project.arnolfini

Notes on Archives

There seems to be a current obsession to archive. The archive stands as a means to accumulate, store and recover historical knowledge but also runs the risk of more negative tendencies in overly determining meaning (and even commodifying it). The important principle is that an archive stands not as a set of things or even a set of statements, but rather a set of relations. Foucault describes the archive in terms of the conditions of the possibility of its construction, thus changing it from a static collection of texts to a set of relations and institutions that enable statements to continue to exist. This begs the question of what social practices validate something as valuable enough to be archived? To take this even further, the archive is a repository of potential speech (Agamben). Like free speech, emergent archival activity is somewhat demonstrated in the socio-technical dynamics of mailing lists, blogs, wikis, content management systems, and so on - all that seem to have their basis in the idea of the archive (or database). Furthermore, the internet indeed archives itself (archive.org and waybackmachine.org).

It is important to make a distinction here from a library or collection in that an archive constitutes a repository or ordered system from which history is written, and meanings produced. There is a well established artistic practice in questioning this: in challenging some of the founding principles that establish the validity of the archive as knowledge - investigating 'counter-memory' and alternative knowledge. For instance, The Atlas Group (recently shown at Arnolfini) take a 'counter-archival' approach to challenge the truth claims of the archive and imagine the possibilities of alternative forms.

In many official archives, assets are collated and only made available through limited access. Alternatives to this take their cue from free and open source software and/or the readymade. One of the working principles here is that archives are built on multiple authorship and ambiguities over ownership - therefore issues of intellectual property become fundamental. For instance, the BBC's creative archive is based on the principle of open content that reflects the inherent structures of distributed networks. The archive, like the database, is increasingly taken to be a cultural paradigm - where objects are brought together in no particular order in contrast to traditional narrative structures (Manovich refers to database movies in this way). Meanings are to be constructed through a negotiation with the archive in this way. Arguably, the challenge for constructing an archive is to construct one that remains active in the way that meanings are able to continually produced.

Part of this may be to engage practices that derive from network cultures that utilise relational processes that challenge existing hierarchical structures and the social relations that derive from these (peer production that leads to peer property). These networks tend to be horizontal, collaborative and distributed in character but to operate tactically, also are required to engage vertical modes of interaction (like the technical and social architecture of networks themselves). This is the working principle for the archive - one that engages both vertical and horizontal axes and that offers participatory potential but also systematic orgnisational structures (for instance, an archive that both uses standard classification and user-generated systems).

The archive is taken to be an active site of production and one where contradictions of access, participation, distribution and control are apparent.