Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017

This article contributes notes towards the development of a communicative approach to investigating archives. Such an approach is vital if one wishes to review features ranging from political or cultural reference points to the ecology of communication in the modern state. Through splicing together recent developments in the philosophy of mind with scientific publications on the bio-chemical cognitive process of memory, a case is presented where the archive is a useful bedrock concept when considering communication processes. A latent goal turns on the hope of sparking a renewed appreciation of archival systems and their place within the wider body of communication theory.

Contemporary remix practices in online video have flourished, due to the unprecedented access to our shared media culture that has been made possible by the databases underpinning online space. The technological and functional specificities of the database intercede our experiences in digital culture and influence how we understand our culture that increasingly occupies the database. They also influence how we express ideas about that culture through creative practices. The technological and, correspondingly, cultural significances of the database are articulated in the digitally specific remix video sub-genre, YouTube Poop. YouTube Poop relies on the database for the existing media content that it appropriates. Moreover, it narratively and aesthetically responds to the database by articulating the concepts of technological error, ahistoricism, multi-temporality, media abundance, the constant availability and the achronological, non-hierarchical, unclassified nature of media that the database has introduced to contemporary culture. In this article, the audio-visual narratives of three recent YouTube Poop videos are analysed in order to establish how they articulate the conceptual implications of the database in contemporary digital culture.

The article discusses the general history of the radio archive in Germany. Such archives were established since radio broadcasts were pre-produced. Firstly, this was the case in 1928 and led to the set-up of appropriate departments, deliberated to deliver the pre-recorded sound carriers right on time for the transmission. This is the beginning of the radio archive, which therefore at no time followed an archival idea. For this reason, even today, there are no radio archives that meet archival principles. In this respect, we propose to make the contents of the ­existing – so-called – radio archives available on the World Wide Web according to the model of UbuWeb that by now holds successful important artistic audio-visual documents for two decades.

Lossless video compression codecs such as FFV1 are currently emerging as a central organizing principle of archival practice. With reference to the perceived perfect reproducibility of digital objects, they promise to alleviate one of the great burdens of media preservation: decay. Recent large-scale international efforts to standardize lossless archival storage signalize a profound change in the relationship between loss, memory and history. This article examines the volatile status of lossless compression within cultural heritage institutions working towards format standardization. Engaging with a broader critique of contemporary archival policies, it questions the certainty with which lossless compression schemes frame decay as loss and contributes to the discussion surrounding the historicity and materiality of digitized objects and the historical value of decay for cultural heritage.

Re-use of digital archival content means interpretation; and the ability to create new and original interpretations of cultural heritage materials constitutes necessary contemporary digital and media literacy skills for any (aspiring) scholar and, by extension, informed citizen. For archives, re-use of their content results in more accessible metadata, as user-generated content has proven to be a valuable addition to traditional catalogue metadata. The Carrot is a design concept for a tool that allows its users to re-use digital archival audio-visual content and create digital narratives with the material, thereby interpreting it and adding to our understanding of the original material. By creating these narratives, new archival material is added, and the archive is thus augmented, with both the narrative and user-generated metadata. Taking the Carrot as an example, in this article we argue that digital tools for re-use of archival content provide opportunities for both users and archives and should therefore be embraced by archives. In addition, actively participating in the development of these tools gives the archives the possibility to get more tailored tools.

Film marketing materials such as trailers and posters are regarded as ephemeral, but as they have migrated online, they have become increasingly pervasive and intriguing forms, colonizing the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. The distinctions between promotion and content have become blurred, and arguably, some marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, which raises questions about the cultural value of these ephemera. In setting out to investigate what film websites contribute to the narrative ecology of the film, the award-winning promotional website for Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) promised to be a good starting point. However, the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after it began, the site disappeared. The article gives an account of a media archaeological excavation undertaken to search for D-9.com. A search led to encounters with a wide range of digital archives including the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of Web 2.0 archives such as blogs, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this journey, the article will reflect on digital archives from what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as online film marketing and promotion.