ABSTRACT
Beyond the traditional archive as an external depository and framing of textual records, digital records take place in computer storage and processing, depending on a techno-archival structure from within. The ‘chronopoetics’ of its layers results from both the materiality (‘monumental’ hardware, techné) and the logics (algorithms, ‘documentary’ software) of the technological archive. In between, the notion of the record archive extended to analogue media (like the photographic image or the phonographic sound, magnetic tape and video), a memory which is capable of addressing human time perception by materially re-enacting signals from the past.
In spite of imaginary terms like ‘virtual reality’ and metaphors like ‘cloud storage’, the archival value and authority of analogue and digital record(ing)s is still media-archaeologically and techno-mathematically rooted in its media materialities. From that derives the plea (and necessity) for an archive of computational hardware. At the same time, the institutional notion of archival space transforms into dynamic intermediary storage. The digital archive keeps this double sense: algorithmic speed and material resistance. Conceptually, the conventional understanding of the institutional archive needs to be supplemented by a more Foucauldean, media-archaeological notion of l’archive.
