This paper seeks to draw parallels between The Pandemic Archive of Voices and different philosophical concepts, and outline future fields of investigation that arrise from this experiment. At first, a general understanding of what is The Pandemic Archive of Voices is presented. It's method of production, it's content, and what can be interpreted out of it. As an initial reference point, "The Archivist Manifesto" from Yuk Hui is brought foward to give the foundation to the initial gesture of Archiving. In line with Hui's argument regarding the current state of technology in relation with memory and archives, a critique to the current material reality to the structure of memory is put foward. Coming from this critical point of view in regards to the contemporary complex of digital memory, an ancestrofuturist approach is presented as a practice to dissolve the linear understanding between the past and the future of memory technologies.
Archives are the main tools for which a future observer understands a particular point in time, they are "exteriorized memory in its organized form", reservoirs of discourses that make possible an archaeology of knowledge, the force by which the present will be understood as the past, and therefore how the future will understand itself based on that understanding of its past.
In contemporary society we have become in fact interfaces of archives. Our smallest gestures are in the constant process of recording, indexation and analysis. These traces - the digital memory of our existence, shift around on metal-oxide semiconductors or magnetic cores at data centres unevenly spread across the globe. Opaque archives, with different levels of navigability and transparency, that nonetheless serve specific agendas and discourses of very various tech conglomerates to which we no agency to.
The act of archiving has become an urgent social political matter. To formulate parallel modes of preserving, indexing, navigating digital memory will shape our present, our future and our past. As Yuk Hui argues in his Archivist Manifesto
We are archivists, since we have to be. We don't have choice.
This decision is already made, or determined by the contemporary technological condition.
What new modes can be experimented with in regards to database creation, management and accessibility?
The Pandemic Archive of Voices is an attempt of creating an autonomous and transparent archive in which a small but diverse sample of personal perspectives are collected from a global phenomenon. It seeks to formulate diverging co-relating voices gravitating around the abstract notion of what is the experience of the global pandemic. Comprised of more than 200 audios in over 24 languages, it is a localized snapshot of a global event, which carries in a vague essence, the Zeitgeist of our time. Therefore, being a potential vector of understanding and reflection for this point in history in which we are immersed in. This database can be understood as a small genealogy of the pandemic, manifested in a scattered structure of multiple sounds and words that formulate fragments of a multitude of subjective experiences.
In the installation, presenting the text and audio as one the binary oposition between speech and writing is escaped, having both as a present, temporary, moving manifestation of this virtual body gravitating the space souronding the visitor.
Despite the fact that this database initially seeks some sort of parallel independent development of living memory, this attempt is fundamentally reliant on the technological structures of very particular enterprises. The recorded voices are now hosted on Amazon S3 servers or at the hard drive of MacBook computers, the source code hosted on Microsoft owned GitHub and the database by CIA-funded MongoDB[].
GitHub's Arctic Code Vault is an example of an attempt to register the source code from millions of repositories to last thousands of years. Stored utilizing the "Boxing barcode" a future observer is presumed to be of our own technological understanding. But whare is this "future observer" expected to be afterall?
- Why the materialization of the Pandemic Archive of Voices in Particular: afection, zeitgeist, global event, multiple perspective
- Material Imaginary x Formal Imaginary
- Justification of the "artistic gesture"
- What are these voices? Voices are memories themselves
- the Machinic/Material Relationship: laser + clay
- The methodology: Research as ()...
- Expand more on the Digital Object of Yuk Hui
"Ancestor + Futurism are two terms that apparently emerge from an impossibility, from the ambivalence between two disparate realms: archaism and future."
"[...] ancestrofuturism requests concepts that work with other notions of time and resignify the assumed linearity between past and future, i.e., concepts that deconstruct the idea of vertical time and history — from archaism pointing towards the future — and that horizontalize this perspective"
http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/epsd2/
How to reuse material from Oracc
Cuneiform tablet from the British Museum which contains Babylonian eclipse tables.
Shang dynasty characters on fragments of an oracle bone dating between 1600 and 1050 BC. British Library, Or. 7694/1516
Human voice as an archive of itself. The voice as a message that is carried through time, a particular sound that manifests itselves in a multitude and sequence of bodies, connecting to one another.
Bachelard MaterialxFormal Imaginary [3]
- "floats on the surface of matter"
- "Bachelard defends the poetics of symbolism and surrealism"
- "imagination penetrative" - Rushkin, 1900
- takes root in the substance of matter.
- "For the material imagination, the exemplary compound is a mixture of water and earth" why?; "Perfect Earth"; "Mesomorphic Reverie"
World and Mind intertwindned. Undeterminancy.
The political and poetic gesture of archiving at this point in history.
Our current state in regards to information and memory, thus, archiving.
- Our lives are mediated through Archives.
- We have become, in fact, interfaces of archives.
- These archives are on the hands of very specific corporations
- Opaque unnavigable archives in which we have no agency towards
- This lack of agency brings the question, to what discourse are the traces from our gestures been serve to?
- What will be the future history, future lives, of these digital objects of our memory? How long will they live for?
https://quadrature.co/work/stones/