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.
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Figure 4. Still from Erica Scourti, Dark Archives (2015)
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