Wolfgang Ernst - Digital Memory and the Archive

ELECTRONIC MEDIATIONS

KATHERINE HAYLES, MARK POSTER, AND SAMUEL WEBER, SERIES EDITORS

39. Digital Memory and the Archive

WOLFGANG ERNST

38. How to Do Things with Videogames

IAN BOGOST

37. Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

PETER KRAPP

36. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

PATRICK CROGAN

35. Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations

ROBERTO SIMANOWSKI

34. Vilm Flusser: An Introduction

ANKE FINGER, RAINER GULDIN, AND GUSTAVO BERNARDO

33. Does Writing Have a Future?

VILM FLUSSER

32. Into the Universe of Technical Images

VILM FLUSSER

31. Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

JAISHREE K. ODIN

30. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art

KATE MONDLOCH

29. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

NICK DYER-WITHEFORD AND GREIG DE PEUTER

28. Tactical Media

RITA RALEY

27. Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political

PHILIP ARMSTRONG

26. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds

TIMOTHY MURRAY

25. Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

TERRY HARPOLD

24. Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now

GARY HALL

23. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

LISA NAKAMURA

22. Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools

BYRON HAWK, DAVID M. RIEDER, AND OLLIE OVIEDO, EDITORS

21. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks

ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY AND EUGENE THACKER

20. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow

VICTORIA VESNA, EDITOR

19. Cyberspaces of Everyday Life

MARK NUNES

18. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture

ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

17. Avatars of Story

MARIE-LAURE RYAN

16. Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi

TIMOTHY C. CAMPBELL

15. Electronic Monuments

GREGORY L. ULMER

14. Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine

ASTRID DEUBER-MANKOWSKY

13. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory

THOMAS FOSTER

12. Dj Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory

PETER KRAPP

11. Biomedia

EUGENE THACKER

10. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism

ANN WEINSTONE

9. Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society

STEVEN SHAVIRO

8. Cognitive Fictions

JOSEPH TABBI

7. Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet

DIANA SACO

6. Writings

VILM FLUSSER

5. Bodies in Technology

DON IHDE

4. Cyberculture

PIERRE LVY

3. Whats the Matter with the Internet?

MARK POSTER

2. High Techn: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman

R. L. RUTSKY

1. Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality

KEN HILLIS

Digital Memory and the Archive

WOLFGANG ERNST

Edited and with an Introduction by Jussi Parikka

Electronic Mediations, Volume 39

For publication information on previously published material in this book, see pages 24546.

Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

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CONTENTS

An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernsts Media Archaeology

Jussi Parikka

Traditionally, archives have had an interesting aura despite the grayness of the concrete walls surrounding them. We tend to think of archives as slightly obsolete and abandoned places where usually the archivist or the caretaker is someone swallowed up in the dusty corridors of bureaucracy, information management, and organizational logic that makes the archive a system. What characterizes such systems is that they are not always understandable or accessible to an outsider. We do not often visit archives, but the archives still have a keen interest in us. The Stasi archives, opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German Democratic Republic in the early 1990s, are a case in point. Those archives recorded a large number of lives down to the most boring details, documented in meticulous fashion, including transcribed voice recordings as well as photographs. Getting to an archive is not always that easy, either. One needs to obtain permissions, make arrangements, follow strict rules of conduct, and get introduced to the whole system of how the archive has been organized. For sure, from a theoretical point of view, the postmodern theory surrounding amusement parks, visual culture, spectacle, and so forth was perhaps more exciting than focusing on the archive as a core site of modernity in its gray administration culture.

And yet suddenly archives are popping up everywhere. A lot of our software-based interaction online now has to do with archival metaphors. We see this in ways ranging from the replacement of Delete or Trashcan on our e-mail screens with Archive to attempts to offer new kinds of storage spacemistakenly conflated with archivesfor the numerous traces we leave of our personal livesphotographs, sound files, videos, documents. We are miniarchivists ourselves in this information society, which could be more aptly called an information management society. Hence we see the business of cloud storage, mobile storage, and such flourishing. We also see this in business models of social media: the so-called free platforms we are using to connect to friends and to share ideas, links, and preferences for films and music are all material for data mining, which is the new form of subsumption of our lives into capitalist production and accumulation of value. This algorithmic unconscious of social media cultures knows a lot about us and is often keen not only to keep but to sell those data to third parties.

The archive-oriented media theory of Wolfgang Ernst (1959) fits perfectly into the double bind of the modes of storage and transmission between old media and new media cultures. One of the last media theorists not to use a mobile phone, engage in any other form of the latest gadgetry, or even have a home Internet connection, Ernst is, however, completely up-to-date concerning the changes in our regimes of memory in software cultures. He is part of the breed of media theorists who are keen to do their own electronics, repair old media apparatuses, and browse through shops with old computers in order to find material for thought for, in Ernsts case, theoretical writings. Therefore, his way of mobilizing media archaeology into an analysis of the technics of cultural memory, analysis of the technical media machines of non-human kinds, and elaboration of theoretical ideas in digital humanities in medium-specific ways is at the same time something that feels new but is also recognizable to anyone who has at least a basic knowledge of some of the arguments of German media theory.