In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) Jacques Derrida asks, ‘Is the psychic apparatus better represented or is it affected differently by all the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction. . .?’ This question is prompted by new technological developments as we transition from traditional to digitised archives. This question also lies at the heart of Selective Memory, a timely exhibition which responds to our contemporary obsession with the archive as evidenced by a recent proliferation of archival artworks that register the shift from analogue to digital technologies.
An introductory text on the gallery wall, tells us that the exhibition is divided according to key themes such as ‘material’, ‘speculation’, ‘site’ and ‘narration’, and that these themes have been further designated with ‘keywords’ that allow for different trajectories to be mapped across the space of the galleries. This interesting curatorial proposition implies that the keywords would operate like meta-tags, creating a rhizomatic network of associations between the physical art objects which would reflect the interconnectivity of the digital archive. However, this hypertext of keywords seemed to be absent. Perhaps the idea is that the viewer forges their own connections between the artworks and the thematic words provided; however, this asks a lot of the viewer in terms of cognisance of the curatorial project, while it is also to some extent a method of mental reflex and association that happens naturally in the context of any exhibition. This aside, Selective Memory was an informed exhibition which explored the changing nature of the relationship of archival technology to memory.
As would be expected, much of the work in this exhibition is lens-based. However, there is no clear-cut distinction between analogue and digital images. In fact, in many works the differences between these two media are blurred, as one engulfs or appropriates the other, and this is perhaps the point. Jasper Rigole’s Paradise Recollected (2008) is a collection of found 8mm films, sourced from flea markets and garage sales, which have been transferred onto video. Much of the material consists of amateur footage and home movies which have been saved by Rigole’s ‘International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other People’s Memories’ (IICADOM). The resulting video is a kind of essay film complete with a voiceover which reflects upon the nature of collective memory. Rigole connects temporally and geographically distant footage through an effective editing process which groups together familiar and universal memories through a system of montage that produces a sense of objective classes of memory. This comes across most powerfully in a series of shots of different infants, captured in flickering film, at different times and in different places, all taking their first steps towards the camera.
The video is accompanied by a diagrammatic textual poster which breaks the film down into discrete terms; the moving images of saved memories are here transcribed into different units of data, just as the actual images were when the films were transferred into a digital format. The self-awareness of this transference from film to digital video in the context of the gallery is refreshing. To further emphasise this transition from real indexical imagery to sets of discrete data, Rigole provides us with a Mac monitor and keyboard displaying the web page of IICADOM, which the viewer is invited to interact with. Here we can browse all of the films that are being projected, as well as being able to change the search terms on the footage. For example, a black and white film of an old lady eating can now be tagged with the terms ‘boy’ ‘playing’; thus Rigole’s archive itself is susceptible to inevitable corruption and disorder. By juxtaposing analogue and digital archival technologies Paradise Recollected draws attention to the differences between these processes. The traditional archive is a static and orderly collection of physical documents which should not be altered or interfered with, while the digital archive promotes an interconnectivity operating according to a more dynamic mnemonic logic which continually updates, rewrites and erases itself in virtual space.
The tension between preserving and destroying is a key paradox of the archive. It also alludes to the problematic nature of new technological shifts for artists, as the digital is perceived to threaten analogue mediums. This incompatibility is played out in a series of works by Sean Snyder that has evolved from his project Index. Here, Snyder has been editing and digitising the archives he has amassed while researching previous projects. During this process many of the physical elements of the artist’s archive have been destroyed. We see the discarded remnants of this process in Untitled, (printed materials, broken DVDs) (2009), a collection of photographs of close up details of cracked and smashed DVDs and shredded pieces of printed text. This process of digitisation, through which the material remnants become unreadable and are then discarded, acts to draw attention to the surface materiality of the technical support itself. In Snyder’s photograph of a smashed DVD we actually register the material properties of the object’s mirrored surface, the way it cracks and breaks like glass, but also bends because it is plastic. This emphasis on the material properties of different surfaces relates to questions concerning the relevance of the concept of medium specificity in a digital age, as digitisation erases the differences between media. Text, sound and visual images all become data files that are read indifferently by the computer.
The transition from analogue to digital archival processes is also the subject of Zbyněk Baladrán’s Working Process (2007), another video essay which utilises found film footage and old film stock transferred again to video. The film is overlaid with horizontal blocks which give way to text evoking the now obsolete aesthetics of early computing. In this work text and image are vying for attention as the eye has to switch rapidly between reading the text, which sits over the image, and perceiving the image behind the text. At one point a series of blocks gives way to the sentence ‘THE PAST AND FUTURE CAN EXIST NEXT TO EACH OTHER’. In many ways this sums up Selective Memory, which is reflective of our current, transitional phase in the history of the archive, a phase in which its past and future states co-exist.