annet dekker capturing online cultures and storytelling as a method in someone's photo collection. For example, people often take several photos of the same moment or object; Assistant traces all these instances, and collates them in an animation. It also can detect images that overlap and when possible stich them together to create panoramas. Of course, nowhere it is explained what is done to detect and browse the images, and none of the other things the programme may have done are made explicit either. The collection is then parsed by auto-editing, classification and tagging software, resulting in many automatically generated videos, collages and animations. Interestingly, Dark Archives draws not only on the Scourti's individual collection but implicitly also on the millions of other user media in which her images and videos are tagged or linked. In general the term 'Dark Archive' is used to indicate a repository for information that can be accessed as a failsafe during disaster recovery - it is a copy of an archive but one that consists only of metadata and is not for public use. However Scourti, is particularly interested in another type of Dark Archive, the information in an archive that cannot be seen. For example, Amazon could be seen as a very 'light' archive. Their business model is based on retrievability, which means that everything can be found and is accounted for. Amazon has to battle against the forces of darkness, which threaten to make things in the archive un-findable. This could be spam or things that have very similar titles; such duplications are rapidly increasing with algorithmically produced content. Thus, there is a need to keep things retrievable otherwise the content of the archive can fall into darkness: items are available but one cannot find - or sell - them anymore. Scourti is particularly interested in how visibility and invisibility - or darkness - relate to archiving and archives. After producing the automatically generated videos her final step was to involve elements of staging, scripting and fictionalizing. She invited a group of writers to speculate on and caption what they imagined to be the missing set of media that somehow evaded classification within the archive; the false negatives, the misclassifications, the media that fell outside of Google's definition for that search term. By asking the writers to imagine the way an algorithm works, she was trying to get at the core of what perhaps a non-human way of thinking or logic could be. These captions were used to create a new series of videos to feed into the work that visitors can access on their smartphones. This relates to identity and memory and Scourti's interest in what and how others can see things she doesn't, "and how the technologies that we are entangled with are recording and archiving our lives".38 On the one hand, it refers to notions of how identity and memory are constructed, as well as to how knowledge is inscribed in different ways. In other words, "these online platforms offer us new ways of constructing ourselves, [and] they are equally reworking the ways in which it is possible to do so".39 Besides challenging notions of data collecting, shared authorship and individual memory, using her own life and documents as an example, Scourti explored the (im)possibilities of online archiving and how this relates to the way identities are constructed, while questioning the optimalisation of online production and distribution. The project demonstrated how the significance and meaning of identity and memory derive from technical infrastructure and production. It also showed that an online archive is never stable - especially when using automated editing systems or certain platforms. The archive and the potentially limitless constellations within it are now expanded by contextual framings that provide additional unfinished or semi-fictional qualities. The project clearly brings out the challenges preservation is facing. Rather than worrying about missing information and dark holes, such 'loss' may generate a productive quality that focuses on retelling, which, in the process, might also do more justice to the artwork. To be continued It is clear that preservation is no longer merely an act associated with the power of institutions and authority, as is evident from the shift to artists, audience members and all kinds of technologies that are actively archiving online culture. This new situation necessitates taking seriously the tension between using complex emulation, virtualization or interactive documentation methods and the time and labour required to generate or capture 'original' cultural data. As well as accepting that online culture is no longer object-based, and therefore cannot be preserved as conventional objects, it should also be treated as a network of (inter)connected links and dependencies that are prone to constant change with each archival method that is used. To understand the provenance and context of such an unstable enviroment means considering online culture as the way through which to preserve it. This requires other forms of knowledge, methods and practices, and, I argue, storytelling as method could facilitate a linking of disparate elements while inciting new hoofdstuk 3 38 Dekker, 'Archiving Our (Dark) Lives'. 39 Jon K. Shaw, Theo Reeves-Evison, 'Introduction', in: Jon K. Shaw, Theo Reeves-Evison eds. Fiction as a Method (Berlin: Sternbert Press, 2017) pp 5-72; p. 43. 152 These are old fashions and fabrics, second hand clothes which have lost their juster. No longer catwalk-worthy, they wither in my closet. 2013-05-19 01.23.36.jpg BMP 3264 2448 705.7 KB iPhone 5 f/2.4 1/20 4.13mm ISO100 Lee Valley VèloPark n pf" X ■een Elizabeth Olympic Park Figure 4. Still from Erica Scourti, Dark Archives (2015) 153

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2018 | | pagina 77