A Round Table Conversation on the Future of the Archives - animated archives
A colloquium will be taking place at the Stanford Humanities Center on May 3rd to discuss the future of the archive. The purpose of the colloquium is a simple one - to share experiences and projects that are dealing with the future of the archive, the museum, the book, the document...
We need the past. Memories make us who we are. And when there are no memories we have diaries, written accounts and documents, pictures perhaps, and, above all, things. History, and who we are, lies in the material remains of the past ... in archives.
Archives - the store rooms of humanity - what has come down to the present.
Archive - a place where records are kept, a record so preserved, to place or store in an archive. The architecture of access to the remains of the past.
Archive 3.0 ?
Are we in a new phase in the history of archives?
Archive 1.0 - bureaucracy in the early state - temple and palace archives - inscription as an instrument of management.
Archive 2.0 - industrialization and digitization of archival databases - with an aim of fast, easy and open access based upon efficient dendritic classification and retrieval.
Archive 3.0 - new prosthetic architectures for the sharing of archival resources:
- animated archives
- a reemphasis on personal affective engagements with cultural memory.
Just think of the possibilities now for personalized documentation, access to information, sharing and searching of vast cultural storehouses of account, narrative, news, image, video ...
There is an emphasis here on interface - but not solely as a human factor of ergonomics or of behavioral efficiency and conceptual transparency - an issue now of richness of engagement.