Louise Craven (ed.): What are Archives?: Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (2008)

“This collection of essays breaks new ground in archival studies in the UK where professional archival texts have traditionally concentrated on the how, not the why, of archival work. Studies of the theoretical role of, for example, the archive and the text or the archive and political power, have meanwhile been undertaken in other academic disciplines where there is an established forum for the discussion of related issues. This book invites the archivist to join that arena of debate, whilst appealing to all those interested in archives from other disciplines; the authors encourage archivists to step away from the practicalities of keeping archives to consider what it is they actually do in the cultural context of the early 21st century.

The wider context of technological innovation and the internet form the backdrop to this collection. The book explores change and continuity in the archival paradigm, the textual nature of archives and asks if views of manuscripts and personal papers are changing; it looks at specific developments in community archives, at concepts of identity and culture in archives and it presents the fruits of innovative studies of users of archives. Taken together, these essays, written by leading experts in the field, provide a new understanding of the role of the archive today.”

Publisher Ashgate Publishing, 2008
ISBN 0754673103, 9780754673101
196 pages
via Jo Morfin

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Frohne, Schieren, Guiton (eds.): Present Continuous Past(s): Media Art. Strategies of Presentation, Mediation and Dissemination (2005)

“With a history of more than 30 years, media art plays an increasingly important role in the international discourse on contemporary art. The reception of canonical video works and electronic media installations is however restricted to temporary and locally defined displays in museum exhibitions or confined to incomplete catalogue documentations. This volume provides a unique combination of theoretical reflections on the reproducibility, preservation of authenticity and juridical implications of emulation techniques with practical approaches to archiving methods and commercial aspects of media art’s accessibility. It is an indispensible guide to the pro’s and con’s for new forms of de-centralized systems of mediation and the growing demands for liberal rules and easy access to online-presentations of media art. Uncomparable to other current publications, the book offers a practical manual with checklists for relevant websites and content profiles of major distribution companies.”

With contributions by Ursula Frohne, Ulrike Rosenbach, Sabine Flach, Elke Bippus and Dirck Möllmann, Mona Schieren, Lydia Haustein, Dieter Daniels, Katharina Ammann, Hans D. Christ and Stan Douglas, Dennis Del Favero / Neil Brown / Jeffrey Shaw / Peter Weibel, Jean-François Guiton, Rudolf Frieling, Monika Fleischmann / Wolfgang Strauss, Rens Frommé / Sandra Fauconnier, Lori Zippay, Bart Rutten.

Edited by Ursula Frohne, Mona Schieren, Jean-Francois Guiton
Publisher Springer, Vienna, 2005
Schriftenreihe der Hochschule für Künste Bremen series, 2
ISBN 3211254684, 9783211254684
223 pages
via Jo Morfin

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PDF (updated on 2020-9-26)

Temporary Services: Designated Drivers (2011)

“A USB drive is a flash memory data storage device that is integrated with a Universal Serial Bus interface. With the invention of USB drives, digital information has become extremely portable and easy to transfer in large quantities from one computer to another. Students regularly bring their films and MP3 files to class on USB drives. Professors carry their lectures and presentations on USB drives and plug them into a school’s host computer. Files move back and forth whether there is internet access or not. And as we have seen in the recent revolutions in Egypt, and the Middle East, internet access is not guaranteed. Websites can be blocked or an oppressive government can get the whole thing turned off and taken away. Corporations can pressure governments to throttle the internet in unequal biased manners that are good for their businesses, but not individuals and communities. Still, files want to move between people. Back up plans are needed and sharing must continue. We are all creating massive digital surpluses and broadband is too limited for us to have greater, freer kinds of exchanges.

For Designated Drivers, we invited an international selection of twenty people and groups to each fill one four-gigabyte USB flash drive with material of their choosing. These drives will then be presented in exhibition spaces, attached to wall-mounted retractable laundry lines. Visitors will be able to load their own drives or laptops (or use a host computer and CDrs or DVDrs) with any of the material they would like from each of the flash drives.

The drives include images, films, audio, programs, and many publications worth of writing and graphic design. File types include: MP3, JPEG, PNG, AIFF, TIFF, PSD, WORD DOCs, PPT, MPEG, PDF, AVI,and more. The participants have included mountains of material – often at higher resolution than is commonly seen on a personal website, and in many cases material that is not duplicated online at all. Some participants have used this opportunity to present a few recent projects with great depth, while others have chosen to survey their entire creative output over more than a decade.

The contents of the flash drives in Designated Drivers are deliberately not available online from one centralized location. We want you to get out of your house. We want you to mingle, in person, with others and talk about which files look interesting to transfer and which might be more to someone else’s liking. We want to make file sharing a bit more physical, social and special again – the way that tape traders in the 1980s would duplicate music onto cassette for another another and mail amazing obscurities to each other all over the world. We also recall those who linked their VCRs together to share obscure films and concert footage. Technology has come a long way, and today we can make these exchanges without a quality loss with each generation that gets removed from the original. We can fit more copies into ever smaller packages. But we question our own growing dependence on the internet as a means of detached information exchange and want to try another approach.

This booklet is a guide to the first round of offerings. Each ‘Designated Driver’ has written an introduction to their device. We welcome you to copy whatever you like, and to further share it however you see fit. We encourage you to organize your own social file sharing situations to make this process more fun, more social, and a hell of a lot less controllable.” (organizers)

Publisher Temporary Services, April 2011
24 pages

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