[-empyre-]real time archiving

[Timothy Murray]

>Grace,

Thanks so much for your wide ranging introductory 
post.  I am particularly fascinated by your 
emphasis on "archival disembodiment"

"Somehow, I feel that if I am
recording an event, I suffer a  kind of 
disembodiment; I stop being a participant,
to become an observer; an observer whose gaze is 
transformed when getting conscious
of the historical importance of any given 
everyday-life event. In this capturing
moment, the artist´s body and its person, is converted into an intelligent lens
through which reality translated directly into a 
digital archive, and automatically
transformed  into a memorable event in real time."

What this sounds like to me is your archival 
envelopement in something of a virtual 
prosthesis, which some might call 'thought.' 
While to some degree you're referencing various 
conditions of alienation (what Brecht called the 
alienation effect of "reporting") I also wonder 
whether the conversion of an artist's body into 
something of a lens through which reality is 
transformed into a memorable event doesn't always 
provide the envelope for thought, criticality, 
and reflection.

I often think of the digital archival moment, in 
which the subject is fused with his/her data in 
the technosphere, as staging as much a wired 
intersubjectivity as a fusion of thought and 
affect.  When we give ourselves to the "archival 
event," I think we give ourselves to the 
vicissitudes both of thought and affect through 
which we become a link within a broader digital 
machinery, "to grant interpretation," as you say, 
"the time it needs to make an event meaninful." 
A truly fascinating notion.  Thanks.

Tim
-- 
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853