Manufactured nostalgia, authentic structure

We threw a new years eve party this (last?) year. We decided early on that we wanted to have a costume party of some kind, and after tossing a few themes about with various friends we settled on one we thought would work for everyone: we would have a 90s party. Reuben and Kate’s all or nothing 90s party.

Why 90s? Most of our friends are in the 25 to 35 age group, so they were teenagers in the 90s. This is more important than you might think: because we were teenagers, the 90s was the period in our lives when we really started engaging with the world, when we became aware of music, and art, and cinema, and each-other. It was a formative period. And because we lived it, we knew all the fine details. No clichés and stereotypes. We remember exactly what we wore. We were there, man.

So: we wanted our invitation to reflect the party theme, and to act as a nostalgia trigger — something to remind our friends of the 90s, to inspire them when it came to costumes, to get them in to the right mood. We wanted it to be fun.

In the past, Kate and I have made well received video invitations for events (another party, and a wedding). This was our original plan: to collect classic 90s videos (movie trailers, TV shows, advertisements) and produce a video mash-up in the style of Liquid Television. But after some discussion we realised that no, a video wasn’t actually appropriate.

Why? Because in the 90s, amateur video production was expensive and hard. It would have been almost impossible to collect all of those videos in one location and edit them together. You couldn’t send out a video invitation to someone without posting them a videotape, let alone send them one over the dial-up internet.

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In Archive Fever ^[1], Derrida suggests that the process of archivization (consigning an external trace of an object to the archive) is determined by technological constraints such that it directly affects our reading of history. Or: we are limited in what we can capture in the archive by technological constraints. (Full disclosure: I am yet to read Archive Fever, my knowledge here is second-hand via Marlene Manoff ^[2] ).

The archivization argument seems to point to the political implications of the archivists curatorial decision: you can only add the objects that the technology will allow — “the structure of the archive determines what can be archived” ^[3] — thus determining what can be added to (and hence, retrieved from) the historical record.

But this technological limitation is also interesting when considered in the context of a layperson reading the archive, especially if he/she is reading for some kind of nostalgic gratification. The structure of the archive is laden with meaning, and the technical constraints of a period are essential markers of the authenticity of the archival object.

* * *

Ok, so what does any of this have to do with an invitation to a 90s party?

Well, we wanted to create a (loosely defined) archive: a collection of curated works, representative of the era, with the goal of manufacturing nostalgia for the 90s. But for our invitation to be an authentic nostalgic trigger, we required more than just the correct archival objects: we required the correct structure, the correct technical limitations. And this was the 90s — when we, the non-archivist laypeople, began to break the boundaries between the personal collection and the public one.

I’m talking of course about the personal “home page” — the first living archive. So, without further ado, I present to you our own attempt at manufactured nostalgia: Welcome to my home page.

1. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive fever: a Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press. ↩
2. Manoff, Marlene. 2004. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4 (1): 9-25. ↩
3. Ibid. p. 12 ↩

Two short questions

I’ve been thinking again. Well, actually, I’m a PhD student, I’m always thinking. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about personal digital archives again. And I have two questions:

What does the archive gain in the transition from physical to digital?

And, (perhaps more importantly):

What does the archive lose?

No coherent answers yet, but I thought I better note the questions down. All part of the messiness of my PhD.

Documentation, not things.

What if the video archive isn’t a ‘video archive’, but an archive of ‘events that are recorded on the videos’? What is the difference? The current Circus Oz video archive is quite literal: a cupboard full of VHS and Mini-DV tapes. But once they are digitised at stored ‘in the cloud’ (as it were), it won’t be the video-object that exists in the archive (to the extent that we can say that digital objects ‘exist’ in any real sense), what will exist in the archive is a subjective record of a performance. Or less academically: you aren’t watching ‘videos’ anymore, you are watching a certain record of someone’s perspective of an event.

Here’s how it works: There is a performance. This is a real event, verifiable, happening in the world. The events of the performance are captured on video (in some format). This video is transcoded into a series of digital copies: one ‘archive quality’ (theoretically lossless), one ‘working copy’ (optimised for web streaming) for general access, others, probably stored in the nebulous cloud. Other data is associated with this copy (archive metadata, descriptions, images). Together these make up a record of a performance: a representation of the event. Documentation, not things.

How does this change the way of thinking about a video archive and archive practice? Is it because we are not concerned with preserving objects but with preserving perspectives?

In “the serendipity of the unexpected, or why a copy is not an edition”, Sarah Werner notes a problem with the digital archiving of manuscripts: that the process of digitising a copy of a text can destroy the history of the artefact. It is common practice, for example, to leave out blank pages when digitising text:

[..] their surrogates start with the frontispiece or title page, then move to the dedication/preface/letter to the reader/start of the text. But you know what’s missing? The blank verso of the title page. Does that matter? I don’t know. It might. It depends on what you’re looking for. But you’ll never know that you might be looking for an answer that depends on that blank presence if you don’t know that it’s not there.

Regarding the video archive, this point is still relevant: the representations of performance were originally on VHS and transcoded via SAMMA, so we should keep evidence of this. Does that matter? I don’t know. It might. It would be great to be able to see who’s handwriting is on the original videotape. It depends on what you’re looking for. But regarding a performance archive, I would argue, it is not so important that physical attributes of the record object are kept, what matters is the performance itself. We also have to deal with the fact that the physical aspects of the record are actually becoming harder to preserve as all steps of the archiving process move to digital: Circus Oz are shooting digital video now, writing show reports and tape descriptions on a computer, not by hand.

This is where the ‘living’ part of the ‘living archive’ comes in: To archive a performance, we need multiple perspectives from primary sources (ie, people who were there) to be able to clearly interpret the contents of the archive. If we are concerned with a record of perspectives, not a record of objects, then allowing people to add content (memories, stories, …) to the archive makes perfect sense.

A physical history

As part of my preparation for my PhD I’ll be spending a fair amount of time over the next few months thinking about and observing how people create, record, interact with, various types of archives and histories.

An almost ubiquitous sight in Australian family homes (and possibly around the world?): The Height Chart. Usually on a door frame, usually in or near the kitchen (which is an interesting space in its own right for the interactions that it encourages).

A record of the family’s physical development – sometimes including guests, friends, even pets – the height chart feels temporary – written in pencil (because pencil sticks to paint? Or because it can be removed easily?) , each entry is temporary – soon to be superseded, out of date as soon as it is made.

It seems as much about the act of creation and comparison as it is about keeping a record: who even looks at the chart when they are not adding a new entry?

What makes the height chart interesting is that it is one of the few places where you can see a singular record of someone’s development (albeit on a very specific metric) – from childhood all the way through to adulthood. I can’t think of another. (Maybe photo album collections come close).

It is a specific and personal kind of history, attached to the frame of the building itself. You don’t take the chart with you when you move, in all likelihood it will be painted over, ready for the next family to record their progress.