The readings from this week made me realize two very different paths that seems to be happening with the use and conception of archive and media storage nowadays. As the text “Arks of Apocalypse” explains, we are living in the Anthropocene epoch, meaning that we know we are destroying our ecosystems so we are trying to save everything we can, creating the many repositories places around the world (repositories of seeds, animals, ice) in the last years. On the other hand, the internet and the digital media have been changing the idea of the archive. The archival media memory is, as Wolfgang Ernst reveals, intrinsically related to a time-based organization instead of a spatial one, becoming what he calls “de-monumentalized”.
It seems that these repositories places are the current stronger example of archive in the “traditional” sense, meaning a process of choosing what to preserve (and what not to) with a place to carefully storage everything, in which access is not easy (physically and bureaucratically), and in which there is a very linear and written-based order to organize, whereas the internet and the digital media is more like an anarchive, with no specific place and in which discontinuity and ephemerality are part of. The first one gives us a feeling of stability that can save all we need (in an unstable world) while the second is a “constant dynamic flow of information” in which we have to deal with absence (p. 110).
I wonder why these two almost opposite processes are happening at the same time and how can one give the other any “release” of their own processes.
Thanks, Cristina! I love the distinctions you draw between the secure, linear, regimented repository of geo- and bio-media, and the digital anarchive. It’s fascinating to think about how these disparate storage infrastructures — with different motivations and ideologies underlying them — are expanding at the same time.