Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies, Issue Three (2013)

This issue of the journal treats “the database [as] one of the crucial social technologies of our time. As such, it is in urgent need of technically informed critical analysis, the kind of analysis that has tended to be demoted in favour, for instance, of the more semiotically amenable exploration of the more obviously cultural widgets and interfaces of the front end of Web 2.0 technologies. Yet the history of the development of the database casts an interesting light on otherwise frequently algorithm-centric eulogies to the development of computing.” (from the Editorial)

With contributions by Michael Castelle, Evelyn Ruppert, Anne Helmond, Taina Bucher; reviews by Thor Magnusson, Harry Halpin, Håkan Råberg, Alan F. Blackwell, and Lone Koefoed Hansen.

Editorial group: Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Adrian Mackenzie
Published in November 2013
Open access
ISSN 2047-2390

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Cornelia Vismann: Files: Law and Media Technology (2000/2008)

“Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo. (What is not on file is not in the world.) Once files are reduced to the status of stylized icons on computer screens, the reign of paper files appears to be over. With the epoch of files coming to an end, we are free to examine its fundamental influence on Western institutions. From a media-theoretical point of view, subject, state, and law reveal themselves to be effects of specific record-keeping and filing practices. Files are not simply administrative tools; they mediate and process legal systems. The genealogy of the law described in Vismann’s Files ranges from the work of the Roman magistrates to the concern over one’s own file, as expressed in the context of the files kept by the East German State Security. The book concludes with a look at the computer architecture in which all the stacks, files, and registers that had already created order in medieval and early modern administrations make their reappearance.”

Originally published in German as Akten. Medientechnik und Recht, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2000

Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2008
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 080475151X, 9780804751513
187 pages

Review (Liam Cole Young, Theory, Culture & Society)

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Sven Spieker: The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008)

“The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive’s content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the “living” past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp’s “anemic archive” of readymades and El Lissitzky’s Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.

Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that resisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.

Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies—the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers us the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Art: Cultural Studies series
ISBN 0262195704, 9780262195706
219 pages

Reviews: Sas Mays (caa.reviews 2009), Andrew J. Lau (InterActions 2009).

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