Reimagining the Archive keynote presentation
by Rick Prelinger
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Keynote presentation from Reimagining the Archive conference, Nov. 12, 2010, UCLA, by Rick Prelinger.
Keynote presentation from Reimagining the Archive conference, Nov. 12, 2010, UCLA, by Rick Prelinger.
It doesn't look like the presenters notes made it through, so will post a PDF somewhere
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Is this an uninhibited efflorescence of ideas, projects, theories that will reverberate over decades to come, or is it a temporary bloom before a loss of imagination, a crisis of legitimacy, or even a clampdown?
First, may we agree on one stipulation, at least for tonight:
Let’s first get the obstacles out of the way.
You might never have asked this question, but I've thought about it a lot while making my movie Panorama Ephemera, while compiling the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco and Detroit shows, and especially while looking at raw archival material for my current film-in-progress.
Let me try saying this another way. Why does historical footage often seem to retreat into the background while contemporary imagery seizes the foreground? Why do historical images tend to appear smaller than life, while contemporary images often seem larger than life, hyperreal, more revved up?
If archival material is considered too old-fashioned, too boring, too distancing to show, or alternatively, too familiar, this won’t enhance the destination appeal of archives. And I'd worry about that.
Unfortunately the book, which is excellent, is also permeated with a discourse of loss, and a suggestion that the propagation of scarcity is inherent in the ethical archivists’ work. I do not know how we will read it in twenty, or even five years from now.
Anyway, why shouldn't moving images (especially nontheatrical ones) flow freely through the culture? Books do. Photographs do. Music does. Soon templates that describe three-dimensional objects that are ready for printing at your local Kinko’s 3-D Maker Shop will, too. The introduction of each of these forms has been accompanied by contending business models, slippage and stealing, and moral panics. But we still have our manuscripts, incunabula, photographic prints and, for many of us, our LPs.
I have no immediate answer to this question, and it would be presumptuous to pretend I did.
The problem is that archives have often abdicated any control over the material they hold and tend to serve as surrogate gatekeepers for copyright holders who support archives as long as it’s convenient to do so. Archives need to define their own interest.
The painstaking work of film preservation and restoration is already being automated.
And most archivists are latchkey children, working in isolation from the broader culture.
The alternative is that this will be done for us without our involvement. I think of the research and public librarians who guarded hundreds of millions of volumes in vain. Data is a liability, and it’s possible the artisan archivist will also be a liability if he and she do not take an active part in proposing their future. It is up to archivists to be advocates for archives.
We must instead turn ourselves into cultural producers.