I Fall Down Internet Wormholes in My Spare Time: Temporality, The Digital Archive and Perceptions of the Past
I’ve felt a shift in my research process and materials I work with in the past year. When first exploring the concept of the archive, I would trawl eBay for listings of ephemera and vintage super 8 films that caught my eye and more importantly that I could afford. However, I felt a disconnect to the physical media I was working with as my motivations were wrapped up in chasing the “coolness” of physical relics of the past. I put down the digitiser machine and went back to basics, researching on my laptop. The more I surfed the web for documentation of historical moments, the more I realised how connected I felt to the pixels of the poor-quality images I was downloading. The internet has been my classroom for a good part of my life so who am I to give that up? Of course, I feel more at home rolling around in my messy desktop filing system. My position as an artist is as someone who has not lived through most of the events I am referencing, only through the passing down of knowledge have I formed my idea of the past. I employ the term ‘post-memory’, first coined by Marienne Hirsch to describe the relationship subsequent generations have to the trauma of their forbearers only through stories, archives, and behaviours. I have expanded this definition, encompassing the concept of hauntology, to include the media’s ability to cause us to forge a relationship to the past without living through it
The internet acts as a digital storage facility, amassing an endless wealth of clutter and archival material from when it was first created, including what has been uploaded retrospectively. Indeed, there has been a software languange shift to include archival metaphors, specifically the change from ‘Delete’ and ‘Trashcan’ to ‘Archive’. Whilst there are specific sites that aim to archive, the Internet does not share the same meticulous organisation of a physical archive. Because of this, there are still billions of images that never see the light of day, tucked away in hidden folders with lengthy files names or in a corner of the web with close to zero traffic.
But who controls this chaotic archive? What causes some images to reach us over others? Does the frequent reposting a moment like the Britney Spears meltdown of 2007 make it more real over moments that don’t get the digital airtime? And does image resolution translate into value online and thus within the historical timeline? These are the questions that are constantly swimming around in my head and have become the driving motivation behind my work.
Algorithms take digital value, determined by the ability to promote engagement, into consideration when boosting content online. Hito Steyerl wrote a seminal essay titled ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’ in which they explore the world of images that have been consumed by the pixilation. They, more colourfully, describe them as an "illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image". They have been screenshotted, compressed, distributed, downloaded and reformatted until they are left now degraded and disintegrated shadows of themselves. An unavoidable byproduct of the heightened intensity of web circulation and the pirate D.I.Y nature of the public sphere, images like this fall victim to being lost within the sea of overabundance. Forgotten by the algorithm, the issue then becomes about ease. Images that are, easy to find, identify, acquire and pass on gain exposure and longevity in the brains of the masses. Unlike poor images, they stick within the collective remembrance and have an easier time becoming a part of a cultural identity. One of my favourite images on my laptop is an image of Bjork attacking a reporter after she welcomed her to Bangkok (it was later revealed that the reporter was harassing the singer). The image is dark and hard to make out, only someone who is a wizz a pop culture or spends too much time on the internet (me) would be able to identify it. There is something gorgeous about the lack of clarity and painterly composition that I’m attracted to.
Hauntology, a term coined by the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, was first used to describe the enduring legacy of Marxism in Spectres of Marx (1993). Now expanded, it has allowed much deeper research into the phenomenon of temporal return. It describes the persistence or return of elements of our social and cultural past, much like a ghost. Hauntology finds itself in a new era, in an age where temporal return has increased in speed, mediasation breathes new life, or ‘unlife’ into the specters of the past. Whilst the internet has proliferated the ability to retrieve and recall, events from the past are also in a constant state of media rearticulation. As of 2024 there are 19 films and documentaries about Princess Diana, in addition to the recent seasons of The Crown and a musical. Through this rearticulation, the past and its spectral inhabitants, such as the death of Diana, continue to grip hold of the present refusing to break the cyclical timeline. Her ghosts lives on through constant airtime and her likeness returning to us in different forms.
The gap that separates production and consumption narrows each day and material from the past often returns in a remixed form. To expand upon YouTube's role within memory studies, Garde-Hansen assesses the ways in which it provides a platform for remediated history through creative editing of archival media texts (2011: 106). Television and film archives often exist in spliced and sampled montages on the site, further blurring the links between the original and remediated outcome. The result of this archival remix culture may transform collective memory into a mosaic of media where a multiverse of past events exist in ever evolving forms (Garde-Hansen, 2011: 107). Perhaps the retelling of stories through remediation is essential to memory. However, it can be argued that it creates competitive memory and causes different versions of the past to be in conflict. I often think about this quote by Wilson from the book Save as- digital Memories:
"With the need to remember diminished, a remixing culture might create a situation where much of our daily media content has ultimately been reshaped so many times that the history of a first and second past may completely vanish altogether leaving the overversioned artefact weighted with incalculable layers of forgotten history” (Wilson 2009: 193)
To end, I feel like I must say that I am pro remix, pro bastardised image, pro pixels and pro digital haunting. I enjoy this world of the simulacrum and watching the way these images of the past get treated online and how artists use them in their work. Their fate may teach us something about collective remembering and the direction of history in the 21st century. That ‘something’ I am yet to work out.
Reference list
Derrida, J. (1993) Specters of Marx Available at: https://files.libcom.org/files/Derrida%20-%20Specters%20of%20Marx%20%20The%20State%20of%20the%20Debt,%20the%20Work%20of%20Mourning%20and%20the%20New%20International.pdf
Garde-Hansen, J. (2022) Media and memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (Media Topics : METO). doi: 10.1515/9780748647071.
Stereyl, Hito. (2009) ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, eflux, Issue 10, page 1-9. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (Accessed: 22 November 2023)
Wilson, S (2009) ‘Remixing Memory in Digital Media’, in Garde-Hansen, J. Hoskins, A. and Reading, A. Save as-- digital memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.184-197.