Archives of temporality
Audiovisual media address humans at the existential essence of our sensation of
being. They regenerate temporal experience, thus addressing the human on the
sensory (aesthetical, physiological) level as radically present, while our cognition
puts it into a "historical" context: here a dissonance takes place, a gap opens.
Furthermore, let us accentuate a clear separation between "audio" and "visual".
The one is physical vibration, mechanical impulse, the other refers to the
electromagnetic spectrum, a sense organ for "radio" in terms of radiation; ears and
eyes are completely different data processors.
The traditional archival regime refers to the symbolic order which is mainly
alphabet-based; the audiovisual archive in the age of analogue media technologies to
the actual recording of physical signals. The proof lies in the fact that even noise can
be registered as audio, to be used for example in radio plays. But even this memory of
noise is subjected to the archival regime: there are catalogues and inventories of
noise in sound studios and in the archives of broadcasting stations, where a world of
noise is ordered according to its alphabetic denomination - subjected to the logo-
centristic writing once more.
A new message of New Media: the temporalised archive
Inspired by artistic practice in modernism, media-theoretical analysis in the
McLuhan tradition focuses on the message of the medium itself. Applied to memory
agencies and especially the "digital archive", this method demands not only a close
analysis of its different technology but a new interpretation of its different
epistemological and aesthetical dimension as well. While the traditional archival
format (spatial order, classification) will in many ways necessarily persist, the new
archive is radically temporalised, ephemeral, multisensual, corresponding with a
dynamic user culture which is less concerned with records for eternity but with
order by fluctuation. New kinds of search engines will not only answer the needs of
variable media arts but will develop into a new "art of the archive" itself.
In terms of computer science and communication, the algorithmisation of archival
data results in the streaming archive which can be almost immediately accessed
online. A problem arises: how can the concept of the archive be opened to
"heterochronic" experimentation and at the same time fulfil its traditional task of
keeping a well-defined order intact for transmission into future memory? In classic
archival terminology, the archival task and the notion of reconfigurability have an
oxymoronic relation. For sure, what is new in the so-called digital age, is the
"permanent temporality" not only of the archival records but of its archival
infrastructure themselves (called hardware and software). So, the traditional "time
base" of archive itself becomes a function of temporal change, requiring a
differential analysis (in mathematical terms).
Different from the traditional script-based institutional archive, the multimedia
archive (as organised by the Internet) becomes radically temporalised. It is rather
hypertemporal than hyperspatial, being based on the aesthetic of immediate
feedback, recycling and refresh rather than on the ideal of locked away storage for
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wolfgang ernst order by fluctuation? classical archives and their
audiovisual counterparts
eternity. The aesthetics of recycling, sampling and cultural jamming is a direct
function of the opening, the openness and the online availability of multimedia
archives.
Two cultures of memory co-exist in our present age: there is still the symbolical,
letter-based regime of the archive and the library which have been defining the
cultural order for such a long time; then a different regime has emerged,
electrotechnical media able to record and to memorise physiologically "real"
gestures, sounds, movements, images, on the sensual and signal processing level. In
Samuel Beckett's one-act drama Krapp's Last Tape (1959), immediate recording of
the voice of the protagonist has replaced the traditional written diary. On Krapp's
desktop, a written "archival" inventory and the magnetic tapes co-exist, which
cannot be deciphered directly by human senses but require a true archaeologist of
media memory, the magnetophone itself. Whereas the alphabetic code (the archival
symbolic) depends on being processed by humans in the act of reading, audiovisual
records can only be "deciphered" by media machines such as the phonograph, the
gramophone, the magnetic tape recorder, the video recorder, computing.
The main task of the traditional archive so far has been to keep legally valid
documents intact for proof and re-use. Once the archive is being searched for
different purposes, mainly by historians, this leads to a misreading of its
administrative nature. The aesthetics of the archive is radically non-narrative.
Transforming such records into a historiographical narrative is an act of misreading
the (in)formation of the archive in an effort to humanise it. When the French
historian Jules Michelet visited the parliament archives in Paris to write about the
recent past of the French revolution, he almost believed he could hear the obstinate
murmur of documents, the voices of the dead - as if recorded on gramophone, so to
speak. Romantic historical imagination, in many ways, prefigured the technological
media of later epochs, in between archival phantasms and auditory hallucinations.
By vocalising silent archival records in his reading performances (his Memory Arena
series) the media artist Arnold Dreyblatt imbues memory with a diversity of voices.
The "speaking" archive is a hallucinogenic form of memory, resulting from the
cultural-poetic (or rather prosopo-poietic) phantasms of trying to "speak with the
past", as confessed in the introduction of Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean
Negotiations which became a pamphlet for the method of "new historicism" in
literary studies: "It all began with the desire to speak with the dead" (Greenblatt,
1988, p.1).
The difference between library and archive
Cultural administration uses the term "ALM sector", signifying the trinity of
archives, libraries and museums. But the difference between library and archive is
decisive - a difference which is grounded in its media of support and of logistics. Any
public "Mediathèque" is rather a library than an archive. Collections of radio and
TV broadcast programs rather correspond to what is called a "publication", rather in
correlation with the library than with the archive of records hidden from the public
(which exists on the hidden level, the techno-mathematical regime of the "symbolic
machine" called digital computer).
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archives in liquid times
