Xiaoyu Ma

It began from an endless pursuance of a physical lost painting, from where the following online explosion of reproduction of this painting revealed the digital world as a boundless digital archive. 

The disappearing origin gives birth to its countless reproduction online, while these reproductions become origins of a new round of production, which makes digital archiving a completely different system from traditional archives. According to Wolfgang Ernst’s archival media theory, many of our software-based interactions include archival metaphors that traces of our personal lives can be recorded and located. It doesn’t only provide extra copies or additional explanation, but introduces possibilities that informations can be curated spatially and conceptually in another dimension, where multiple narratives have been invited to circulate, manipulate and evaluate things within this the archive, as well as the archive itself.

Music playlists. 

Email inbox.

Visitor records.

Like how Stuart Hall described as ‘a living archive’.

Digital archives are no longer informative extensions or additions to physical archives.

On the one hand, If we look back to Walter Benjamin, the mechanical reproduction of images damaged the original aura of an object or a scenario, and transformed religious meanings into exhibited values.

On the other hand, if we look to the latest discourse about NFT mania, born-digital images have led to a new realm of image production and reproduction that is exceptional to reproductions of physical images like the lost painting, and enrich the digital archive to a new degree. Not only the medium, but also the concept is freed in the digital archive. As John Berger notes in Ways of Seeing, the meaning of the mechanically reproduced image “multiplies and fragments into many meanings” which results them being the “liberated image”, emancipated. Thus, a poor image helps deconstruct the meaning contained in the image and accelerates the circulation.

Jon Rafman once said the internet contained ‘the world’s information and [made] it universally accessible and useful […] consistent with the archival notion of accumulating everything’.

Ryan Gander once curated an exhibition called “Night in the Museum” which endowed objects with initiative power of “seeing” and compelled them into a conversation with their “neighbors”. When it comes to digitalization, the conversations are expanded to unprecedented scope and depth; things are not deadly archived under indexes or in cabinets, but woven together by digital interactions.  

The digital archive is continuously growing and accumulating, while constructing and deconstructing the existing system and concept. The living archive is a combination of transient and eternity. It is inclusive with the archival notion of accumulating everything, while overwhelming with continuously updating chaos.

We are also “neighbors” that are woven into this archive. 

As audiences.

As interpreters. 

As curators. 

It is weird to use the preposition “in” when describing the access to the digital archive, for the reason that physical bodies do not enter like stepping into the archive of a museum. However, when one entering the digital archive, it is more like the individual is immersed into the archive. Our interactions with this archive are digitalized, recorded and reflected in the process of archiving.

We audience and witness of past present and future; interpret and emancipate contents and concepts, as well as the newly built links and connections between images; curate intentionally and imperceptibly, becoming part of the living archive.

The digital archiving process works like a medium which connects us and algorithm, leading the two to cooperate for better accessing to this big digital archive. Our contributions to the digital archive is the soil for algorithms to learn from, and algorithms are keys for us to open up conversations throughout the archive, which results in improvement of machines’ digital humanity and our social digital literacy. 

As a matter of fact, algorithm efficiently helps we see things with apophenia, drawing connections between unrelated things. IT IS AS WELL the audience, the interpreter and the curator. 

However, algorithm has its mechanical logics that can be hardly understood in human perspectives. The term black box is a concept lately used in digital humanity, describes the ‘arcane and unknowable’ algorithmic process between ‘inputs and outputs’. We coexisting with algorithm in the digital world means that the fade zone of understanding and misunderstanding is symbiotic to us. Our growing ability of compromise on taking a computational ground is somehow the proof of our digital literacy.

The logic of digit(a)rchiving.com can only understood by seeing from both human perspective and algorithmic perspective, which means that it is incomprehensible to either of them (including myself). Thus, during the processing of this webpage, the algorithm are trained to learn from users behavior and polish its digital humanity throughout the project; users are pushed to dive into the black box attributed to the fade zone of algorithm, and imperceptibly improve their digital literacy to address the overwhelming development of digital humanity.

Users are always welcomed to interact with and interact any elements on the page but have to beware of the traps of automatic machine identifications during this process, understanding what and how is it happening while trying to proof their human identity to these machines.

To embrace this big archive is embracing an unstable growing compound of ourselves and the digital copy of ourselves, as well as contending with imperceptible inertia brought by the mechanical and philosophical differences between those two.

When we immerse ourselves into the efficiency of how algorithms help running the digital archive, we can easily fall into the cyber vacuity of interpretation.