[-empyre-] Culturally specific archives

[Johannes Birringer]

hi all

thanks Jon for this text excerpt from your writing, and it seems you are grappling in a very interesting way with Diana Taylor's potentially confusing "so-called" juxtaposition --  between the  "archive" of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral "repertoire"  of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).  Obviously it is tempting to look at the embodied performances/performance techniques in this (second) sense of the repertoire, and am I correct I reading you as making a direct analogy between embodied cultural practices/techniques and digital media practices/machining architectures?  

could you please expand on this idea of recombinatorial "digital repertoire" ?  when you say it can dispersively (randomly?) propagate and then becomes beautifully un-controllable, are you not mixing too many metaphors now that distract or distance us from the values that were mentioned earlier when Craig tried to speak of located, localizable cultural values and protocols to preserve them? (I am also thinking of Craig's mentioning of dignity, and  Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Or is the argument you take from Taylor, and carry into the "digital culture"  a cynical one, implying that there can be no stable archives, no authentic bones, no dignity anyway, nothing to rely on, since the repertoires are always already debunking the myth that we are anything but posturing, hopelessly autistically self-referential, the us  archive generation (Yann suggests this  -- am i misunderstanding? is document documenting itself a generative process?, a perversely creative loop?)

regards
Johannes


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Taylor's use of the word "repertoire" is suggestive of the malleability of re-performed culture.  Although she notes that dancers often swear they are performing exactly the same dance as their predecessors, Taylor writes that, "as opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning." 


Taylor's repertoire is emphatically embodied rather than written, with explicit contrast to print and implied contrast to scripted media such as radio and television. Yet it is less broadcast media's dependence on *scripts* than its dependence on *hierarchy* that ties it to the conservative view of the archive as regulating adherence to the original. Open software programmers, Wikipedia contributors, and YouTube mashup filmmakers constantly script and re-script the digital repertoire; new media writing escapes the centralized control characteristic of broadcast because it is editable. Furthermore, new media are not exactly disembodied in the way that a pre-recorded show playing on a screen is disembodied. New media may be non-geographic, but they network people into active producers rather than passive consumers, and even when mediated by machines, they execute rather than represent. This means that many of the "bodies" that perform new media--a browser running JavaScript, a
 Playstation running C++, an Intel CPU running machine language--can be modified and distributed inside emulators and other virtual environments. If anything, the fact that the digital repertoire can propagate by a dispersed populace using DIY tools makes digital media even more uncontrolled than the analog repertoire.

Excerpt from the chapter "Unreliable Archivists," in Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, New Media and Social Memory (MIT Press, forthcoming)
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