Media, Memory & the Archive

Conference: Media, Memory & the Archive
October 6, 2007
Argos, Brussels

How will future generations look back on the artistic production of the 20th and 21st centuries? Media formats, operating systems, software and hardware, browsers and the internet as we know it today will have evolved beyond recognition, both in shape and in use. What strategies might be used to transpose technology-based works, variable, hybrid and ephemeral by nature, to an unknown and unpredictable future? How can intent, context and experience be recorded and permanently interpreted? The archiving process does not only represent an attempt to preserve certain notions, it also implicates that others will be forgotten. What is relevant for preservation?

What is the impact of models, technical structures and tools that are being used, on the construction of cultural memory? How does information travel through time, now the world is being (re)presented and organised more and more as a dynamic and networked database? How will museums and other memory institutions cope with these new paradigms and what is the role media artists - and we ourselves - might have in the structuring of public memory?

All video lectures below are in English.

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Richard Rinehart started his presentation from the connection between new media art and the so-called ‘social memory’. What exactly is the influence of new media art on social memory? The new archiving methods for this art make us reflect about what we (want to) remember. If museums want to continue to exist, they first and foremost will have to succeed in the preservation of change instead of what they are doing at the moment. The preservation of static content and shape should shift towards the recording of behaviour and interaction.

Jean-François Blanchette is interested in two research domains: preservation and forgetting. In this presentation he aimed to bring the two together: the shifting borderlines between what is being remembered and recorded and what is not.

Can new media art give us some hints on a post-metaphysic way of thinking about art, and especially its relation to the archive? In order to investigate this and present it in a visual way, Gere used an output of the Biomorph software programme. By means of this ‘new media art work’, dixit Gere, he reflects on the archive.

The contemporary art institution is no longer a solid identity but has opened itself up in many ways. According to Bosma, thinking about the archive fits in a cultural shift of broadcasting to narrowcasting, consumer to user, user to end-user. Both the art as well as the public have a new status.

According to Oliver Grau, dispersed particles of media art history can be found everywhere, but a global art history still does not exist. New media art has a long history, but Oliver Grau’s starting point is that this art can not be understood without knowledge of its history.

The presentation of Steve Diets revolved around the keyword ‘rescension’. Rescension is what happens by rewriting an original work, adding elements to it or removing some, and it is totally anti-hierarchical. Dietz linked this practice to the archive.

While the debate on social memory is still dominated by vague categories such as ‘collective memory’, Wolfgang Ernst believes that with the arrival of electromagnetic media, a new level of micro-memories has arisen. Ernst prefers to speak of ‘the archival field’, similar to the magnetic field, which is able to replace the known classification systems.