Book part: Between Light and Dark Archiving
Abstract
Some people argue that the digital archive is an oxymoron (Laermans and Gielen 2007) or more akin to an anarchive (Ernst 2015, Zielinski 2014). Derrida used the word anarchive to signal that “what remains unvan-quished remains associated with the anarchi.” Ernst relates it to the digi-tal archive and describes the anarchive as something that cannot be or-dered or catalogued because it is constantly re-used, circulated, and ex-panding, and thus only a metaphorical archive. Similarly, Foster describes how the anarchival is about obscure traces rather than absolute origins, emphasising the incomplete, which may offer openings to new interpreta-tion, or ‘points of departure’ as mentioned by Foster (2004). These vari-ous descriptions imply that digital archives, and in particular Web-based archives, function less as a storage space and more as a recycling centre in which the material (the archival document, if one can still use this term) is dynamic. In other words, the default state of the digital archive is re-use instead of storage, circulation rather than centrally organised memory, constant change versus stasis. How to capture and retrieve all this data, information and documentation, but more importantly, in what way does archiving take place on the Web? In what follows I examine projects by artists who in various ways explore the challenges of online archiving. These examples show how information and data is captured and archived on the Web. In particular, how it becomes a networked environment, or performance space characterised by the transition from objects to pro-cesses. This new situation, I argue, means moving between dark and light archiving, and it’s the place where a new method of networked co-archivingemerges.
Preferred Citation
BibTex
Dekker, Annet: Between Light and Dark Archiving. In: Grau, Oliver;Hoth, Janina;Wandl-Vogt, Eveline: Digital Art through the Looking Glass. New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in digital humanities. Krems a.d. Donau: Edition Donau-Universität 2019, S. 133-144. DOI: 10.25969/mediarep/13348.
@INCOLLECTION{Dekker2019,
author = {Dekker, Annet},
title = {Between Light and Dark Archiving},
year = 2019,
doi = {10.25969/mediarep/13348},
editor = {Grau, Oliver and Hoth, Janina and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline},
address = {Krems a.d. Donau},
booktitle = {Digital Art through the Looking Glass. New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in digital humanities},
pages = {133--144},
publisher = {Edition Donau-Universität},
}
author = {Dekker, Annet},
title = {Between Light and Dark Archiving},
year = 2019,
doi = {10.25969/mediarep/13348},
editor = {Grau, Oliver and Hoth, Janina and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline},
address = {Krems a.d. Donau},
booktitle = {Digital Art through the Looking Glass. New strategies for archiving, collecting and preserving in digital humanities},
pages = {133--144},
publisher = {Edition Donau-Universität},
}
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