The Technoarchive

INTRODUCTION

How has the ubiquity of digital technologies, which has rendered us all archaeologists of our own data and memories, changed the way we understand, manage, interact with and navigate archives?

We are living in a world where the ubiquitous presence of digital media has led to the creation of mass personal archives. These technologies have enabled new processes in which we as digital media users record and document every aspect of our personal lives. In an era of unprecedented information exchange across multiple different media platforms, the role of digital memory has become paramount in the storage of knowledge and personal data. It is therefore beneficial to examine the implications of this phenomena so that a deeper understanding of how to work alongside these systems can be attained. While traditional archives require a rigorous fine-tooth combing and systematic ordering of information, digital archives are navigated by data processing means. These processes are often categorised and ordered through algorithms, and happen so fast that it gives the illusion that it is taking place in real time.

The ‘technoarchive’ is a term which media theorist Wolfgang Ernst uses to describe these digital archives (Ernst 2012). They are microtemporal, meaning that they are always in transition, actively documenting in the present1. While we interact with these processes on a daily basis, rarely do we reflect on what these are and how they have drastically shifted our understanding of what it means to collect and record and ultimately, the way we manage, interact and navigate them. Furthermore, though there has been an expansive amount of research done on the effects of digitisation and digital technologies within the context of institutional archives2, very little has been done on personal digital archiving methods.

Consequently, this paper first and foremost addresses how the emergence of digital technology has recontextualised the term ‘archive’ within the phenomena in which digital media users record their lives on a daily basis. Secondly, it acts as a supporting document to unpack the areas of investigation in which my research project undertook and thus asserts my research’s value in the digital humanities field and the visual communication design discipline.

My research project speculates on how we might interact with and navigate through personal digital archives in the future, by pointing towards some of the ways we currently interact with them. It investigates what these methods and processes are by creating an impossible future for the archive that enables memories to be retained forever. Through this, the project highlights the range of different types of digital storage we currently engage with to suggest ways individuals memorialise people and objects. It also points to the volatility of digital material—how the digital, though often thought of as eternal and imperishable, is still storage and memory dependent, and is therefore as finite as the analogue.

Furthermore, the project examines how digital memory is used as a metaphor for human memory. Though the two should not be conflated with one another, an understanding of how human thought and memory employ spatial analogies to describe search and storage provides greater insight into how digital memory operates metaphorically. For this reason, my research emphasises the importance of investigating memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Moreover, it will provide context for the rationale behind particular design decisions in the exploration of the spatialisation of memory.

Desiderium is a virtual reality experience centered around a speculative personal memory archiving service that eternalises your memories in the cloud. Ultimately, the research project enables people to become more cognisant of both the capabilities and limitations of personal digital archives. While it is a creative output as an interactive experience, is first and foremost a tool I have used as a central focus for my research. It has therefore reinforced my creative practice as research and should therefore be read in the context of a design research work. For this reason, it was not intended for easy consumption as a playable entertainment game. Rather, the project serves as a point of conversation to examine how we understand, manage, interact with and navigate personal digital information. The ramifications of digital technology on modern archival practices are complex and are multifaceted. Therefore, the emergence of this unprecedented phenomenon calls for a critical examination into the treatment of these data repositories. Desiderium hopes to act as a bridge for talking about these ideas in a digestible, narrativised way. The project is thus organised around these main ideas: embodiments of memory, spatialisation of memory, digital materiality and personal digital archiving practices.

Redefining the 'archive'

In a traditional sense, archives emerged from a need and desire to preserve cultural and social memory of a place, institution or an individual (Cook & Schwartz 2002). It therefore served as a means of documenting and recording neutral, accurate scientific data and histories by archivists. While there was once a greater value in ‘securing the materiality of their documents’ (Ernst 2012, p.88), the rise of digital storage keeping has shifted our focus away from accumulating records and evidence of people and places in a chronology, to needing to preserve data for the sake of memorialising oneself. The systematic process of constructing traditional archives holds a large contrast to the creation of mass personal archives, which have rendered us all archaeologists of our own memories—the digital has enabled anybody and everybody to upload, record and ultimately memorialise their lives. From the storage of digital artefacts such as photos, documents, videos and audio in local drives, to circulating information on online spaces such as social media, messages and emails, people leave traces of their digital footprint everywhere. As this is a process that happens so quickly in such short amounts of time, the responsibility of the management of this data rests on the individual. For digital media users, the lack of knowledge on a methodical archiving process means that while they are their own archivist, a complacent attitude towards carrying out this role leads to a haphazard management of their personal data. The purpose of these digital archives are therefore designed for temporal storage in order to make information accessible, rather than focusing on a neutral and systematic documentation of histories.

While these digital archives are haphazardly managed, they are designed in particular ways that guide and suggest how an individual might go about managing their digital artefacts and therefore carry limitations. Moreover, our digital experience can also be affected by automated systems and artificial intelligence that seek to streamline our navigation through these archives. Artificial intelligence (AI) mediates the process in which we document and manage our personal digital archives. It is paramount that we are cognisant of their role in this process so that we can understand how to engage with these systems appropriately, particularly as they automate the organisation of our personal digital archives while rendering its processes as invisible and seamless as possible. As a result, AI presents the illusion that we are autonomous. The reality is that softwares are structured, and that AI and machine learning algorithms are often trained by profit-driven corporations to collect information and in turn target people with highly specific, customised content (Kapoor 2018). AI’s role to predict and curate our personal digital archives is seen as helpful and are therefore automatically deemed absolute and accurate. However, they can at times present errors in their prediction. This is usually evident where AI may sometimes miscategorise data into the wrong folders based on their object and facial recognition technology (Monin 2019). Thus, it is important to recognise that our archiving process is a collaboration of both human and non-human actors so that we can better understand how our documentation and management of personal data is mediated.

Desiderium forms a conversation around these ideas in the way it explores the capabilities of storage in software, how this affects the management of digital archives and the impact that digital media has had on the mass growth of documentation and record-keeping of daily activity. Subsequently, it is necessary to explore how non-human collaborators such as AI affect our digital experience and how these machine learning processes are trained and controlled by profit-driven corporations that collect our data for capital gain. It reexamines what an archive constitutes as and points to how this definition has been recontextualised alongside the emergence of digital archiving media.

Furthermore, since the project investigates the capabilities of digital media in the way we understand, navigate and manage our personal digital archives, it is therefore crucial to explore how these frameworks are modelled. Whilst they are created so that mass amounts of information can be understood in digestible through interfaces, their information structures are also modelled and designed. Therefore, visual communicators play an important role in the employment of media in the knowledge production process in that they design the spatial organisation and visual argument to create meaning. Drucker’s Knowledge Design: A Conceptual and Circular Challenge (2014), lays the foundation for the purpose and value of my investigations. It has also provided a framework for which I think critically in a theoretical and conceptual space about knowledge modeling. Knowledge design requires skills from media archaeologists, but also practitioners in the field of design who can apply their skills in a digital environment. The design in which they engage with is not ‘design’ in the sense of ornamenting or producing an aesthetic output, but rather as a means of ‘modeling knowledge’ (Drucker 2014). The role of visual communication designers is to thoughtfully consider how data and information should be arranged, determined by its ‘use, access, navigation, sustainability, storage, migration interoperability, networked conditions of exchange and integration, [and] search’ (Drucker 2014). The graphical expression of knowledge is then understood as carrying ‘organisational, operational, and epistemological principles’ (Drucker 2014). These knowledge modelling practices play an integral role in my exploration of personal digital archives. The development of Desiderium enabled me to carefully unpack and reflect on our current knowledge modeling systems, mainly focusing on information hierarchy, categorisation of data (particularly into folders), data taxonomy, as well as data collection and migration across multiple information networks (social media and personal local libraries containing photos, videos and audio).

CONTEXTUAL REVIEW

Digital technologies have created new processes for personal documentation, the management and sharing of personal data and memories, and for the means in which we store personal data into digital repositories. While designers such as Lucas Rizzotto and Yidan Sui investigate different material embodiments and ways to visualise memory in digital spaces, theorists such as Johanna Drucker, Wolfgang Ernst and Wendy Chun bring concerns surrounding the materiality of this digital media to the fore. These theorists argue for an adequate understanding of digital materiality so that visual communicators can design more effectively within the constraints of computation and software environments/systems. To create a more foundational understanding of the technoarchive, this section points specifically to Ernst and his writings on media archaeology.

The Technoarchive

Wolfgang Ernst’s Digital Memory and the Archive (2012) provides deep insight into the information production processes that occur in the digital realm. Ernst argues that both media users and non-human actors in digital archiving processes work together as ‘active “archaeologists” of knowledge’ (Ernst 2012, p.55). The ubiquity of technology has meant that the responsibility of the writing and curation of historical records and archives which were traditionally held accountable by archiving experts, are now in the hands of anybody and everybody. He highlights that more important than creating factual recounts and documentation of cultural and social memory, we now live in an ‘information management society’ (Ernst 2012, p.2), designed for temporal storage to make information available in the present or almost immediately. Our focus has shifted towards an archiving ‘process’ by which these digital archives store mass amounts of personal data and memories. The writing and creation of this mass data is no longer oriented around what information we are archiving, but how we manage these miniarchives. Ernst’s perspective on these shifting ideologies has enabled me to better understand how the technoarchive emerged whilst revealing how we have become our own personal data management processors.

The treatment of knowledge production and archivisation processes is significantly different with digital media compared to traditional methods of documentation. Ernst states that, unlike traditional archives, digital archives are centered around the regeneration and co-producing of information within a network of online users. Information is constantly passed around in mass virtual networks—co-produced and co-collected. However, the nature of digital media has allowed for digital information to be easily transferred, modified or deleted. As a result, we must begin to evaluate and challenge the rigour in which resources are being distributed and held accountable so that authentic accounts of the past can be upheld. More importantly, we must not only evaluate the authenticity of these documents, but be cognisant of the challenges and possibilities that the digital realm enables.

Theorists such as Johanna Drucker, Jean-Francois Blanchette and Wendy Chun shed light on the affordances of digital materiality beyond the scope of the digital’s forensic and formal material qualities. While Drucker and Blanchette point us toward a new way of looking at materiality beyond the literal, Chun explores the duality of computational data as the ‘enduring ephemeral’—that data on one hand can never fully disappear but its deterioration is an eventuality. Together, Drucker, Blanchette and Chun highlight the volatility of materials. This section provides insight into my research on what aspects of digital materiality I have been interested in exploring through my practice, using the spatialisation of memory as a way to diagrammatise my findings within a virtual reality environment.

Digital Materiality

Popular academic research and collective understanding favour the idea that the digital should be characterised as immaterial. Materiality has traditionally been understood as possessing tangible and visible qualities, and that because the digital is often seen as a collection of 0s and 1s, it therefore does not carry such physical elements (Blanchette 2011). In A Material History of Bits (2011), Blanchette offers a historical overview of digital media academics who argue for the materiality of computing. To investigate this, Blanchette points to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s study of ‘formal’ and ‘forensic’ digital information. He contends that digital information leaves behind traces of both mechanical and electronic writing. Further, in this paper, Blanchette challenges the immateriality of the digital by highlighting its effects on the physical world. While the definition of materiality relies on the notion that it must possess physical qualities, more importantly, materiality is determined by whether an entity has a cause and effect. It is the responsibility of digital humanities practitioners to highlight the impact of the digital so that people understand its growing impact on the way we interact with each other and the world. With the rise of cloud computing and other seemingly invisible processes that exist in parallel with the digital, Blanchette argues for an understanding of the material constraints of these infrastructures so that they do not remain invisible and unaccounted for. This perspective has enabled me to realise that though the experience I am designing is virtual, it still very much remains within the material realm insofar as it produces real and visible consequences on the user’s understanding of computing systems and processes.

In Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality (2009), Drucker examines how the visual is performative. Drucker argues that aesthetic expression is an event—that an entity’s formal material qualities may provide clues as to how the expression may perform. This is particularly important for me to consider in the examination of ways in which the audience of my virtual reality experience might interact with these memories, especially in how particular objects or interfaces might imply interaction and meaning. Thus Drucker’s conjecture enables me to consider how I might use diagrammatic principles to demonstrate or suggest how the memory might ‘perform’ within the space, as well as reflecting on how VR itself as a material might also prompt certain interactions.

Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Chun looks at how human memory and digital memory carry seemingly enduring qualities, yet their deterioration/destruction is an eventuality. For a memory (both human and digital) to remain alive, it must be active, relentlessly working against its propensity to fade or deteriorate. Memory must therefore undergo a constant state of repetition. Digital media is now constantly being viewed as a preservation apparatus, however, while the digital creates the illusion that it is permanent, Chun highlights the fragility and limitations of software. To illustrate, cloud computing creates the illusion that your data permanently exists elsewhere, able to be accessed at any time on any device. In my project, I debunk the misconception that digitality equates to permanent storage—the reality is that digital archives are as material as the analogue and digital data can corrupt and degenerate. Furthermore, the nature of the digital (both in terms of hardware and software), storage, by definition, implies that there is a limit to how much space there is and therefore highlights the finiteness of software.