ABSTRACT
In the present age, the archive is no longer hidden away in national libraries, museums, and darkened rooms, restricted in access and guarded by the modern-day equivalents of Jacques Derrida’s archons – the guardians of the archive. 1 Indeed, researchers and archivists’ hermeneutic right and competence – and the power to interpret the archives – have been transformed with digitalization and the new technics of computational surfaces. Through computation, access to archives is made possible and often welcomed – through rectangular screens that mediate the archives contents or through interfaces and visualizations that reanimate a previously inert collection. We might consider this not only a de-archiving of what we previously understood an archive to be but also as a creation of new archival forms through practices of re-archiving. 2 Indeed, Wolfgang Ernst argues that the original role of an archive was ‘to preserve [...] for an indefinite time, or even to bar present access, conserving [...] for later, unexpected, and hence truly informational use’. 3 For Derrida, the ‘gathering’ of an archive was the ‘dwelling in a location’ and a place for objects and knowledge to be sheltered. It was a place of classification and putting into order a process of archivization. 4 Indeed, as he argued, ‘archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives’. 5
