The Live Archive
As part of my masters in Curatorial Practice I have been conducting an online work placement with Arika, a political arts organisation based in Edinburgh. They have had no public programming during my placement, and so it seemed like a good opportunity to delve into what was already there - the archive. This has been a fascinating and sometimes lonely experience, and has raised questions for me about what happens when you preserve live events through digitisation, and what the life of the archive is in the present.
Traditionally1, archives privilege material remains over the immaterial because the immaterial is seen as fleeting and mutable. Material objects, on the other hand, are treated as if they are fixed representing some undisrupted past. This idea is problematic because it disregards the ways in which the immaterial remains differently2, and the ways in which objects are performative in their own way. Digital technology tampers with the binary between the material and immaterial in archiving, since live performances are able to to be captured as data, and can be revisited in a seemingly fixed form. Yet there remains an ephemeral quality to live events that can’t be fixed: the smells, light, gestures, connections, disruptions that haven’t been captured. These are now absent, or merely suggested in the retrospective experience. Similarly, the digital problematizes the idea that material remains in a fixed form. Due to the accelerated development of technology, data which does not get tended to quickly becomes ancient and inaccessible. There is, therefore,
Archiving practice was developed according to a Western, white-cultural logic which adheres to the notion of linear time. Linear time sees past, present and future as separate and clearly definable spheres of existence. 1
Rebecca Schneider’s article Performance Remains (2001) looks at how performance transmits cultural knowledge and how the immaterial remains in different ways to the material. 2