Revolutionary Conceptions

Encountering Zielinski describing the conception of a ‘classic archive’ as, “the externalization of historical consciousness,
thereby documenting a consciousness fundamentally tied to power”, I immediately saw the contrast in Breakell’s conception of the ‘modern’ archive as ‘democratized’. The image of ‘dusty basements’, dismissively so, paints how the general public is often told to visualize ‘classic’ archives. Additionally, our modern understanding that “history is written by the winners” provides us an excuse to keep the basements dusty, coloring any archival work as inherently incomplete, or one-sided. Breakell points out that archivists have been labeled ‘voyeuristic’; shuffling between dusty boxes (the “monotonous gray”, as Mattern points out, appears to us as an “anti-aesthetic”) in darkened underground spaces, this was the image the came to mind from the advent of archiving until the dawn of modern computing.

In a short period of time, the conception of ‘archive’ was completely and radically changed. Breakell herself points out that “archive” had not been used as a verb until the PC-era, and was quick to share her hope that “the original meaning not to be lost in the new”. The new conception of ‘archiving’ seemed a far more active and relatable task: Mattern points out that “a rather small proportion of the population at large has been in an archive”, but nearly everyone has had the experience of archiving data via computer systems. The digital universe seems at once more tangible and omnipresent than the arcane world of the subterranean stacks. The ‘cyberspace’ aesthetic of instantaneous retrieval, and endless digital storage has quickly re-contextualized how we conceive of archives and archiving. Mattern identifies the experience of students physically visiting an archive, “how much of it lives only in material form, and will likely not be digitized any time soon.” If history is written by the victors, does that mean the dusty basements will fall by the wayside to visions of LED-lit server rooms?