MEDIA AND THE ARCHIVE: Motions and Transformations

The Subjectivity and Interactivity of the Archive

For a film student who's always unsatisfied with the mainstream cinematic narratives and who's also a devout gamer, there are few things more inspiring and exhilarating to see than projects like The Dumpster and those by Erik Loyer. Mixing storytelling, documentary, history, and interactivity - and combining great ambient music and sleek visual presentation - these projects struck me at first as more interactive arts than archives; the first associations that jumped to my mind were such interactive masterpieces as Journey, The Unfinished Swan, or Gone Home, rather than what we think of archive - a dusty old library, with documents sealed away on shelves and in drawers. 

And this brings up the interesting question of how much curation there should be in an archive. Most archives' curation go no further than simply collecting materials that are relevant to the theme of the archive, and sorting and categorizing them into a way that is clear and organized. But projects like Loyer's "The Knotted Line" and "Public Secrets" venture further and categorizes its materials in a much more 'authorial' manner - and expresses (or presents) them in a much more authorial way too, with music and graphics designed by him to not only present the information but, in fact, add a new layer of information. Is this a better way of archiving? It's certainly much more inviting, entertaining, and artistically accomplished.

But we can also claim that this form of (highly) interactive archive is inherently inaccurate, and argue for a 'pure' kind of archive: that the greatest archive in fact is our daily lives, unsifted, unselected, unbiased. Are projects such as Loyer's 'too much' in their artistic directions? The intricate visual and audio design - are they injecting inherent bias into the documents we are reading? The ultimate form of a pure archive may very well be something close to the Library of Babel - a sea of information that contains all the information we as a species have ever compiled, and more. The obvious problem, however, is that with such a pure cluster of information we'll always need a key to decode it, a key to find the information we need at a given time - a form of organization or curation, in other words. 

Even a more traditionally-archival-kind-of digital project like The Dumpster can be questionable. A c 

 

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