The sex appeal of archives

Digital archives are sexy.

Of course dusty paper exerts an irresistible attractive force – leather-bound volumes with faded lettering, row after row, in wooden cabinets higher than a man. Naturally bringing out the slide collection again with the family around can provide some lovely moments. But in digital form archives lose nothing of their allure.

What they lose in terms of tactile pleasure they make up for in terms of dimension and depth. Just look at YouTube where everyone spends a few hours watching amusing videos. Or Flickr. Or Cobra.be naturally as otherwise you would never have found the fantastic instalments of Container or Kunstzaken again.

Everyone now knows how to use photo, text and film archives, but there is more digital material to be preserved. For example, intensive consideration is being given to how we can save games for future generations. There is still doubt among some people as to whether games are also art, but there are no two ways about the fact that they are characteristic of the generation that is growing up. Different gaming fans are trying to keep old games playable (just try the classic  PONG once) and the respected Library of Congress wants to save the consoles as well as the games themselves for future generations.

The internet itself (or rather the collection of ever-changing websites which we refer to with this term) is another challenge. What did the website of klara.be look like again last year? The “Internet Archive” is trying to provide an answer with the WaybackMachine. Just enter the website as usual and chose the correct year, and in a jiffy we can ascertain that the website of VRT in 1999 did not have particularly much to offer.

Actually it is ironic. While we digitalise physical object to save them and make them accessible, much recent digital material is being lost. Every one has lost photos at some time or has lost batches of emails due to a crashed hard disk. Digital material sometimes seems to be fleeting, despite the promise that it can be saved for eternity.

Whether we want to find our holiday photos again in 30 years time is another question. A question that I asked myself the last time my father brought out the slides from my childhood. So you can see that some things never change.

This weblog was written by Nico Verplancke and fully published on Cobra.be