[-empyre-] Digitality, Authenticity, Decay, Memory

[Sean Rupka]

Hi Attila and Mark,

I think this may speak to aspects of both your posts so I will leave this here.

Let me echo the thanks to Quinn for organize this and quickly apologize for being a bit late to the game.

Just to riff a bit on some of your points Atilla. I think, as I understand it, I completely agree with your suggestion that memory itself, thought of as “human memory” has always been intertwined with techne, dependent on some form of prosthesis outside of ourselves to serve as referent. To this extent as well I agree that immanent to memory is it is consistently built on a lack that is compensated for through a reiteration of the relation to a past. What I mean to say, if memory is considered as a particular relation to the past, the selective nature of memory itself implies the converse as well, that every relation to a past via memory is a non-relation to an alternate past.

How might this relate to digital objects or the digitization of information? I would raise multiple questions here that I believe my interlocutors may be better positioned to comment on.

The relationship between memory and technological artifice has been problematic at least since the time of Plato. The externalization and perhaps expropriation of memory, the location of memory elsewhere in objects (memorials) could in fact be destructive. The openness of such objects as memorials has long been linked to discussions of their success or failure as memorials.

The question I would raise then vis-à-vis digital objects and memory relates directly to the question of what is the digital object and from whence does its authority emanate? The idea of digital archives for example calls to (my) mind the contradictory stances of both something eternal and unchanging but as well their ultimate fragility. This fragility has been pointed out as deriving from the nature of the medium itself (the ease of its re-writeability, erasability, as well as very real possibility for the decay/degeneration or loss of information, vulnerability to changes in technology, obsolescence). Insofar as digital objects' immateriality compared to traditional objects are free from what we generally call decay, their relation to memory itself changes. We could for example say the materiality of decaying objects has traditionally been the ironic source for their identity, by their increasing 'lack' over time of what they once were we judge their authenticity, through their decay we have some referent to the fact that two times (past and present) are bridged. Digital decay I would suggest does not act in the same way.


This being said digital mediums that by nature exist less as authoritative isolated objects and are more dependent on their relationality may allow for multiple, co-existent, even contradictory structures of memory.


I am thinking of Ernst here when I suggest that the digital realm is dependent as much upon its relationality and its structure as it is upon concrete bits of information. To bring a quote in “Ultimate knowledge (the old encyclopedia model) gives way to the principle of permanent rewriting or addition (Wikipedia) (Ernst 2013). Here memory then could be seen as ultimately formed through its reaffirmation and changed through the shifting frequency of future iterations, searches and relationships.


Now is this in and of itself radically new? Perhaps not. Memory has likely always been competitive. But there is something interesting in the shifting ontological nature of the digital object and that perhaps is due further investigation.


Further though, if what is essential for a human appropriation or extrapolation of memory from digital data which in its sheer amount far exceeds the ability of any one individual to take in at any given time (thus necessitating a certain selective forgetting but as well pointing towards an interesting gap between information and knowledge that is no doubt exacerbated by such a form) how much are we externalizing memory in a technological artifice that we, somewhat unawares, become incapable of accessing largely through our inability to process such databases? Becoming crippled under the weight of data?

Marks question here of source code as reminder seems pertinent and interesting but I need to ponder it a bit further, and I would echo his reference to Chun by quoting her from an essay I recently read (The Digital Ephemeral, 2008) “The major characteristic of digital media is memory. It’s ontology is memory…”


I feel like this may have become a rant but these were a few thoughts I had to hopefully add to the conversation.

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