Tempor(e)alities: Archival Eigenzeit

The term »tempor(e)alities« oscillates between temporalities and tempo-realities. This refers to the inherent temporal essence of archives as memory institution and storage apparatus. There are conflicting time regimes at work in the archive: on the one hand, it is meant to suspend time to keep information for future memory (negentropic time); on the other hand, it is subject to time at work (entropic processes, material decay); thirdly, the speed of access, migration, and short-time memorial functions of the archive increase.

For centuries, the archive has been an agency of dis-continuity, setting the memory of past records apart from the administration of the present. This spatio-temporal distance implodes once archival data is electronically coupled online to internet-based access. More or less immobile cultural materialities of memory lose their heterotopic and heterochronic quality of resistance against the logocentric tyranny of presence in favour of immediacy.31 Against that background, old-fashioned archival resistance becomes a virtue in the time of networked records which dissolve into cache-buffered streaming data.

With its current theme, »Dis Continuity,« CTM 2014 reflects on the growing tendency to reference the past. This suggests that that which marks the popular and experimental culture of today is not just cultural nostalgia of a society which has lost its avant-garde bias, but also a direct function of its storage technologies which become an integral part of present data circulation and processing. When the traditional archive thus gets mobilised, it transforms into a short-time intermediary memory of the present itself.

What looks like an increasing drive for historic »retro« references in fact deconstructs the dominant time model of history itself. Applied to sonic culture, this argument becomes almost self-referential. Whereas before the phonograph any sonic expression (be it speech or music) had to be symbolically transformed into music notation in order to survive in time, with technical recording sound immediately becomes inscribed into a non-historical, non-human, signal-based archive of a new kind which literally has to get in motion (like the turning disc or the hard drive) in order to get re-presenced:

»The concept of linear, historical time is denied, if not actually eliminated, by the electroacoustic media...the concept of a linear flow of time becomes an anachronism.«32 Nonlinear temporal short-cuts undo narrative and storytelling which are the underlying tools to achieve the historicist effect. The formerly »historic« relation between presence and past is replaced by a cybernetic concept of immediate feedback and dynamic resonance; thereby it becomes sonic itself – with the neologistic term sonicity referring here not to the audible manifest sound but to the implicit tempor(e)ality which is connected with vibrating, oscillatory and frequential articulation.«33

CTM 2014 – Dis Continuity explicitly refers to past artistic experimentation, protagonists, and movements offside well-beaten paths. This approach is archival rather than historical. Whereas most narratives of musical evolution over the past centuries favour exceptional protagonists whose achievements are undisputed, the archival co-existence of records does not suggest any hierarchy in itself. The texture of the archive itself mirrors the complex fabric of musical threads. Whereas historiography’s task is to identify and decide upon main storylines, truly archival navigation detects interconnections, parallels, and short-circuits. The simultaneous arrangement of files allows for jumps to other addresses like in digital computer storage. Synchronisation replaces the historical discourse, leading to an aesthetics of many pasts folded into the present in latency. Whereas such moves in textual records are necessarily hypertextual, with sonic records hypertemporal navigation is possible since they represent time objects themselves. Just like access to records in an archive is a rather spatial and topological act, nonlinear links of the present to the past require a different description, which Michel Foucault once termed »archéologie.« In his Archaeology of Knowledge (FO Paris 1969) he argued for an active self-distancing of the present and a new respect for dis-continuities.

The archive is not a coherent depository for memory supply but a multiplicity of layers to be unfolded with and within memory technologies. These techno-archival temporalities can be identified as chronopoetic once they are no longer identified as passive storage, but rather dynamically driven by algorithms which finally affect the human sense of time. Since the notion of the archive has been extended to the storage of audio signals, a memory has emerged which is capable of addressing human perception in repeatable hyper-presence; this does not only represent, but actually enacts different aggregations of the past. This leads to an epistemological liberation of archival memory from its reductive subjection to the discourse of history in favour of an agency of multiple temporal poetics.

The archival challenge to historiography

Archives have their inherent temporality, their Eigenzeit as memory institution and storage technology. The tempo-realities they generate refer to the function of the archive both within historical time and as the condition (the Kantean a priori) of writing history. For historically oriented disciplines, the archive provides the fundament to write historiography. The notion of a macrotemporal coherence called history and its discursive power – as frequently emphasised by the media philosopher Vilém Flusser – has its essential precondition in the linear writing of the phonetic alphabet; one-dimensional textualities unfold in a literally progressive sense of time. But as a symbol-calculating machine the archive itself is radically different from narrative history, closer to »data bank aesthetics«34 which is ahistorical and rather represents a different temporal aggregation of what is commonly called the past.

The archival order is a non-narrative alternative to historiography. Archivology is not just an auxiliary discipline to history but a genuinely alternative model of processing data from the material archives of the past. While historical discourse strives for narrative coherence, archival aesthetics deals with discrete, serial, or dis-continuous strings of information which in the age of computing gains new plausibility against literary forms of historical imagination as developed in the 19th century.

As data bank structures, the archival mode of memory as record management is a non-narrative alternative to historiography, in the best tradition of early 20th century avant-garde which »questioned all models of memory (especially narrative ones), favouring openly dynamic, discontinuous forms contiguous with the modern means of technological reproduction, especially photography and film.«35 An archival collection of photography (different from private photo albums) does not aim at a meaningful story; on the contrary, it rather deconstructs narrative. Archival logistics in the correlation of data undercuts the narrative by discrete counting (alphanumeric metadata). The tight coupling of symbolical evidence in forms of oral or literary stories is being replaced by a loose archival coupling (truly medium in terms of Fritz Heider),36 as becomes manifest in the genealogy of photographic archives:

»Although individual sequences of pictures were often organised according to a narrative logic...the overall structure was informed not by a narrative paradigm, but by the paradigm of the archive. After all, the sequence could be rearranged; its temporality was indeterminate, its narrative relatively weak. The pleasures of this discourse were grounded not in narrative necessarily, but in archival play...«37

When the past is confused with history, any archival record is immediately subjected to contextual knowledge. This transforms it from being an autonomous physical monument into a historical document. Foucault decided to reverse this operation:

»There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse...in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.38

Archival time layers

In its different formations, the archive consists of diverse temporal layers which demand for a description in terms which are not limited to the semantics of cultural history in order to re-configure it for future demands in the age of networked tradition of knowledge by technological media. The very term »tradition« shifts from its emphatic macro-temporal notion to the analysis of the time-based and time-basing micro-mechanisms of transmission. While tradition has been associated with long-time memories across deep historical time so far, this emphatic horizon now seems to shrink to a mere extension of the present (as its re- and protentive short-time »working memory«) – a dramatic shifting of the temporal prefix. Archives are in transition on their very operative level of electronic signal and data processing.

The traditional archive model is static, residential, a storage space which delays and defers time in the emphatic sense of ancient Greek katechon. »Siegecraft, once the art of defending the strategic cities of European states, has become the art of defending the archive«39 – protected space in order to beat time. In terms of Harold Innis, the archive as a memory base belongs to the tools of empires which are temporally »biased« to keep legal claims and imperial laws in long-time endurance.40

But with the acceleration of transport and communication media since the age of the Industrial Revolution, a shift of emphasis from emphatic long-time preservation to ultra-short intermediary storage took place – a direct effect of electronic media culture itself. The traditional mandate of the archive to preserve records for future use is inverted on the micro-temporal stage of digital operations in the present. Intermediary storage here is necessary for calculating the immediate future from the immediate past – the extended presence in times of predictive algorithms and Markov chains, as familiar from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of subjective time sensation in terms of re- and pro-tention.41

While with the growing digitisation of archival records the traditional archive loses its detachment from the administration of the present, presence itself in return becomes coupled to an exponentially growing archival memory. The new immediacy of archival presence in terms of online accessibility may be compared to a situation from the area of visual recording of movement. The production and projection of documentary films since the beginning of cinematography has been a rather heavy and slow apparatus-based and -dependent process, and copies were expensive. But in the late 1960s the first Sony portable video recorders (used by Nam June Paik) allowed for immediate playback of the recorded present.42

Archival monumentality as suspense (epoché) from the temporal economy

Today, intermediary storage as in-between time (in its Aristotelean sense of »metaxy«) increasingly dislocates the tentatively eternal monumentality of the classical archive (and its records) on several levels: both as an institution of temporality and in its material sense (the volatility of electronic data). With the current liberal, broadened, electronically biased (thus liberated from spatial and material restrictions) use of the term archive, »online data collections labelled archives could in fact be better characterised as perpetual transmission rather than permanent storage.«43 What used to be secret spaces, secluded from public insight – the arcana of political administration and of their archival memory, the »secret archive« – is now directly wired to the communication circuit of the present. The archive loses its temporal exclusivity as a space remote from the immediate present (access).

In an age of volatile, ephemeral electronic memories, memory itself has become transitory.44 With such increasing mobility and acceleration, should we rather ask for an immobile archive as counter-memory?

This leads to a wish to arrest movement for longer intervals or at least for moments. In the age of YouTube and UbuWeb, movement itself gets archived.45 The idea of an archive in motion is a paradox: the archive is traditionally that which arrests time, which stops all motion. For 19th century historians, the archive was in its essence an institution that made it possible to access frozen sections of past time. The archive, in this sense, cannot be in motion or produce motion. But the technological developments in the 20th century have inevitably forced the archive to confront the question of mobility, both practically and conceptually. Technically the archive of motion was introduced during the late 19th century, with the scientific desire to store and analyse temporal phenomena, culminating with the phonograph and cinematography. The transition from an archive of motion to the notion of an archive in motion is associated with the advent of computer technologies and ultimately the internet, where constant transfer and updating redefine the temporality of the archival document.

Society is no longer based upon emphatic memory (as once suggested by Émile Durkheim) but on the permanent re-circulation of immediate pasts; therefore Niklas Luhmann defined society in times of technological media as a form of communication. Applied to memory agencies and especially the »digital archive,« this demands a new interpretation of its epistemological dimension. While the traditional archival format (spatial order, classification) will in many ways necessarily persist, the new archive is radically temporalised, »ephemeral,«46 multisensual, corresponding with a dynamic user culture which is less concerned with records for eternity but with order by fluctuation. New kinds of search engines develop into a new art of the archive. The online public rather uses the Google search machine than the internet portals of national libraries to get access to printed and audio-visual memory. Will Web 2.0 and the emerging Real-Time Net replace the traditional guardians of memory (archives, libraries, museums), just as internet radio and IP-TV is replacing traditional broadcasting media?

Transformations of memory’s mandate from endurance to immediacy

In Grimmelshausen’s fictitious novel Baron Münchhausens Abenteuer the sound of a trumpet, which is transient by definition, is being frozen like winter ice, to be released in spring to sound again. Presence is usually memorialised by freezing the situation, which means storing or fixing signals. Recording is converting a time function into a place function – a transformation into archival states. Traditionally nonhuman agencies of memory such as archives, libraries, and museums have been persistent over time, based upon stability of storage as opposed to the volatility of subjective or collective memory. But the present archival condition is accompanied by a radical transformation on the technological side. The unitary zero / one processing of all kind of data within one meta-medium of digital computing has the consequence that the emphasis is not only on preservation of cultural heritage anymore, but also on immediate circulation – a cybernization of memory as feedback operations. Memory in the age of electro-mathematical media has become transitory, more than ever known from so-called oral cultures. In analogy to Walter Ong’s famous analysis,*47 a kind of »second mem/orality« takes place.

The negentropic effort: Archives as extended presence

Physical entropy has been the scientific justification of the notion of an emphatic time arrow (»progress« respectively »evolution«) in history and historical discourse. This is currently being replaced by a flat, almost anachronistic temporality. Digital media tend to divest themselves completely from their material body. This transformation has a dramatic epistemological dimension: The classical carrier-based archive (material storage) becomes an e-motional archive (in electronic motion) with electromagnetic ephemerality and latency. The gain of flexibility and computability is paid with a loss of durability. When years ago the Cologne Municipal Archive building collapsed, it became apparent that most material records, though being dirty and mutilated, survived this catastrophe, astonishingly resistant against the pressure of stones and against temporal entropy; the same is still true for most analogue audiovisual storage media like early daguerreotypes. Once the signals, mechanically engraved (phonograph) or magnetically embedded (magnetophone) on a material carrier, have been transformed into digital, immaterial information, they can be (virtually losslessly) »migrated« from one storage computing system to another. Permanence and archival endurance thus is not being achieved in the traditional way any more (which has been monumental fixation, stasis so far), but by dynamic refreshing. The notion of »the material« becomes dynamic itself – as identified by Henri Bergson.48

So far the essential archival desire has been a negentropic cultural effort against cultural memory loss. But physical records themselves – be they text, sound, or images – are subject to entropy which the human eye and ear immediately notice – e.g. the material deterioration of Edison sound cylinders and magnetic video tapes. Progressively, such records become dis-continued from the present. In contrast to this, after digitisation (sampling into binary symbols), a new kind of archival permanence is achieved: As code, records become almost time-invariant, sublated from change, leading to ahistorical immediacy in the moment of re-play.49

From space-based to time-critical archives: Kairotic internet tempor(e)alities

Nowadays, with the direct coupling of the archive to online communication, a reconnection of the formerly separate archive to the cybernetics of the present takes place, shifting the archive’s epistemological status and temporality. While in former administrative practices there have been clear separations between the register (the short-time depository for administrative records which are not in current use but might at any moment be reactivated and therefore are kept in the operation room itself) and the »archive« (physically separated into a distant place for long-time legal claims), today the archive merges with the register itself. This compares with what happens within the computer itself: in the Central Processing Unit, »registers« serve to store data for intermediary calculations – not to be called an emphatic »memory« at all. Directly associated with the CPU but external to it is the working memory which stores a) actual programs and b) the data to be processed, divided into ROM (Read Only Memory) and RAM (Random Access Memory).

In media archives of sound and moving images, once the carriers are provided with a time code for nonlinear access to single frequencies and even individual pixels, memory becomes a function of its techno-mathematical encoding and compression. With increasing digitisation of traditional material records, archives are becoming time-critical. As opposed to the procedures in the institutional archive, the time it takes for access to records in the electronic archive shrinks to a momentary flash. The new focus of archival theory is its temporal disposition. Historical memory transforms into archival addresses (and more precisely URLs). According to Marshall McLuhan, this is due to the fact that archives and libraries are no longer based on the Gutenberg Galaxy of static texts, but live in an age in which streaming electrons and bits becomes the fluid technical condition of instant memorisation.

From a media-archaeological point of view, the traditional archive is deconstructed by the implications of online techniques. Since antiquity and the Renaissance, mnemotechnical storage has linked memory to space. But nowadays the residential archive as permanent storage is being replaced by dynamic temporal storage, the time-based archive as a topological place of permanent data transfer. Critically the archive transforms from storage space to storage time; only processually can it deal with streaming data in electronic systems. The archival data lose their spatial immobility the moment they are provided with a truly media-temporal index. In closed circuits of networks, the ultimate criterion for the archive – its separateness and discontinuity from actual operativity – is no longer a given. The essential feature of networked computing is its dynamic connectivity. Cyberspace is an intersection of mobile elements, which can be transferred by a series of algorithmic operations. In electronic, digital media, the classical practice of tentatively eternal storage is being replaced by dynamic storage »on the fly.« Classical archival memory has never been interactive, whereas documents in networked topologies such as Web 2.0 become time-critical for user feedback.

While emphatic memory transmission over time for relevant records has been traditionally based on the archive, electronic live transmission media, performing communication across space, by definition of their signals have been essentially memory-less. This again changed with digital communication which not only requires intermediary micro-storage in the very nature of digital calculation but also stores data on servers to networked access. In the future though, the Real-Time Web will be a set of technologies and practices which enable users to receive information as soon as it is coded, »rather than requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates.«50 Search machines like Google already perform such real-time analysis based on giant servers farms which represent the universal archive of web sites. Taking place in and being connected to »realtime« systems, technologies of memory become (trans-)mission critical. With instant messaging, the message of the medium (in McLuhan’s sense) is immediacy, which is the effect of co-presence in communication: cybertime which compresses time itself.51 The long-time chrono-emphasis of archival memory is thus being replaced by kairotic instantanisation. The core function of mirco-temporal storage devices is to let the data immediately become past. The figure of time here is the grammatical »future in the past,« based on a feedback operation.

Conflicting archival tempor(e)alities: Symbolic order versus order in fluctuation

Different from the traditional script-based institutional archive, the electrified archive (as organised by the internet) becomes radically temporalised. It is rather hypertemporal than hyperspatial, being based on the aesthetic of immediate feedback, recycling, and refresh rather than on the ideal of locked-away storage for eternity. The aesthetics of recycling, sampling, and cultural jamming is a direct function of the opening and of the online availability of multimedia archives.

Once the archive is coupled to the online economy of time, such data availability has created a cybernetic system of permanent recycling of the immediate and remote past.52

The age of electronic media generated what the art world spotted as »Fluxus,« literally: the flow (including steady-state in flow and order by disorder). Does the archive in motion lead to Fluxus? Instead of managing static words and images, Fluxus interprets life primarily in terms of music: overlayed waves, resonances, changing patterns. Leif Dahlberg (KTH Computer Science and Communication, Stockholm) actually proposes the »streaming archive.«53 With such archives-in-motion, a problem remains: How can the concept of the archive be opened to »heterochronic« experimentation and at the same time fulfil its traditional task of keeping a well-defined order intact for transmission into future memory? As symbolic order (which always implies the machinic,)54 archives are not time machines at all. They need external temporalisation to generate a sense of history. From archival statistics (memory based on scriptural archives, listings, and charts as distribution in space) we move to stochastic time series analysis (dynamic remembrance based on algorithmic signal analysis of temporal series.)55

As long as the archival records consist of strings of symbols (i. e. alphabetic writing), a cognitive distance – in spite of the auratic qualities of handwritten manuscripts or autographs – can be more or less kept, since an act of decoding has to take place which involves the cognitive apparatus. But once photography and phonography, the first apparatus-based media in its modern sense, became subject of the archive, the sense-affective, presence-generating power56 of signal-based media cuts short the distance which is a prerequisite for historical analysis, in favour of mnemonic immediacy – the electric shock.

Archives emerged with the symbolical code of writing. The symbolic code can be transmitted (now »migrated«) with a high degree of fidelity in copying, regardless of the material. Thus the symbolic code (like the genetic code), especially in the alphabet, is mostly invariant towards historical, i.e. entropic, time. Digital data, which is: »information« per definition (Norbert Wiener), are neither matter nor energy.57

Central to streaming media are the algorithms which process and compress digital media formats like sound and moving images; such algorithms are the real archive (the condition) of the digital age. Documentary science therefore has developed the notion of »logical preservation.«58 At the same time, it is search algorithms and other analytic tools which set an archive of digital data in motion as opposed to the metadata orientation for classical archival order.

Against immediate access: Archival resistance

With all that getting-in-motion of the traditional archives, let me try a counter-analysis of archival insistence as resistance. The archive might now, as a retro-effect, rediscover its virtue as institutional monument: to interrupt the ever-speeding circulation and electronic economy, to arrest and fix and maintain chosen items, thus turning floating records from relational documents (files, data) into discrete monuments again, as epoché taken out of time. Archives of physical memory media (paper records, photographic negatives, phonographic Edison cylinders and gramophone discs, celluloid film, audio and video magnetic tape) ask for limitations on access not just because of their material fragility but for epistemological protection against immediate consumption.59

Emphatic storage waiting for (re-)circulation belongs to the logic of late capitalism and thus is part of a memory economy. In a contrary way, a virtue of the traditional archive has been exactly that it was outside (historical) time. This refugium, this temporal exile from history, is in fact a kind of archival resistance against complete mobility which is the signature of modernist discourse. The old institutional archive served as a bedrock against the complete mobilisation of records, as opposed to distributed digital archives and their open access on the internet today. More and more, archives find themselves both inside and outside the Web 2.0 or »social Web« economy. A gap opens between the necessity for archival services to the public versus defending archival secrecy (the arcanum) against the discursive tyranny of open access. In becoming available online, the archive is being deprived of its traditional power: its »privacy« in the literal sense, its secrecy from public discourse. However the former archivum secretum (be it in the Roman Vatican, be it in the case of the Prussian State Archives) is not just an old-age power instrument to be overcome in favour of immediate access. The actual archival secrecy exists in a new way, hidden in technology itself.

The sound of the archive: Silence

Let us finally listen to the sound of the archive. The traditional sonospheric experience in real archives is silence; historical imagination (as expressed by the Romantic French historian Jules Michelet60) hallucinates the voices of the dead. What is the sound of silence? Albert Mayr, who calls himself a »time designer,« composes music with silence as the essential element; John Cage’s famous piano composition is performed by (non-)playing 4’33” of silence. Pure endurance is a Bergsonean time which passes. While an empty space within a painting positively endures with time, silence in acoustics is always a temporal (though negative) event itself. Historians will always remind us that there is no unmediated access to the past. But in the negative sound of the archive, its silence, we listen to the past in its truest articulation. Let us pay respect to absence instead of converting it into the spectres of a false memory.

• CTM 2013 Collapse of Time: Sonic Time Machine by Wolfgang Ernst by CTM Festival

• CTM 2013 Collapse of Time: Sonic Time Machine by Wolfgang Ernst by CTM Festival