testing testing 1-2-3…

In the Professor’s interview, she touches on the unique offerings the medium (or mode) of sound can have in an archival context. She mentions the “medium, material, and volumetric properties of both the recorded sounding subject or object and the space in which that recording occurred”. It is certainly true that analog sound recordings carry a type of metadata about the state of the space, and the world, at the time of recording. Reading the Gammon article, it seems as though the widespread degradation of analog (magnetic) media constitutes a loss of our collective memory of the acoustics (and spacial properties) of all the places at which important sounds have been captured. Even in the digital recording era, there still exists an important relationship between space and sound, although the impacts on audio fidelity seem reduced.

 I just had a relevant experience this past weekend with friends who sat around a studio and mastered an album through digital-analog transfer, and back. In the world of music, the degradative properties of analog mediums are often sought out for use as a post-production filter to bring aesthetic merit to sets of digitally edited and recorded songs. The descriptions of the “improvements” heard when running digital songs through tape, and back again, is often described in terms of increased “dimensionality”. This makes me wonder whether culturally we deeply associate analog grit (the behavior of tape) with the acoustic properties of rooms used for recording at the height of the analog age in popular music (the old recording studio room setups – lots of echoes and phase cancellation, textures of wood, things which many engineers consider a no-no, but which also define the sounds of classic records we all love)…

Processing Post

The sound collections in the listenings are impressive and refreshing to me simply because of the different sensory information other than a visual or written encyclopedia. Acoustic productions like podcasts gained in popularity over the past several years. My mom tends to go to sleep with a book podcast in stressful days. ASMR seems to have become a subculture. The listenings just reminded me of the magnetic tapes I had in my first and second grade, which allowed me to enjoy storytelling before reading more text.

Screens and sound cater to the head, and what about the body? I think the artists immersed in the now are inclined to create an atmosphere with more than visual and acoustic effects. With 3D-printing and more technologies, touch would be increasingly represented. However, our storage may not be enough to record a period of time after new physical information becomes archivable.

Speaking of media archaeology, what excites me is that it is cyberpunk (or silkpunk if the early time is focused on). Intellectual property can date back to at least four centuries ago. It seems that human imagination has evolved slower than I expected.

Theory, emulation, classification…

The over-theorization of archives confuses me more as my study of it deepens. I enjoyed reading Rick Prelinger, because to me the best way to understand things is to ground them, and he did just that for me. What are archives? Who is an archivist? Should and/or archives participatory? Archives as an institution and a political actor… I mean it goes on and on and on! This is why I now have more questions than answers and with no clear way in which I will start to unravel all my confusion because the archive is a complex organism that interacts with many actors and contains many roads.

Maybe my questions arise from a naive place, yet the separation of scholars from the archives and the separation of the archives from media archeology as reflected in “Media Archeology of Poetry and Sound”, demonstrate a constant in the field, which is the non recognition of the archive and therefore all that it comprises, hence in a way alienating it from intellectual processes and research. Moreover, I am conflicted with the dichotomy between the “bureaucratic, inflexible” traditional archive and the participatory archive being considered in contemporary culture. On one hand, I believe that the archive should be more adaptable to the changes that time imposes, yet on the other the idea of newcomers dancing within the archive realm makes me very uncomfortable.

The Paradox of Preserving a Performance

I have friends who work in the performance world, one is a dancer at the New York City Ballet and another is a program director at BAC (Baryshnikov Arts Center). The three of us have talked, a few times, about preserving performances and we wish we could, but they aren’t mean to be preserved.

While completing this week’s readings, I kept going back to that conversation and thinking about how the preservation of the sound/performance can alter it…thereby creating another layer of experience that wasn’t present when it was viewed by an audience. What archive the performance/sound is a part of can create and embedded meaning, how it was catalogued, who presented it, etc.

The multi-sensory archive can offer more context to the experience of the archival object, but it can’t ever fully preserve the context/time/space of the object. Do we accept those imperfections, try to improve them (as people are doing), or should we let these pieces die as perhaps they were meant to? Zen for Film was a perfect paradoxical example of this. Given the principles of Zen to be in the moment and let each moment flow and die as we move to the next.

Angry Librarian

“The immense backlogs of physical film seem to defy efforts to process them. Could we bring nonprofessionals into the archives to work with materials, annotate, repair, conserve, prepare for copying and scanning?” – Rick Prelinger, “Workshops, Workflows & Wooden Trains,” Keynote at Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Pre-Conference, Oakland, CA, 2015

In an effort to house the full contents of The Archive at a quaint and genteel historical society, the powers that be have decided to expand the archival structure. Great! But, now what? There is no existing catalog; there is no increase in labor; and there is no foundation in place for The Archive to be accessed any more by a public audience in the larger structure than in its current home. So what can we do?

The notion of control over The Archive is prevalent in Prelinger’s presentation as is his theory that not only should outward viewing of the archive be given to the people, but so should the back-end structure. In the same way that Christine Mitchell describes being blocked from access to digitized media in Concordia’s archive because the machines used to digitize must be preserved and protected from overuse (Amodern, 2004), protecting the contents of The Archive from being misused by blocking access to the back-end structure is shortsighted and counterintuitive to the purpose of the archive. If it’s preserved and no one knows it’s there, then what’s the point of preservation?

Image Atlas

I found John Tagg’s piece on photography and filing cabinets to be a really great nudge to rethink the history of photography — particularly how it was instrumental (but perhaps also itself instrumentalized) for the “archiving apparatus” (Tagg 33) which must now include platforms such as Google, etc. Photography’s role in the production of certain knowledges — especially that of ethnographic discourse further facilitated by the networks of colonial empires — is certainly within Tagg’s discussion; there are countless other scholars who write about this, or the association between photography (as light-writing) and that of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on illumination, transparency, and the light of reason. But what I really found helpful in Tagg’s piece is the unhinging of photography’s centrality, and to situate photography within a broader apparatus which included the technology of filing systems.

Under the long shadows of the archiving apparatus, and reflecting on search engines today coming up with more and more powerful reverse-image searches, I wonder if photography is increasingly pressed to the service of the archive. *Side-note: I love the Image Atlas project by Taryn Simon and the late Aaron Schwarz, which politicizes search engines and their geographical biases when it comes to image search results.

Though digressing a little from the class’s focus on archives/archiving, but keeping the line of inquiry on photography, and for those who might be interested in rethinking the definition/history/origin of photography, Joanna Zylinska has a wonderful lecture “Photography After Extinction”. It links photography and geology together, and as such forms also an interesting link back to the 1977 Original Sun Pictures exhibition mentioned in Anna-Sophie Springer’s article.  

 

Photography

What struck me throughout several of the readings this week was not just the dilemma and ongoing discussion of how to theoretically classify photography itself to be and where it should go, but how the choice of language becomes paramount in this labeling process in dictating their context longterm.

Vestberg called it the third typical problem, the ‘for whom’  access to a photograph is intended for.  That this decision dictates the kind of engagement to a photograph seems most apparent in the examples of how access through digitization has become reliant on word-searches to turn up information. Which makes the question of how the language and semantics are applied to bring up these searches seem much more political to me.

There was a tangram game that I played growing up where one person had to convey to another person through language the pictorial layout of a tangram composited geometric house or penguin, etc. that they had in front of them . We’d give relational descriptions that the pieces had to one another for them to recreate the exact image. Both people were looking at the exact same scaled, colored and shaped pieces but figuring out how to communicate how these things were arranged in relationship to one another on a flat plane, was incredibly challenging.

That the task of translating what a photographic image is in terms of scale (in multiple ways), color, complicated content is then dealing with an understanding of so many more variables, though single searchable words seems obvious.  I am curious about the hierarchical structures that the people labeling photographs then see as more important, per their audience.

Vestberg uses this quote, by Wilder ‘by stripping away some of the “photographic” traits of the photographs (author, type, origin, date)’ in favour of information pertaining to the objects they depict, photographic archives have relied precisely on the same illusion of a transparent medium, the technicalities of which are (presumed to be) irrelevant to the users of its products.’

It seems like Instagram plays with these exact same ideas to see how hashtags and labeling create more links or likes between users.  They’ve eliminated their automatic geotagging and now make it an optional choice for users, even if the image is taken nowhere near where they’ve tagged it. The connection between the words and the image is established though, creating a translation of understanding of a place to an image even if it has no physical basis.

This also reminds me of Hito Steyerl’s essay ‘In defense of the poor image, linked here:

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Archive, Knowledge, and Identity

This week’s readings brought us deeper into the archive by looking at it from another perspective of photo archives. I realized a few things about the organization of the archive that were evident before, but were really apparent in this week’s readings. John Tagg talks about how the photo archive is a “political apparatus” that is “inseparable from the rationalization of information the control of bodies, and the relegation of the photographic operator to ‘the status of a detail worker.’ There is a lot to unpack there, but overall it helps us realize the power of the archive and how its function and organization extend beyond just the organization of data and material objects and into the realm of societal norms and functions. Archives are systems of knowledge and we see both the importance and limits of the archive. As Nina Vestberg stated, the politics of truth fold into a politics of identity through the regulation of relationships both to time, truth, and memory and to the practices and technologies of record and recollection. Our archives reflect our own identity and how we think about the world.

Previously I hadn’t thought about how many different subjects the photographic archive touches and how important it is to access those photos for various disciplines (medical, artistic, etc.)

In my previous job as a copywriter in advertising I would write metadata for images to help people find our website. This was my own form of organizing a kind of photographic archive within the tripartite system that Vestberg talked about. We have the thing, then data about the thing, and finally the bits of information to help you search for the thing and determines your finding, therefore determining your exposure and knowledge.

In current terms, hashtaging on Instagram serves this same function. We are both functioning as the Warburg and Conway libraries do, we account for what a picture shows, but sometimes it is never the same as describing what it depicts.

A New World Order of Things

Libraries have always given me a sense of calm. As I enter, I’m met with hushed movements of patrons and the smell of printed paper. Whether I arrive with a clear intention of what I am taking home or not, I always take a stroll through the stacks, feeling the sense of moving through a maze of stilled information awaiting my curiosity.

Although it is difficult to impress upon generations of students the importance of searching for objects vis a vis the “the first order of order,” (Weinberger, 2007) perhaps the search for objects and relationships between them can be had by creating a digital stroll through an online world filled with first order objects. Instead of being met by a stringent set of indexing from a database interface that requires a specific word that will (fingers crossed) be tagged in the corresponding metadata, like Sir Martin’s explorations in the physical world the researcher could cull the digital landscape for hidden treasures: original letters; early photographs; clay tablets scene from 360* vantage point through VR.

Nina Vestburg is correct in analyzing the digital database and how it will be used. No longer will it be tied up behind hopeful clicks made like the roll of a die: moving forward we must ask of the database, as Vestburg has, “for whom it is intended: the same people, often specialists, who made use of the analogue archive, or a new and expanded audience, perhaps largely made up of amateurs?” (pp 481). I believe it is the latter. As a community we are continuously socialized to expect digital access to the information of the world through our Google and Wikipedia searches, so why not the contents of the library?

Collecting Photographs: The more our mediums change, the more our archival tendencies remain the same.

After taking a series of photos during an event or even throughout my vacation, I often feel overwhelmed and vexed thinking about how to organize and caption each photo. The initial excitement is still there — that feeling of “I’ve caught something unique and different that the world has yet to see through my lens,” both in the figurative and literal sense. However, developing a system in which to order, caption, tag, and file away these photos can become a daunting effort if you’ve taken hundreds of photos throughout the course of your travels.

With that said, I can only imagine how archivists at the New York Public Library must feel when combing through boxes and entire stacks of photos and other kinds of visual images in the attempt to make sense of how to properly organize the media for the public’s research uses. Paintings in a museum took time to create, but photographs are often created in a snap. As John Sarzowski, director of MoMA’s department of photography stated: “The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process — a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made… but photographs, as the man on the street puts it, were taken” (Crimp).

It doesn’t really matter whether an artist chooses a blank canvas or a camera. The photograph is just another medium, a conduit to convey the theoretical aspects of an artist’s subjectivity. I can only imagine the series of archival planning involved in curating these photographs and creating entirely new collections out of previous ones by consolidating them into sections such as “Art, Prints, and Photographs.”

The reclassification process, according to Crimp, is based on each photograph’s “newly acquired value, the value that is now attached to the ‘artists’ who made the photographs.” In a way, it’s like organizing paintings by subject (19th Century Art), topic/technique (Impressionism), and then by the artist (Monet, Manet, etc.). I personally don’t find it to be that revolutionary to designate a librarian with the new job of reorganizing and curating entirely new photo collections by “artist.” Who else is going to sift through these materials and help us make sense of it? However, what I do find noteworthy in the endeavors to do so is the subject matters that each photographic material captures — images that document particular events and which otherwise cannot be reproduced instantaneously by painting them.

As a graduate student looking back on the history of archiving and retrieving photographs, I thought that John Tagg’s articleThe Archiving Machine; or, the Camera and the Filing Cabinet, was a little amusing. “[T]he photograph’s mechanism of capture could not operate so irresistibly if not embedded in the entirely nonmimetic machinery of the catalogue and the file.”

Although Tagg is referring to a file cabinet in that quote, I also can’t help but think of the way in which I plug in my camera into my computer to upload the newly captured images. My MacBook Air still detects a certain ordering system in my Nikon DSLR camera’s memory card. Like the file cabinet, I have a medium with which I have “the possibility of storing and cross-referencing bits of information and collating them through the particular grid of a system of knowledge.”

Paintings are to photographs and JPG screenshots, as filing cabinets are to memory cards and Instagram pages, as index cards are to meta tags and hashtags. Of course, the methods of archiving are going to differ based on the type of medium (e.g. the paper that photo was printed on if printed, the type of camera used to capture the images). The mediums of art and documentation may have changed over the last century, but the overarching concepts of retrieving, ordering, and storing these visual media in specific epistemological receptacles remain the same.

Photography : Elusive Materiality

SHUTTERSTOCK

Photography is one of the mediums that I rarely connect to problematic situations. Whether it be interpretation, classification and in this case even less archival work. This is possibly explained by the assumption that photographs are so straight forward that what needs to be understood beyond their own existence? Unlike books, manuscripts, even paintings and other mediums photographs are considered a stolen moment encapsulated in a photograph to document.

I became aware of this dismissiveness while reading Elizabeth Edwards’ Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive. She states “An archive—of photographs—something separate from the dynamic of a discipline, something to be mined when useful, ignored at whim; a mere passive resource, tangential to the main business, a mere supporting role whose significance is defined not through its own identity but through asymmetrical relations with other objects which it serves to confirm in some way or other.”

A perfect example of this is the outstanding work Julia van Haaften did for the NYPL’s photograph collection, which had been neglected and forgotten until her personal interest sparked this great endeavor of classifying, organizing and eventually creating a collection out of the photographic material.

The retrieval and storage aspects of the archive are structural components that undoubtedly are of great importance for the conservation and organization of them. Nevertheless, as Jhon Tagg shares in “The Archiving Machine, or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet”, it is the relationship of classification and knowledge that make the archive a well of wisdom. The importance of classification is essentially making sure we have as less lost narratives as humanly possible and that through classification systems we can diligently and responsibly reflect truth, whichever that may be.

“Counterarchives” and the aesthetic aspect of photography

I found very interesting how photography, since its origins with the stereograph and other formats, had “the issue of the archive”. As already discussed in other classes, we often think that the problem of excess of data / documents / material is only a question of our time, however John Tagg’s text presents the fascinating discussion around the mass production of stereographs in 1859. Thus, classification and organization of photographs and stereographs were since the beginning an issue to be solved, and the handbook The Camera as Historian represents this issue very well. It does so, mainly because it shows how every choice of classification system reveals its power relations, social rules and, as Tagg says (inspired by Foucault) “the space of the file is the space of disciplinary machine”.

With this in mind, it was a great discovery for me to think about the idea of “counterarchives”. Though the commandment aspect is intrinsically part of any archive, the idea that “forgotten” or “lost” archives have the power to create a new narrative about society, especially the ones that suffered from a regime of terror, made me realize how important each archive is in relation to the discussion of truth. The fact that “Archives still retain, therefore, a particular and perhaps privileged relation to the field of truth…” is an engaging form to relate with archives, and it improves the discussion about History and narration. Yet, it was not very clear to me what the author meant with the statement that “archive cannot be taken over but has to be smashed.” I understand his concern about the danger of using archives in the study of history as an element of real truth, however the idea of “smashing” was not clear (maybe an English issue for me?)

Finally, I would like to add a comment about Douglas Crimp’s text concerning photography collection and the NYPL case. I found very interesting how, when Julia van Haaften started organizing the photography collection in 1977, photography “changed” its role, gaining autonomy from the document / archive / subject it was coming from, and embodying an aesthetic element. Thus, becoming art. When the author gives the example of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs that would not only represent the information in the photo, but also the expression of an artist, I ask to myself: if each photo has this “double” aspect (information and artistic intension or interpretation), how should we organize them? If until now photography has usually been classified through author’s name, date or subject, would it be possible to create a classification related to the aesthetic experience? If so, which “elements” of the artistic interpretation would be used? And then, after all, wouldn’t these topics of organization also reveal its apparatus?

The Future of Archives

Storage, storage storage. It seems we are always running out of space and in the midst of material chaos. Reading through Lischer-Katz article it felt like I have read all of this before. Actually my perception is that all I have read about archives lately talks about the same points. Firstly, the question of the immateriality of digital material. Second, the ecological impact of not only maintaining the new infrastructures to store and preserve digital media, but also the impact of our analog media material that needs to be discarded. And Finally, the worry that a significant amount of our analog collections and in the future even our digital collections will be lost.

A fascinating aspect of this moment in archival history is that I can’t stop but think about how the archives have always been overlooked and seen as transparent, even before the digitization era. Before digitization maybe because it was too big and in your face and now because through digitization everything gets sent away to the “Cloud”. With this transparency that follows archives a worry surfaces. What is the future of archives and how will archivists, scholars and the public’s relationships to it change? Will we loose the archives as we know it?

On the other hand, the ecological aspects are clearly not addressed as often making it more difficult to come to a well rounded solution for this reality. We talk about the problems that we know so well, but what are we going to do about it? It’s like we are in a constant loop of recycled conversation.

Beyond Additive Subtraction; Etch and Sketch Memories

The Aesthetics of Erasure photograph (oil on linen), He Did Not See Any American blue, by Artist Rights Society member, Jenny Holzer (ARS), was a visual symbol of how most marginalized populations feel when sorting through the historical records seeking knowledge and the missing pieces of their blotted out past. I was constantly looking to see if could possible read through the blacked out words that would reveal their true context and also to solve the mystery of why those particular paragraphs were selected for erasure compared to those words still visible. 

It lead me to the supplemental article by Ella Klik and Diane Kamin, Between Archived, Shredded, and Lost/Found: Erasure in the Digital and Artistic Contexts.  In this essay both writers point out very interesting perspectives that I never thought of as an artist and writer.  New attitudes, desires and connections on keeping or discarding artwork in the digital era, was that of “Beyond Additive Subtraction”. She examines scholars Matthew Kirschnman, Wendy Chun and Wolfgang Ernst works to describe the reoccurring act of erasure and how it is unavoidable.  These scholars in their works believed that ‘overwriting’ and and erasing was necessary to make room for new data. The act of erasing and recreating in the same space is a “habitual condition of the digital.” The idea that the relationship between the surface and the the inscription is changing with electronic media, which means a radical change in how we store and keep archives digitally is now a new “dyna-archive” compared to the classical archive. Chun stresses the duality of the digital archive, citing that erasure is habitual and continuous. 

Chun’s idea of digital media production being habitual and continuous made me think about my childhood toy the Etch and Sketch.  One of my favorite creating toys that made me feel good about my artwork. It also had a dual system of creating and erasing in order to make room for something new. I always thought on the art that had to be erased. Yet, I just happily deleted it (shook it) and poof gone!  I could always see the remnants and tiny traces of what I had just lost, yet I was more focused on the new creation that would overwrite it.

Connecting both of these concepts make the act of erasing the opposite of storing both frustrating and liberating. One goes with the other? Production and recycling all in one movement?  What does that do for long-term archival practices?  Can we deal the idea of creating something, not saving it and move on by making something to replace it?  This is an interesting yet complicated practice, yet it may be the future of digital archiving.

 

Dogs have Barkives, Cats have Meowseums


I am drawn to the aura of Tacita Dean’s work, specifically the process, particularly with Girl Stowaway. I am sure there exists, in a vacuous alternate dimension devoid of chaos and serendipity, a boring version of an archival art piece which resurrects a historical Jeinnie, projected in a wall-to-wall carpeted gallery cave where humans on awkward first dates sit squishily on that flat couch while looping fluorescent assaults of the ken burns effect gradually make them realize they learned everything they needed to know from reading the embossed didactic glued to the wall. Deep in the throes of trying to impress one another with pseudo-intellectual endurance for art gazing, each first-dater hopes the other will initiate the gesture to move on. In the real world (in this dimension, or as marvel nerds call it, earth 616), Dean’s work is catchy and vibrant. Why? I cite captured coincidence.

The extroverted making of art (and perhaps, due to its pensive and temporally absorbent nature, archival art) might be the best exercise we have for trapping exotic, wild coincidences for dissection under epistemological and existential microscopes, to be prodded and picked apart by whatever theory pierces the skin, hoping to bottle any organs of intellectual merit.

Unpacking my own experience of exposure to Dean’s work suggests Girl Stowaway as a piece takes many forms across its scope, including the form of journalistic reporting on what feels like lived performance art and true crime investigation and testimony. Where Stowaway ends or begins as art, whether it exists on visual media, or through story, or in interview about either (or all of the above), is not easy to pinpoint. In the middle of a course brimming with examples of well ordered orders and neatly cataloged catalogs, I find that difficulty to be refreshing.

While I understand the broad labeling of this sector of art as archival, I do not understand how fabricating your subject’s history (which she did, and which I am ALL FOR!) does not constitute a disqualification of sorts. We have explored how empirically flexible the archive can be compared to its dusty colloquial stereotype, but I still feel as though, for the sake of its own historicity, archival should be an adjective associated with minimal invention, fabrication, or fill-in-the-gaps creation. Foster describes archival art as art that “not only draws on informal archives, but produces them as well”, and I took informal to mean still possessing a reasonable degree of empirical integrity. I seem to still have this childish definition hammered into my head in verb form; to preserve a subject in its congenital truth, or to freeze from all subsequent biases. Susan Breakell explains that archive as a verb did not exist in her dictionary before 1988, and the use of it as such generates lexicological discomfort. That discomfort is the type of sensation, one of casual grieving for the loss of a reliable concept, that archiving should effectively preclude, no?

NO. Of course not.

The fabricated can simultaneously be the most integral part of archival art, and a vehicle for truths. Consider Cheryl Dunye and Zoe Leonard’s piece in which the fictional Fae Richards is invented and brought to life through the presentation of an archive of her life as a lesbian African American actress and singer in golden age hollywood, amalgamating the true experiences of many under one persona. It is a work of art that showcases the ability for its format to double as fiction and fact, discussing very resonant themes for black female artists of that (or perhaps any) era in a manner that may exceed the profundity of an alternative piece based on any single, historical individual.


 

Transforming Ideas

Post for Oct 10: Ordering Logics

I believe classifications vary culturally. In ancient China, books were traditionally classified into four categories: Confucian classics(jing), historical works(shi), non-Confucian philosophical works(zi), and literary works(ji). Physics, geography, mathematics, etc all belonged to the “zi” category, which seems very unscientific nowadays although the subjects may have at once the perilous otherness and resemblances in Foucault’s preface. Speaking of food dropped on the floor, many people, especially nomads or some Japanese who often sleep on the floor, don’t necessarily regard the ground as very dirty. It’s not always the particular characteristics determine where something belongs to. Rather, it’s our cultures that arrange them.

Languages also play a fundamental role in classification. The example of certain aphasics sorting wool may indicate this point. There are a lot of rocks, birds, plants exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History. As we discussed last class, some ubiquitous objects may serve as a piece of archive. It seems that we divide objects into types as we speak and as if our ancestors had figured mysterious connections between the words and certain elements of the objects. No wonder several theorists found inspirations through the fictional writings that challenge the existing ideas using words. Scholars may create new terms as they recognize new types scientifically, and pop cultures also often times breed new phrases defining unclassified entertainment and phenomena. The Chinese customers who find the 6-inch Subway sandwiches not enough but footlong too much even have given that a term.

 

Principle of Original Order; Atopia, aphasia

The readings this week shed a heavy load on the harsh realities facing archivist; analysis, classification and distribution of knowledge and information. All the readings made their unique points yet one in particularly triggered memories of collecting, organizing, labeling my own historical records.

In “The Order of Things…”, Foucault, stresses some key reminders about the world of ordering, classifying and naming things. He speaks of “aphasiacs”, a person who has had a brain injury and as a result has impaired language and can not read or write nor recognize order of things.  Foucault’s comparison on a culture who has lost it’s language can be tormented in the same fashion as brain injured (stroke) person who has lost all language, reading and writing abilities. He found it suspicious and comical that Borge’s idea of ordering things was not just “linking together things that are inappropriate” (preface xvii), but that there was “no
law or geometry, of the heteroclite” (common locus) when arranging or placing them into groupings.  This practice by Borge was futile and pointless according to Foucault.

I could not help but to feel a sense of relief that someone put my frustrations into perfect metaphors. Language and origin has always been of great interest to my personal research.  A lost language is a big puzzle when attempting to preserve or rediscover secret or destroyed knowledge. As Foucault states perfectly, I have experienced that feeling of a “loss of what is common to place and name.” (preface xix)

I was not surprised to discover just how brutal and difficult it was to practice and as a principle, in “Disrespect the Fonds, Rethinking Arrangement and Description in Born-Digital Archives,”  by  Jefferson Bailey.  

Dechein termed the act of arranging materials as, “brutal manipulations”, I call it simply language and culture manipulation. As language and meaningful context disappeared, so did the origins of old records and their importance of being properly placed. For archivist with the daunting task and deep work of deciding what stays and what goes, I am wondering what is the hope for future generations who seek to reconnect with lost information–and build new connections to culture, language, objects, that have been misrepresented by racially biased library infrastructure?  Can I be hopeful and optimistic about digital archiving and the new data being collected in today’s media practices? 

I feel like an “aphasiac” sometimes too when it comes to connecting to the past.  How can archivist ensure info takes it’s rightful place next to objects and things– “next to and also opposite of each other” ? (Foucault)

It seems the evolution of archiving during the early 19th and 20th centuries, inspired archivist and librarians to innovate clever ways of organizing. Frustratingly they would arrange, rearrange, and then adopt newer ordering and classifying systems to set in place– only to repeat and improve as new technology and massive data sets demands it.

 

Rectifications, Re-orderings, and Renditions

Reading through Foucault’s Preface on “The Order of Things” and Perec’s piece “Think/Classify” led me to think about classification systems that we use in other disciplines to order information and understand complex environmental ecosystems, especially in the sciences. The readings also brought to mind the concept of the “rectification of names” in Confucianism—that if our language is not correct and accurate in the naming of an object or of an idea, then language would fail to reflect the accuracy of reality. So much of epistemology depends on the proper ordering, classifying, sectioning, defining, hierarchy, and enumeration of things that at times we may have to also alter and revise our man-made classification systems to accommodate new knowledge or to rectify previously known facts, truths, or observations. In doing so, we are not only reordering and renaming the logistics of our collections and archives of knowledge, but we are also rearranging the ways in which we think about the world and how we relate to it.

Foucault gives us an example of this: “What transgresses the boundaries of all imagination, of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which links each of these categories to all the others.” He even goes on to state that “The central category of animals ‘included in the present classification’, with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all…”

Naming the five (or is it six?) kingdoms in elementary school is one thing, but having to delineate between phyla, families, species, etc. is another challenge that is never ending as we accumulate and accommodate new knowledge of every biological organism that exists in the various types of ecological systems that already exist in our world.

As we process the information that we already have about particular academic disciplines and topics, we simultaneously struggle with rearranging the logistics of how we want to order, classify, enumerate, define, and compartmentalize our knowledge so that we can easily access the information for later use… just in case we may need to go back, rethink, and reorder our lists again.

The Coupling of Otlet and Google

From our readings, it did seem as though Paul Otlet was a kind of a tragic hero who was well ahead of his time, but ultimately shunned by his own government. I wondered if this is an aspect that intrigued and inspired Google to take Otlet into the folds of their history: Google as this idea that was not just well ahead of its own time, but also one that shouldn’t be curtailed or limited by the presumably narrow visions of national governments.

That there was exactly one whole century between Otlet and La Fontaine’s dream in 1895 to index and classify the world’s information and Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s initiative to start Google in 1995 seems to have given Google significant leverage: a whole century worth of a great history of (transnational) informational management.

That Otlet predates Vannevar Bush also makes historical sense for Google to position itself in relation to Otlet rather than Bush. But I also can’t help but wonder if the fact that Otlet wasn’t American also helped Google project itself as an idea/machine/company whose vision and history goes beyond its American origins, thereby enabling Google to position itself as certainly a trans-American, if not altogether transnational, entity. A strategic coupling that would perhaps give Google better access and entry to not just cultural institutions in Europe, but potentially also to the rest of the world.

[Of course Vannevar Bush’s direct involvement in the building of the atomic bombs in World War II made his postwar essay on the need to consolidate all information for the purposes of a peaceful, programmable future all the more ironic. Incorporating Bush into Google’s history and lineage would have been a ticking time bomb.]

 

Circular Logistics

I was really impressed and inspired by Warburg’s library organization and thoughts, especially because every time I had to organize my books at my very small personal library, it was a challenge to figure out which way would be the best: by author’s name? Country? By subject? Or the order I wanted to read? After many thoughts and no decision, the books were somehow organized in an unorganized way between a rational and a subjective orderliness. Warburg’s organization was very well thought and structured one, but had a very subjective side related to our daily memory organization and connections. In relation to that, his library was circular and the circle is very symbolic for a never-ending form of knowledge. Thus, a circular library gave his method of organization another mnemosyne dimension, as “(…) his library was memory, but ‘memory as organized matter’.” (p.201).

Prelinger’s Library has also a “circular order” in is organization through the idea of serendipity, in which we have the opportunity to become flaneurs in our own discovery. It gives the feeling of an infinity of connections, just like the connections we make in our head. Besides, the complementary relation between digital access and analog browsing also made me think about this circular dimension, in which one aspect is connected to the other and vice-versa.

On that account, it was even more powerful to read about the BookOps and the ReCAP, and also to watch “Cold Storage” about the Harvard Depository. Being part of the library infrastructure and logistic, and with the necessity of efficient storage and retrieval, its organization has to be rational. Therefore, everything is more “square” than “circular” in its organization. I wonder if, with the increasing number of books that need to be storage, there’s a way to still create an efficient logistic that is less money-space-time focused, giving “off-site” storages a more circular aspect.

If books are and have to be “a thing on a shelf” in those places, is there a way to better connect them with “a topical and material unit of knowledge” that they are in the libraries? Is there a circular logistic able to keep receiving all the number of books and still maintain this landscape a real discovery experience for human knowledge?

 

 

Not directly related to this week discussion, but very close to that, Wisemen film “Ex Libris” about the New York Public Library is a great reflexion on what libraries are and mean nowadays, focusing on their role in the society and in how “far” this role is, as books are not the main element of them anymore. A must-see!