Vampires and Archives

The following text has been composed from the e-mail conversations between the two moderators of the "Anarchives" conference, Anne Nigten and Michael Punt.

Michael:
Perhaps the first thing to say is that there is nothing about the concept of archive that insists that there is public access, despite the fact that as a location it is the place where public records and historical documents are kept. The archive, like a court of law, does its job independently of intimate public participation. Secondly, in spite of its image as an unworldly apolitical bastion of objective history, the archive (in the modern sense of the word) stems from precisely the time when the cult of fact was superseding other ways of knowing the truth. Regardless of its content, the modern archive (that is, post seventeenth century and pre-Postmodern) may contain evidence of the subjective and the historical, but it is at pains to eradicate the contamination of subjectivity and history from its methods. Such contradictions insist, at the start, that the archive, for all its apparent timeless stability, is a site of complex contradiction and a site of political activity. Restricting public access to those who subscribed to empiricism and what has been called 'boundary maintenance' ensured that these contradictions were stabilized.

The premise of this conference (as I understand it) is that wider public access, facilitated in part by certain technologies and in part by social revisionism, has placed the archive (as a concept) under strain in such a way that its disciplining function is either exposed or eliminated. Certainty, whose supremacy is evaporating in history as much as it is in cosmology or television, needs a worthy usurper that will reinforce the values that underlie the cult of fact. Into this moment of instability a number of artists and scientists have seen new opportunities to reclaim the real by building alternatives. It remains to be seen how long the space is available for us to act and what scope there is for real intervention. Nonetheless in the secessionist spirit I ask the question intended to foreground the issues of subjectivity and history: Can you have a beautiful archive?

Anne:
Do you mean storage wise or in terms of retrieval? It is an interesting thought in the digital age - it somehow seems to refer to the physical presence of let's say a library - objects and the atmosphere attached to them, multiple sensory input like the smell and feel one can experience in 'special' collections or personal archives. Software code and d-base ontologies sometimes possess this beauty and 'personal signature' as well. It also refers to the importance of graphical user interface design, which is an important field artists have been working in. In my talks to Ben Schouten he also refers to a certain aspect of beauty in visualization and design technology.

Michael:
I mean in the sense that the post-historical archive lacks the nostalgic sentimentality of the socially authenticated document and replaces it with evidence of the movement of history back and forth.

Anne:
Do you refer to history in general or to the history of objects, traces of usage, social or cultural history?

Michael:
I mean the use of history as a means of explaining the present, which for many people presents insurmountable contradictions. The authentication of data and the cult of fact is a relatively modern invention. We should not lose sight of the prior models of truth that the challenge of post-history recuperates.

Anne:
Yes, here we go! Although I always have my doubts about the term 'truth' as such.

Michael:
I mean truth in the sense of the competition between realities in which a reality informed by reason is claimed as the only admissible reality. We should not forget the popular resistance to reason in the past, or overlook it in the present. The crisis in the new archive in which public (and artistic) access and participation is irresistible is that the contrast between the decaying system (of civilizations) and the complete and generative archive is exposed.

Anne:
Yes, this also hooks up with the autopoietic system. After I studied the work/papers/writings of Thecla Schiphorst and Margarete Jahrmann in more detail I think it is interesting to keep in mind - while investigating the other works - for discussion and conversation/interview purposes:

• Thecla Schiphorst refers to Varela. In her work this may be interpreted as 'open' systems emerging/growing or organizing themselves through user interaction and social interaction.
• Margarete Jahrmann refers to Luhman's social system theory (Very briefly: he takes the communication domain as the term of condition for the autopoietic system derived from Maturana/Varela. From this theory one could conclude that the operational characteristics of his system theory are independent of its specific users/participants, since Luhman filtered out humans from his model.)

I would like to know how this relates to the self learning systems used by Ben Schouten and by Arnold Smeulders (refering to M. Minsky's society of minds). Distributed knowledge and distributed consciousness relate to this as well.

Michael:
I think that the introduction of debates about consciousness is essential. The electronic archive now reinstates these debates as it presents a challenge to the hierarchy of evidence, i.e. bookish literacy and mathematical data, which insist on certain interpretations versus the image, which thrives on an indifference to reasonable truth. In her brilliant book on visual analogy Barbara Maria Stafford points out that "Through sheer skill, craft, or technical trickery, poet and painter were able to imaginatively simulate mythical, historical, or religious scenes they had never in fact beheld. Conjuring and artistry were thus one."

This moral promiscuity invests the image with an extraordinary power in networked communications since its meanings are relatively non-hierarchical and immediate. Moreover the completeness of the image in contrast to the historical moment's decay raises new issues about the status of the image as archaeological and archival evidence.

Anne:
Yes, the image-less art (the art without fixed or attached image). This makes sense of constructions of images based on data retrieval and interpretation, where an image or a series of images is continuously being constructed.

I am fascinated by concepts of generating archives, not reflecting existing files, images or data to be preserved but to look upon archives as living organisms. This not only reflects other visions on archival concepts but also includes pointers to our contemporary life and approaches of art based on parameters, or 'intelligent' software code.

Michael:
As a complete catalogue of an incomplete past the archive becomes an archaeological trace of a fractured unconscious which finds expression in technologies that disavow the immaterial as they open access routes to it. In this way the archive can become a site of therapeutic retrieval regardless of its evidential base. In this case how (and with what technology) it is catalogued is as significant as what is catalogued.

I think that what we have to be aware of is the powerful inertia of the archive as an instrument and if we want to make interventions we have to be vigilant. For example we should be constantly asking to what extent our interventions in what we may begin to understand as the post-historical, post mechanical, archive merely recycle the aesthetics of High Romanticism and the mythologies of the cult of fact? I suppose to answer my initial question, a beautiful archive is now possible for the first time but if we achieved it then we should be suspicious.

Anne:
This reminds me of something I ran into at your webpages http://www.stem-arts.com/postdigital/ page1.htm

I found a picture with the following text: 'the imagination is prompted by human desire to modify the world through technology which in turn prompts desire'

I guess we're much further now. We are getting techno-morphed, in A.I. and robotics theory there doesn't really exist a single 'self' anymore. Most of the developments of the past few decades are heading in the direction of distributed knowledge. A while ago V2_ published a book called Technomorphica, which deals with technomorphization, the reorganization of the organic based on the intelligent machine model. It poses the question if evolution has entered a technological-scientific phase where humans no longer develop themselves in natural processes, but where the human body adapts itself to the parameters of this technological era. The same subject is reflected in the work of the artists and scientists involved, striving toward technological perfection. Artificial intelligence as referred to by M. Minsky in Machinery of Consciousness for several artists is a reason to come up with other scenarios to mis-use or abuse technology, to establish other cultural experiences or raise awareness among a broader (networked) audience and this is often done by means of connection machines.

Michael:
However, I would say that in your last comments it is precisely where I think we need to re-think terms such as mis-use and abuse since they suggest a legitimate use for technology that is in some way inherent in the apparatus. Its a position I find difficult to sustain since, as I argued in Accidental Machines, much technology - especially computers - was not 'invented' with an end use in mind. Rather, a particular meaning became validated by a forceful colonization by the very community that had the most to lose from alternative interpretations. What we now see with artists, hackers and gamers is the trace of those other meanings, which are simultaneously exploited and denigrated by the 'legitimate' users. In the same way, if we regard the archive as one of the technologies of history we return to the opening statement and the archive's vampiric relation to history as concept feeding off its own species while at the same time claiming to occupy a territory regarded as aloof. Of course we are talking generically here and not about any particular archive, and that has to be stressed, because what is at stake is the meaning of the past as mutable negotiable consensus between equal partners, not an absolute imposed by a series of institutional gateways whose invisibility is an illusion in which we all conspire.

Note:

This conversation could have been carried on for a while. The above text is a reflection of some parts of our discussion. Publishing this text in the conference reader should not be interpreted as a total coverage of the theme. Nevertheless, since we are talking about archives it seemed relevant to open up our conversation archive created around the theme of this conference. We prefer to deepen some of the issues discussed during the conference Anarchives: connection-machines July 5th 2002 with the participants and the audience.