The fundamental tension of the archive is between shard⁄exuberance and shard⁄compression. Exuberance is not a consequence of hoarding, an accumulation of junk. Only a naive understanding of archiving prioritizes scale over information, after all, a lot of the same is not much at all. Analogously, compression is not merelythe manipulation of symbols as to find a denser representation of information.
Some representations may be compact for a first-order of meaning, yet fail to capture a latent space of possibility hidden in the source. Archiving is an act of selection: The shard⁄aim is enabling infinite use (exuberance) of finite means (compression).
In order to survive beyond a lifetime, the archive must not only archive its content, but the archival method itself. This involves the construction of a socio-technical apparatus that elucidates the selection over time. Thus, the tension between exuberance and compression is mirrored between content and form. Within the discursive frame of “tooling”, it can be restated as tension between shard⁄conviviality and shard⁄maintenance. By trading metaphors between these frames, alternating between content (what’s contained in the archive) and form (what material constitutes the archive), we can being to gesture towards a framework for the design of archives.
As object of study, few are as interesting to consider as www⁄UbuWeb. While physical archives and libraries have existed for much longer, UbuWeb is both digital and conterminous with the existence of the internet. As such, it is built on a radically different substrate to oral traditions or printed matter, one that in different moments of its history has appeared both utopian (“information wants to be free”) and dystopian (“information is stuck on shard⁄enshittified platforms”). Further, it supervenes on top of networks of actors distributed across the planet, rather than spatially cloistered.
UbuWeb began as part of the utopian impulse of the internet, and has since evolved to become an shard⁄autonomous resource: infrastructure that others depend on and help maintain, in an attempt to guarantee for each other the means for an autonomous life. A quarter century into its existence, it becomes critical to ask: what is necessary for UbuWeb to survive another quarter century?
And so the story began… Sitting at his desk, with a glass of whiskey at hand, Ken Goldsmith ripped, scanned, and torrented art to add to his collection on UbuWeb. It was performance art, an act of uncreative writing. I can hear his voice in my head, paraphrasing a conversation with Tom McCarthy — “It’s our dirty secret, the one people try to hide: all writing is patchwork.” We’ve killed the author, and with them intellectual property. Plagiarism? Ill-defined. The bib⁄ecstasy of influence overruns pretences of originality. (I picture Joyce, blinded in one eye, nearly so in the other, mumbling in sing-song, scribbling fragments, as Beckett reads to him the entry on Dublin from an encyclopedia.) The fundamental aesthetic act has always been selection: this not that.
An archive, in its purest, quasi-mathematical form, is the preservation of differences. Uniformity, a field of white noise, lacks information. All objects are identical to each other, indistinguishable. shard⁄Difference is what allows a concept to arise: the tracing of a line of topography on a paper defines a map that organizes our perceptions. If all possible lines were drawn, i.e. no selection was made, we would be no better than before. Good maps allow us to navigate complex terrain while reducing unnecessary noise. They select a finite number of differences that express the most information, that is, the largest amount of relevant options. As such, they are compendiums of difference that make a difference.
Which differences make a difference change over time. The archive must be a place where new maps can be designed and preserved. Kenneth Goldsmith is dead, and with his death, readers are birthed, the archive evolves. Surely, his name is on the cover of Duchamp is My Lawyer and rarely is UbuWeb mentioned without Kenneth’s name following suit. Yet each time that an artwork from the archive is referenced, downloaded, and remixed into a new work, differences are made to make a difference in new frames. The archive is a place of shard⁄exuberance: not of a single complex map with a universal key, but a multiplicity of maps written on top each other as palimpsest. This makes it autonomous of its creator. In response, a network of custodians arise that maintain the material infrastructure that sustains this multiplicity.
Kenneth’s most important selection was not the content of the archive, but rather its form. Kenneth chose simple tooling. There weren’t many other options at its time than hand-written HTML sent via file transfer protocol to a server linked up to the domain name resolution network. However, his stubbornness against adoption of “modern tools” has proved resilient. As a first-order effect, the shard⁄simple tooling afforded independence and ease. The activation energy low enough that Ken could begin to leave his trace on the environment, to “dwell” in Ivan Illich’s terms. The second order effect was facilitating shard⁄maintenance, “the sourball of every revolution […] who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
Simplicity, however, is not a simple matter. Simple tooling is not dumb tooling. Thinking of tools as instrumental means for achieving fixed goals fails to account for the range of improvisations and “misuses” that they afford. Rather, it is more productive to consider them as www⁄materials which define a space of expression. Here too we have the shard⁄ambition of infinite use of finite means, refracted into tensions between expressiveness and shard⁄resilience. Different shard⁄media environments select for different kinds of difference (visual, acoustic, tactile). Oral traditions are chanted through song, memorized through phrasebooks. A scribes copies a manuscript by hand, to be sent off to a distant land. Thousands of copies of a pamphlet fly off the press to be distributed. A portable document format is sent through the internet according to the transmission-control protocol.
The key decision behind the internet is prioritizing a simple shard⁄interface. The design of headers (addresses) along with an arbitrary payload of bytes appears banal, however it is essential to establishing a “narrow waist”, an interoperable standard through which different agents can collaborate. Critically for the archive, bytes are a meta-medium in which all other media can be encoded: image, audio, video, or text. The central affordance of the computer is reading and writing from this malleable substrate of bits. When combined with networking, the digital medium becomes excellent at transmission of information. At longer time scales, we call it preservation, but fundamentally the operation remains the same: reproduce the message to preserve its information. Hard drives are replicated to avoid bit-rot, and copies are distributed between peers for shard⁄redundancy.
Dematerialization has consequences. While digital interoperability allows the archive to be portable and thus resilient, the materiality of the archive, and consequently the labor required to maintain it is obscured. Physical archives assert their existence through sheer material cohesion, though even in the case of a 38-ton steel sculpture by Richard Serra, everything is temporary. Re-centering shard⁄custodians is one way of surfacing the labor behind shard⁄maintenance. Perhaps the most enduring intervention is the act of mirroring, the technical term use to describe making a replica. The burden of infrastructure is taken on explicitly, the obscured materiality made painfully apparent, and the virtues of simple tools promulgated.
An autonomous archive is one in which individuals can inscribe themselves in and depend on (conviviality), whose multiplicity of voices are maintained without collapsing into one (exuberance), guaranteed to all through networks of interdependence (maintenance), and resilient to the entropic forces of time (compression).