PEGGY PARSONS: Good afternoon,
everyone.
Welcome.
I'm Peggy Parsons, curator
for film,
and I'd like to welcome you
to the annual Rajiv Vaidya
lecture.
The title this year is Noisy
Archives on the Future
of Memory, and our speaker
is Rick Prelinger.
But before I introduce Rick,
I want to take a moment
to acknowledge the friends
and family of Rajiv Vaidya,
several of whom
are in the audience
today-- even though I can't see
you right now because
of the light in my eyes,
but I know you're there.
So it's through the generosity
and kindness of them
that this special fund was
established in 2001 in order
to provide a lasting, enriching,
and communal tribute to Rajiv
who was very deeply interested
in the history of cinema,
so thank you.
We're very, very grateful
to have Rick Prelinger with us
today.
Rick wears many different hats.
He's professor of film
and digital media
at the University of California,
Santa Cruz.
He's well-known as an archivist,
collector, filmmaker, author,
and self-described outsider
librarian.
In 1982, he founded
the Prelinger Archives to assure
the preservation
of ephemeral films
and ephemeral movie footage.
The definition of ephemeral,
in this case, encompasses
amateur and home movies,
advertising and educational
films,
sponsored
industrial and corporate films,
and footage that's generally
outside the scope
of conventional study.
In 2002, the Prelinger Archives
was acquired by the Library
of Congress.
Many of these films were never
actually submitted
for copyright.
Nearly half the collection
that's now in the library
is unique master materials,
and much of the rest of it
is not really
available
in any other collection.
So it's quite special.
In 2004, he co-founded
the Prelinger Library with Megan
Prelinger, and he describes
this as quote an appropriation
friendly an image rich reference
library specializing
in 19th and 20th century
historical ephemera.
And the library, which is in San
Francisco where he lives,
is in downtown San Francisco
and it's open to anyone.
Besides UC Santa Cruz, Rick--
who by the way grew up in DC--
has taught in the MFA design
program at the School of Visual
Arts in New York.
He lectures widely
on American cultural and social
history and also
cultural and intellectual
property access.
He sits on the National Film
preservation board.
He's board president
of the Internet Archive and also
the San Francisco Cinematheque.
So after his lecture today
and the Q&A,
we'll have a short break.
And then if you can stay around,
at 3:30 we're going to show
his compilation called lost
landscapes of New York, which
among other things
is a very special opportunity
to hear Rick's
live personal narration
about what we are watching
and also a chance for you
to talk out loud to the screen
if you want to.
It's quite special.
So please welcome Rick
Prelinger.
[APPLAUSE]
RICK PRELINGER: Thank you,
Peggy, for the detailed
and considerably more incisive
introduction than I usually get,
so I appreciate that.
Grateful thanks to the Vaidya
family whose generosity makes
this whole lecture possible
and the series of which it's
a part, and thanks to everyone
at the National Gallery,
especially the technical crew
whose kindness and labor
comes together to make
these programs.
And thanks to all of you
for coming today.
I can't see you.
So I'll have to find other ways
to gauge your reaction to what
I'm saying.
And what I'm going to talk
about today, I hope to venture
beyond archives as we commonly
think of them.
And in so doing,
I'm going to talk about ideas
that really only probably
a few hundred people
are thinking about right now.
So in a sense, this talk
is a bit of an experiment.
It's a bit of a provocation,
and I hope to learn
from your reactions.
We commonly think of archives
as repositories
for the cultural, social,
institutional, and family
record, right.
But rather I want to propose
today that we can begin
with what we know
and what we tend to take
for granted about archives,
about history,
and about the turn to digital
and then go further.
So today, I'm going to try
to take you on a short journey
that
is
both contrarian and speculative.
I hope you expect nothing less
from a speaker.
Today, archival materials
permeate the culture,
and old and new images intermix
in our media and in our minds.
Along with pretty much
everything else, archives have
moved from nerdy to chic,
and history has moved
into the mainstream.
More people use archives
and special collections,
and most important of all,
they're making many more
derivative works
from archival materials.
It's tempting to say
the internet made this all
possible, but it isn't just
because of the digital turn.
It has to do the way we think
about history and the way
that we feel, perhaps, more
entitled to work with history
than we might have a few years
ago.
But while archives have never
been more popular,
at the same time they're
more precarious.
Today's archivists must contend
with weaponized amnesia,
with scarce and uncertain
resources,
with technological change
and the flow
from a relentless digital fire
hose.
This is the tweezer
versus the shovel.
These are two visions
of digitally from the '50s.
Was there ever a good time
for the turn to digital?
That's impossible to answer,
but its disruptive effects are
happening at the same time
as all manner
of cultural, social, and
existential anxieties.
Climate change, this
is the California fires as
seen--
the sky as seen from my window.
Climate change, weather
extremes, politics
as performance,
dramatic maldistribution
of wealth and power just to name
a few all co-extensive
with digital disruption.
And digitality stops at nothing.
Since the 1990s, we've steadily
displaced much of our culture,
labor, and record-keeping
from the physical
to the digital domain.
Sometimes this
as simple as making
a digital copy
of a physical record.
But more often, it involves
a complex reorganization
of human activity, labor,
and experience.
This is
an authentic, unrehearsed shot
of opening up a box of home
movies.
And this is what I saw.
To be fair, I need to credit
the digital turn
for my own emergence.
My film archives were
sequestered in metal cans
sitting on high shelves
and poorly lighted rooms.
They were resistant to access.
They were difficult to watch.
They were unwieldy to repurpose.
After it became more
affordable to transfer
digitize and layer scan film
straight to digital,
we were able to make them
available online
for free downloading, viewing,
and reuse.
This changed my life,
and I hope enabled the work
of many makers
who might of not otherwise
have been able to break
through the commercial wall
to get access
to archival materials.
I really can't think
of any other archivist who has
received the kind of validation
that I have because of this.
But not everyone's experience
has been as positive as mine.
Can we unequivocally say
that digitality has changed
our lives for the better?
I don't know.
While the digital turn has
vastly enriched many of us,
it's also amplified divides,
accelerated inequalities,
elevated the possibility
of historical amnesia,
and brought us new and onerous
forms of labor.
But while I recognize the drama
of the digital turn,
I want to stop short of using
revolutionary language
like my brothers and sisters
in California
have been doing for years.
There is no light switch
between past and future,
and nothing is
either old or new.
Nothing's completely
material or immaterial.
This is the situation
that the Welsh scholar Raymond
Williams classically described
where the residual, what remains
from the past, and the emergent
what's emerging
from the future coexist
and interbreed, the residual
and the emergent.
This is especially
true in media,
because the residual is often--
sometimes always-- emergent,
and the emergent tends
towards the residual.
Old and new fuzz together.
Think of that famous shot
in Hitchcock's Vertigo that
simultaneously zooms in
and tracks backward.
I hope I've got that right.
Print is dying, but new forms
are emerging.
Old vinyl records are left
on the street
while new pressings are sold
at premium prices.
Film is simultaneously
over and in resurgence.
And like many technologies,
digital technologies
were introduced unevenly.
They were at once there and not
there.
For many years, digital tech
was associated with privilege.
It took years for computers
and broadband to percolate
downward.
Smartphones, even though they're
expensive, pierced the wall.
But even today, 11% of Americans
don't use the internet.
Digital isolation magnifies
inequalities, though there are
exceptions, such as the case
of our president
who has reportedly never sent
an email.
The digital divide was and still
is very real.
But in recent years,
we see two related trends.
Groups of less powerful people
have developed
into technological vanguards.
Two dramatic examples are youth
for whom the majority
of online experiences
are arguably designed
and African-Americans, 91%
of whom own smartphones,
Asian-Americans 94%,
Latin X people 90%.
What many people call
Black Twitter
is a cultural space
for complex performance
of identity,
as well as a powerful tool
for communication to make
social change.
And it's interesting
that black Twitter
and white Twitter
don't intersect very much.
Think of who you follow.
In a society that markets
their images
but limits their agency,
these groups have taken
on the symbolic domain
and negotiated
their own relationships with it.
And sometimes
these relationships
are reverse images of those that
exist in a social and political
world.
But at the same time,
things get funny when people's
agency is displaced
into the symbolic domain.
The old relationship
between digitally and privilege
is flipping,
and the digital domain
is increasingly associated
with powerlessness.
We're starting to see evidence
of a reverse digital divide,
a reverse digital divide.
Getting the personal attention
of a bureaucrat,
collecting and touching
artisanal objects,
writing with a nice pen,
these are privileged encounters.
The rest of the world
wrestles with touchtone menus,
disrespectful algorithms
in different online government
services, and poorly designed
websites.
And slow media is coming back
for some.
Some friends are building
an intentional community
in Mendocino County
on the northern California
coast.
They've installed fiber
on their farm, but it moves bits
very slowly.
And for a long time,
they chose to keep
their internet service
up only between 8:00
in the morning
and 5:00 in the afternoon--
inconvenience but voluntary.
Historical amnesia isn't new.
It made our country possible.
Amnesia enabled colonialism,
and it also enables
mass entertainment.
And now amnesia has become
weaponized.
We've mass digitized millions
of cultural objects,
but many of us
live in a world that rarely
references ideas or events back
beyond 1997.
And even
though historical consciousness
feels as if it's never been more
urgent, we've taken the urgency
out of history.
We target historical books
and programming to males 45
and older.
There's a joke at PBS
that that's 45 to infinity.
I don't know if there's anybody
here from PBS who can attest
to that, but there's almost
no historical programming that's
targeted at emergent youth.
A browser architecture,
your browser does a good job
of presenting small pieces
of historical insight
and small bites of evidence,
but it hasn't yet worked
out presenting complex texts
or ideas and neither have most
documentary films, frankly.
Perhaps, we'll discover
rediscover history if a crisis
makes it clear that we can't
find all the answers
in the present.
I don't know.
We've also invented new forms
of digital labor
that insidiously mask
the distinction between work
and leisure.
I toggle seamlessly between work
I'm accountable for
and the maintenance
of my social media personality.
One mode is paid,
the other unpaid, but it all
takes place in the same machine
space
and mobilizes the same mind
and body functions.
Both tire me, and as we all
know, my digital leisure creates
great value for businesses that
will indirectly sell me back
my labor that's built into goods
and services that I buy.
And the digital turn has brought
about new injuries
and caused many of us
to experience old wounds
in new ways.
They're the workers who once
worked with physical objects
whose labor and skills
are no longer needed.
There's the loss
of countless library books
and other textual materials that
are no longer
accessible in their original
forms.
Now we only see pictures
of them, and the ease
of digital access
is often countered
by an infinitely harder use
experience.
It's as if you couldn't see
paintings, only books.
There's a trauma re-experienced
by cultures that have been
marginalized for many years
and are now exposed
on the internet in ways
over which they have no control.
I'm thinking here especially
about indigenous cultures whose
traditional knowledge is shared
in ways that violate custom
and taboo.
And there's everything we read
in the press trolling
the harassment of women
and peoples of color,
the mass propagation of lies,
none of this new
but accelerated and amplified
to an unprecedented scale.
This is what I mean when I talk
of digital wounds.
But now let's talk
about a clean and spare world.
Digital emergence has given
birth to a sense
that we've moved beyond the era
in which information and culture
is principally embodied
in physical objects.
Digital emergence, we might say
that it rests on kind
of the assumption
of analog marginality.
It's very binary.
It's either, or.
And some librarians
and archivists are tasked
by their managers to clear
shelves of rarely consulted
physical materials.
This is real shelf clearing,
and it's deeply destructive.
Here are some examples
of inconvenient media
objects that are disappearing
from libraries and archives.
Many have already disappeared.
The one at the bottom, film,
is only beginning to disappear,
but I believe it will.
I mean, to be fair, quite often
the decision to digitize
and destroy or simply
to [INAUDIBLE] session
is reasonable.
In itself, it's not
a poor decision,
but we have to reckon
with the sum of many decisions
that profoundly changed the way
we reconnect-- we connect
with cultures.
There's all kinds of anxieties
that coalesce in this drive
to divest ourselves
of the physical.
For some the turn to digital
is a turn to purity, a turn away
from inconvenient, old,
disease-ridden, culturally
infected objects.
Of course, digital materials
themselves
are neither pure nor clean.
They rot.
They drop out.
They glitch.
They fall victim to format
obsolescence.
We don't yet know how
to preserve digital materials
in the long run.
Anyone who tells you they do
is pitching a product probably.
And the companies that we trust
to maintain many
of our digital materials
move on.
They disappear.
There are worries about clutter,
about hoarding.
Most normative images of living
working in communal spaces today
show environments that are
spare and open.
Storage is rationed, physical
storage.
And since most storage is
assumed to be digital,
it's generally invisible.
Media scholar, Erica
[? Michelin-- ?]
I think an unsung genius--
remarks on how we stigmatize
physical accumulation but we
reward digital hoarding.
Scott Herring's excellent book,
The Hoarders, which
unsolicited pitch,
go out and buy it.
It's a great read.
The Hoarders talks at length
about how hoarding is
stigmatized and equated
with mental distress.
And he tries to bring us back
down to earth a little bit.
We cannot let today's ideas
of clutter over-determine
tomorrow's access to history.
More fundamentally,
our attitudes towards material
objects have become infected
with what historians call
presenteeism.
We are presentists when we apply
current modes of thinking
to the past and the future.
Right now it's very tempting
to internalize the present
and to imagine a future that's
based on trends that are very
young, that haven't been with us
for very long.
It's presenteeism, for example,
to regard digitality
as the absolute negation
of physical media.
And so I love to ask
this question.
Do physical objects,
do physical cultural objects
have the right to exist?
it's an interesting question.
This-- by the way, I didn't make
this up.
That was somebody did that.
That was a prank.
This is one of the machines
at the Internet Archive
that holds hard drives.
And when you go to archive.org,
they spin for you.
The crisis ecosystem
of evidence-bearing physical
objects has become really
fascinating.
There's a displacement
and expulsion
of physical materials in favor
of digital surrogates.
It's
akin to urban gentrification.
And archivists, scholars,
and citizens, one day we're
going to have to answer for it.
We're basing entire new agendas,
phenomenological, philosophical,
scholarly agendas on one
recent technological turn that
turned to digital.
And for some reason,
we find ourselves staging
a battle
against physical materials
in order to make room
for apparent digital abundance.
But the record of daily life,
an ephemeral print culture
can be an inclusive record
of the experience of communities
often left out of mainstream
histories.
It's the record of people
in what they read, saw,
and heard.
Much of this record is physical.
It's expensive to take care of.
And questions of equity
surround the decisions
to collect or not to collect,
to retain or to divest.
Every generation,
every community
should have the right to access,
assimilate, study, and critique
the cultural heritage that
surrounds them.
If I knew what I was doing when
we started the online film
archives, which I can't really
claim I knew what I was doing,
but in the back of my mind
was this sense
that every generation had
the right to rethink
the cultural heritage
and history of the United States
through these films.
And we had to make them
available.
The freedom to uncollect
is asymmetric.
Those whose cultures are effaced
by uncollecting generally
have no say in the matter.
And by the way,
download that poster.
It's a great read.
Digital and physical materials
de-familiarize one another.
And for me, this goes a long way
to explain the value
of physical materials
and why both belong together.
de-familiarization means making
the familiar strange,
so that we can see it
with new eyes.
It means seeing something
in a different context.
It's like bringing your partner
home to the parents
for the first time
or letting a dog loose to run
in the waves and, suddenly, you
see a wild animal.
Physical objects are
remembrance objects.
They're reminders of how systems
of communication,
representation, information,
and labor function and still
work.
And interestingly enough, it's
taken the aggressive onset
of digitality
to teach us more about how
physical materials work,
about their specific
affordances,
about what physical materials
make possible.
So three experiences that I've
been involved in to help us
maybe
look
beyond simple physical virtual
binaries to redistribute power
and heal digital wounds.
This is a little preview
from List Landscapes of New York
later on today.
This is 42nd and 8th in 1946.
I'd like to cite
my own experiences here.
The three projects I'll mention
are not necessarily
world-changing models.
But they've taught me
a great deal about the potential
of passing on knowledge
in both digital and physical
modes.
It is not easy to model
new worlds,
but the cultural space is wide
open for remodeling.
For example, we can model
new modes
of cultural distribution.
It will give us a hint at what
new modes of property
distribution might look like.
We might also tackle enhancing
public memory
through restructuring
public archives.
So archives, during the 1980s,
I collected a couple 100,000
cans of historical film.
I supported this collection
by charging people to use stock
footage, which was generally
successful, but there was
a big problem.
Film is terribly inconvenient.
Those of you who've worked
with film
know about the distance
between the can and everything
else you want to do.
It's hard to bridge that gap
between the object
and the people who need
or want to use it.
It's smelly.
It's heavy.
It takes expensive machinery
to duplicate.
But when I returned
to California in 1999,
I was almost immediately drawn
into an emergent digital culture
that was nothing
like my previous experience
in New York where information
still wanted to be expensive.
When in the first 30 seconds
of our acquaintance,
Brewster Kael, the founder
of Internet Archive,
challenged me to digitize
our collection
and put it online,
I was at first wary but soon
enthusiastic.
The experience of offering
a large collection, which is now
almost 7,000 items
for unlimited and free reuse
dramatically changed my life.
It gave me a perspective that
doesn't fit neatly
into the dominant discourses
of archival practice
and librarianship.
Because suddenly anyone could
download a file, play it, share
it, or incorporate images
and sounds into their own work.
This has now been done
some hundreds of millions
of times, and there's absolutely
no way to estimate how many new
works, how many derivative works
have been made
with the collection.
We breached that commercial wall
I mentioned that separates users
and would be makers
from history.
The film collection is now
in the Library of Congress,
as Peggy mentioned, where it
will survive as long as any film
survives.
But the digital versions
circulate without limits.
There's a lot more to say
about this project, but for now
I think it's a really successful
encounter in mixing
of the physical and the digital.
This is our library in San
Francisco.
There are other kinds
of sharing.
The experience of giving away
films helped us imagine
a different kind of library.
And so my partner, Megan and I,
tried the experiment of opening
our collection of printed
materials to the public in 2004.
This project continues, and we
have space through the end
of 2021.
And we've had time to learn
a great deal.
What we've learned.
The library has become
a workshop for social reading
and collaborative work.
It's incubated countless works
of art, publications, events,
research projects.
And the key ideas that this
suggests is tied to the maker
movement, but it's not quite
like it
that many cultural institutions
might gain by thinking
of themselves
not as repositories
but as workshops,
as places where new work is made
from old collections.
And you know unusually
for a collection of print,
right, dusty books, periodicals
and print ephemera,
our patrons skew young.
They're mostly between 18
and 35.
Some of the things that happen
at the library, our interest
in starting the library
was to build a community,
but we had no idea how this
might happen.
And as it turned out community
did build around the collection.
We don't think
our main achievement has been
to build a collection, though,
it's kind of become
a great collection.
It's fostering the growth
of community.
We see about 1,200 visitors
a year and over 200 people
support the library financially
through contributions.
We don't subsidize it anymore.
We think that in these times
touching, browsing, and reading
books has become
a privileged experience.
I grew up around huge book
collections.
Relatively few people do now.
We've scanned a lot.
It's online.
And interestingly enough, people
use the physical shelves
as the index
to the digital corpus, which
is a kind of neat rehearsal
of common behavior.
So the lesson of the archives
in the library,
one is exclusively digital
the other is resolutely
analog leads me to believe
that the most exciting course
to the future lies in both
and, in embracing
digital physical hybridity
as an active and inclusive
practice,
neither one or the other,
both and.
At our library,
we found that our younger
visitors find many research
books and materials
that other libraries have
junked, popular and trade
periodicals, gov documents,
paper maps, print ephemera.
We often need to put resources
in front of people and say, look
at this.
But the value is constantly
reconfirmed that these objects
have the right to exist.
These young men are looking
at the census Atlas of 1890
produced by the Bureau
of the census, which has
a deep concern with race
and religion.
Take a look at it some time.
It's a deep object that's been
junked by many libraries.
Public assembly, so it doesn't
make much sense to talk about--
well, neither nostalgia
for the physical
nor the celebration
of digital conquest
make a lot of sense.
To take a formulation
from the artist and writer Jen
Bervin and transcode it,
it's becoming clear
that physical and digital
materials each have
different jobs to do.
And in fact, the turn to digital
has revalidated the analog.
Digital media has taught us
a great deal about how
physical media forms actually
work.
E-books have taught us to think
more about how physical books
work.
Weavers today take inspiration
from screens.
And as Austrian film curator,
Alex [? Horvath, ?]
has pointed out, the Renaissance
of Baroque era
musical instruments
is a relatively recent
phenomenon.
So there's this kind
of reverse validation,
it's a reverse understanding
where the future elucidates
the past.
What does public assembly mean?
So you're going to-- those
of you who stay till 3:30 will
experience this directly,
but I'm going to just talk
a little bit about it for those
of you who can't.
When you successfully bring
together people in a room,
what more could you do than just
show a film?
this is a topic I've been quite
interested in, because it seems
like you could do a lot more
than just show a movie.
Since 2006, I've produced
25 feature length urban history
events in San Francisco,
Detroit, Oakland, LA, and New
York.
Each one of these events, which
is in quote--
I say event instead of film--
brings together archival footage
from home movies,
studio produced outtakes,
industrial films, newsreels,
and other kind of rarely seen
ephemera.
The audience is encouraged
to talk as the event unfolds
to identify people, places,
and events, to ask questions,
to disagree with your neighbors.
Comment freely.
I'm also the MC.
These revel in images
of the past, but these are
non-nostalgic nostalgic
projects.
I want people to think
about possible urban futures.
They avoid narrative.
They avoid the character driven
structures that we associate
with mainstream documentary,
but they're quite intricate.
They've been performed over 100
times in various cities.
They've been seen by about
38,000 spectator/participants.
And unlike-- and this
is critical.
There is a lot of new work
in interactive and participatory
documentary right now,
but my work is realized
through public assembly rather
than algorithm.
People are not separated
by machines.
For a time,
I thought I was doing something
radical, but I soon realized
this is completely traditional.
In the west,
think of the Elizabethan theater
where the pits were often said
to be populated
by rowdy groundlings who
commented loudly on plays
and performers.
This is a highly engaged form
of audience interactivity
and later the theatrical space
functioned as a virtual stage
onto which racially integrated
audiences in the 19th century,
especially, perform
social relations.
As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
describes in a wonderful book,
the deterrorialized common lands
when they were taken away
from the people,
they were remapped
into the space of the theater
so that 18th
and early 19th century audience
members
didn't just go to the theater
to see a play.
They went to represent
themselves to make common space
and often common cause.
In 1803, a Boston writer
complained that the theater
didn't have bright enough
lighting during the show,
because people weren't there
just for the performance.
And when Richard the III was
performed at the Bowery theater
in New York in 1832,
over 300 audience members
swarmed the stage to assist
in slaying the tyrannical King.
So this is not your multiplex
where they tell you to turn
your phone off.
These are quintessential digital
projects.
They couldn't exist
without digital scanning,
editing and projection,
and their high definition.
Yet they're made from completely
analog sources.
They encourage people to raise
their voices in the presence
of many others.
They require making the effort
to come out to the theater,
but perhaps they lead us back
to a commons.
So a few lessons, we cannot
exclusively thrive in either
analog or digital worlds.
We might, therefore, try
to think about what it might
mean to be radically
traditionalist, to exploit
the possibilities
of physical and digital
hybridity
and materiality
as a way of remediating
are, sort of,
poorly thought out rush
to the digital.
This doesn't mean rejecting
technology.
This is not your Sunday
afternoon Luddite speech.
It might mean using technology
with greater imagination.
Do we simply retain
physical objects?
Well, physical objects have
great psychological and symbolic
power, but their existence alone
is not enough to affect power
relationships.
But objects can be shared.
They can be loaned
and exchanged.
They can be the basis
for performance
and social activity.
Community can coalesce around
collections.
We might begin by trying to,
sort of, avoid binary thinking
and thinking beyond polarities.
How could we migrate
this consciousness of hybridity
into every aspect
of our digital lives?
Could we use hybridity
as a strategy for confronting
power that manifests digitally?
Could we leverage
the reverse digital divide
and try to share physical goods
as broadly as we now distribute
digital goods?
Could we not only
use digital and analog
to de-familiarize one another
but to de-familiarize the idea
of virtual
versus physical property.
One thing is clear
that to embrace
analog digital hybridity
means honoring the dignity
and the labor of those who work
and who maintain in all modes.
It also means learning
from makers in all media
and all materials.
It means resisting a shift
of consciousness
into exclusively digital
metaphors and promoting ways
of thinking that emanate out
of physical making as well.
And it means maintaining
the records of our time
in both analog
and digital forms.
It means
being
conscious of physical place
and what it means to people,
combating the celebration
of placelessness.
The left picture is people who
might have been resisting
the redevelopment
of their neighborhood
on the Upper West Side.
It means looking up
from our keyboards
and seeing who and what are
around us.
We might avoid writing
triumphalist narratives
in advance.
Many of us
seem to be celebrating
the total victory
of the digital,
even though this hasn't yet
occurred.
How often have we heard
that we'll achieve
infinite cultural memory.
But why save everything just
because we might aspire to do
so?
There's been news
in recent years
about DNA-based storage, which
is working.
It's very slow,
but it's working.
It suggests
that all human knowledge can be
preserved in about six wine
bottles worth of DNA.
People at Microsoft Research
must have gone
to a French restaurant for lunch
the day they wrote that press
release.
But universal storage,
universal storage
is the greatest machine
for forgetting that humans ever
could imagine,
because the ability to remember
invents the right to forget.
I think this is the best
photograph I've ever taken.
I'll just come right out
and say that.
Ultimately, our era will not
be judged simply
by the evanescent digital
monuments we build,
but also
by the measurable success
of what we can fix and invent
and introduce
in the physical world.
There is really
exciting and important data
driven projects, large scale
modeling, astrophysics,
and cosmology.
But the huge projects go far
beyond moving bits around,
climate change, redistributing
resources, and so on.
And finally, we need to think
differently about archives.
Could we start to think
about archives not as places
where the record of the past
quietly rests
but where the reality
of the future where
awaits to break free?
To sort of paraphrase
and borrow a bit
from the brilliant digital
humanist Bethany Nowviskie, what
if we saw archives not just as
anchorages but also launch pads?
What if we saw archives not
simply as spaces for retrospect
but spaces for rehearsal?
Could we think about archives
and other cultural repositories
as speculative places
where we can imagine, craft,
and criticize different ways
of making community and society?
Could we make that twist where
we don't just look to archives
for the record of the past
but where we imagine
and create the record
of the future?
To me, this can work,
because archives are
both repositories of trails
followed and roads not taken.
We can look to archives
for evidence that helps us
rethink the way our world has
turned out, and we can find
many intimations
of alternate worlds.
Archives resist
triumphalist visions
of progress.
They support us when we question
whether what we now experience
is inevitable.
Archives help us question
whether the future has to be
what we are told it will be.
And at their best,
I think archives can be places
where we might try to model
alternative and utopian
arrangements of society.
And the reason I think
this works is, because we look
to archives to--
as ways they record
social arrangements
and how they've turned out.
The record that's held
in archives helps us recover
and evaluate different sorts
of social experiments.
Could we not think of archives
as places
where social arrangements are,
perhaps, drafted and worked out?
We see this today in the--
in what a number
of afrofuturists thinkers
are proposing regarding
historical archives that we
might think of archives
as containers for utopian worlds
that have never yet come
to pass.
This is true also in community
archives projects
where
alternative social arrangements
are recorded and documented.
Just as a painting, a work
of speculative fiction,
or an experimental music
composition leads us to imagine
unanticipated futures,
we could also imagine them
in the archives
or in the museum.
We do this by rediscovering
and reconsidering the past
through its evidence
and looking to the evidence
for intimations,
for hints of futures.
And today, we see that archives
are becoming more than just
collecting institutions.
They're becoming noisy sites
where community conversations
transform into theory.
This is another quote
from Bethany Nowviskie.
She says, let's move
digital libraries and archives
past the stage of lenses
for retrospect and become spaces
for projection, planning,
performance, speculation.
She talks about how afrofuturist
thinking proposes counter
insurgencies to inevitability
and points
to projects like black quantum
futurism in Philadelphia led
by Rashida Phillips
and [INAUDIBLE].
Very interesting.
Worth looking at.
And where I started thinking
this way, I was really prompted
in 2014 by communities
of archivists and thinkers
who were generating a wealth
of new thought
about what archives are
and what they could be notably
feminist identified archivists,
archivists of color,
some queer theorists,
and some community activists--
people who focus
on the future
of traditional knowledge
and traditional cultural
expression in a highly
networked world.
So much
of that current like excitement
in the archives field
stems from the Black Lives
Matter movement, which posed
an incredible challenge.
This important movement that has
left such a trace, it's mostly
recorded in social media.
And social media
is hard to save.
It can be dangerous to save.
It's certainly
complicated to save.
It proposes really
a whole new set of questions.
But archivists like Jarrett
Drake, Burgess Jules, Eric
[? Tansey, ?] Bethany Nowviskie,
Stacy Williams, Ricky Punzalan,
a host of others are proposing
radical archival figurings.
For example, they're saying
let's think
about community-driven needs
rather than just research needs.
So archives are becoming
birthplaces of new ideas
whose implications go way beyond
just how to collect records,
how to make them accessible.
The community-based record,
the informal record,
in this case, the home movie
record can be so revealing
and so important.
And we're only beginning to look
at it.
This is the [? Slabe ?] family
of Detroit who in 1959
along with the rest
of the white people
left their neighborhood when it
was blocked busted
by corrupt realtors who said you
better sell quick.
The so-called colored are moving
in.
And so they shot this movie,
because they were home movie
freaks of almost every house
on their block
up for sale in 1959, 1960.
When I first showed us
in Detroit,
I met an African-American woman
who said we moved in there.
So the oceans are rising.
And if archives are to ride
the waves, it's not going to be
as arcs that are fully
caulked to repel leaks
but as permeable wetlands that
are capable of assimilating
ebbs and flows--
archives as venues where past,
present, and future interchange
and transform one another.
In this, I think, lies
their greatest purpose,
an occasion for excitement.
And you know the digital turn
was never inevitable.
It arose through a combination
of invention, arrangement,
and social needs.
It promised people
many conveniences and also
promised great returns
to the businesses that wanted
to engage us.
It could have happened
otherwise.
And there will be other tech
revolutions that make
the digital turn seem trivial.
It is trendy to assert
that the digital, physical
conflict will inevitably resolve
in favor of the digital,
but victory is written neither
in stone nor in bets.
As we continue to realize
that production
and public discourse
and social struggle
don't easily shift
from messy and inconvenient
realities into symbolic domains,
we'll begin to reconnect what
we've so conveniently severed.
And I end with Nathaniel
Hawthorne with his story,
Earth's Holocaust,
one of the greatest
anti-war archival tales that
begins once upon a time
but whether in the time passed
or the time to come
is a matter of little
or no moment.
This wide world had become so
overburdened
with an accumulation of worn out
trumpery that the-- it's
a coincidence--
that the inhabitants determined
to rid themselves of it
by a general bonfire.
Hawthorne imagines a moment when
the world wants to clean itself
out, to rid it-- to purge itself
of its past
and build a giant bonfire.
It's a great story.
It's public domain.
You can easily find it.
Hawthorn is careful to say that
intellect itself cannot serve
for humans to distinguish right
from wrong.
Has the digital turn encouraged
librarians and cultural
custodians and decision-makers
to channel
this ethnic, purification
through simplification?
Is the iPhone doing
the same thing?
None of us can look just
to emerging technology
or just to ourselves to inform
the decisions as to what we
keep, what we throw away,
what we pay attention to.
We need to look
to our communities
and to the futures
that we hope to build.
Thank you for your attention.
[APPLAUSE]
