Motion and immobilisation: the audiovisual archive Whereas the scripture-based classical archive is a static array of records on the grand scale and letters on the microscale, which could be brought in motion only by the act of human reading line by line, the Edison phonograph is the first form of a truly "performative" archive in motion, since its recording (notably the early ethnographic field recordings around 1900, leading to the Vienna Phonograph Archive and the Berlin Phonogramm Archive) is based on a rotating, technically moving apparatus both in recording and in replay (parallel to early cinematographical recording and projection). In a very simple thought experiment, imagine an early phonographic recording. Whatever the song or speech that will be, parallel to the harmonic timbre of this sound one will for sure acoustically hallucinate the scratching, the aperiodic noise of the recording apparatus, as well. True media-archaeological awareness starts here: the exercise is to be aware that at each given moment media culture is dealing with the past. It is a technological memory. The noise, the scratch of the wax cylinder is the pure message of the medium; in between, the human voice is literally incorporated. Such a recording primarily memorises the noise of the wax cylinder itself - which is not cultural-historical, but cultural-technological, a different kind of information of the real. Media archaeology opens our ears to listen to this as well, not to filter it out. Thereby the phonograph as media artefact does not only carry cultural semantic like words and music, but - like any work of art - is at the same time an archive of cultural engineering as well, by its very material fabrication - a kind of frozen media knowledge, which media-archaeologically waits to be defrosted, liquefied. Moving Media archaeology: Technology as "archivist" (Phonovision) For media memory, archival dynamics replaces „archival space" (Michel de Certeau). The earliest known recording from a Television Transmission is the revue Looking In, performed by the Paramount Astoria Girls on the BBC Baird television system (30 lines) in April 1933, recorded by an enthusiastic amateur on his recording equipment (the Baird Phonovision system) on aluminium disc. Processed and restored by digital filtering, the key to clarity seems to be movement itself. Any reproduction of one of the 30-line television broadcast as stills in a printing medium (photography in the book), gives a wrong impression of what had been actually seen.6 Here the time-critical comes in, since printed records (be it texts, be it images) miss a crucial element: the time-base of perception. "A single frame of the Paramount Astoria Girls may be crudely recognisable, but when seen as a moving dynamic television image, the girls come to life before our eyes. it has much more to do with what we perceive than what is there in pixels, lines and frames. What we are experiencing is not the detail that the eye sees, but the recognition of movement that the brain sees. our brain somehow builds up a model of what we are looking at." (McLean, 2000, p. 211f) wolfgang ernst order by fluctuation? classical archives and their audiovisual counterparts As a physical item and as a technological monument, the Baird Phonovision recording disc is part of the classical archival techniques (subject to inventorisation) such as any other classical paper record. The difference is operative: as a document it comes only into being, i.e. it becomes "readable", recognisable when being processed and replayed by a technical medium (first the Phonovision electro-mechanical Baird equipment, now the digital restoring computer). Furthermore, it needs to be kept operative by an ongoing medium, which requires the archival artefact to be processed online.7 The chrono-archive Only with the arrival of chrono-photography (Muybridge, Marey) and with cinematography an impossible occidental dream came true: to catch the dynamic element in movement, the kinetic. Technical media (both for acoustic and visual movements) thus have created a new kind of archiv(e-)ability. It took generations of archivists and librarians to take account of this new option which for a long time did not fit into traditional archival and classificatory terminology, which has rather been fixed on static relations between objects (mostly verbal). The National Library of Australia has been among the institutions which have created a special task and collection of folk dance and artistic dance (both scriptural and pictorial, mostly videographical documentation).8 Australia had already been path-breaking in institutionalising a multimedia approach: The National Film and Sound Archive. In the meantime, Europe (where France has been at the front by establishing the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, and recently the Norwegian National Library in Oslo achieved a similar encompassing task of multimedia and multi-modal archivisation of national culture) follows Goethe's idea of a "virtual library": if it is not possible to physically assemble the audiovisual cultural heritage, there is at least the option of collecting its information. The Gateway to Archives of Media Art (GAMA) is primarily dedicated to ephemeral forms of art.9 This ephemerality relates both to the artistic form (performances) and the techno-electronical content, the so-called "variable media". This is the answer to an archival challenge: how can not only material traces and textual documents, but temporal expressions themselves (movements) be preserved for future historiographies? Dynamic reiteration of access needs a flexible tool which allows for the coexistence of different orders without destroying the structure of the database. Not only the target, but also the mediality of the archive has been extended. The answer lies in discovering, reflecting and techno-mathematically realising new options of flexible access. The most immediate medium for this to take place is the electronic form of an open source software as content management system which includes search functions which are not limited to logocentristic addressing any more. archives in liquid times 6 See the Restored Video Recordings 1927-193 5, online http://www.tvdawn.com/recordng.htm 172 7 See http://www.tvdawn.com/silvaton 8 On the National Library of Australia's Collection Development Policy see http://www.nla.gov.au/policy/cdp 9 See http://www.gama-gateway.eu 173

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 88