in a digital
culture when the essence of the image itself dissolves into alphanumerical data.
Algorithms can find, for instance, all edges in a bit-mapped image. What looks like
images, in media-active perception, is rather a function of mathematical data sets.
archives in liquid times
2 In French conter instead of raconter, in German zdhlen instead of
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