stranding

Interesting project (LifeBits).... but I think (after a skim of the PDF) again doesn't take into account the 1,000s of intangibles. It will store a lifetime's worth of data, perhaps, but what goes beyond data? The important stuff. I suppose one could tag one's data with meta-data, that helps you remember why a datum is significant, etc. but then language becomes problematic... how did you want to fold this research into stranding, Val?

what interests me in lifebits is exactly those problems - how it can store a lifetimes worth of data completely detached from memory ( or the object of memory, as evident in the coffee mug that was scanned in)

it is the compulsion to record in relation to the desire to remember that i find interesting w/ mylifebits - really i think it has nothing to do with memory(in the sense of constructing one's identity through one's past) but rather with amassing a collection of data as an affirmation of weath/importance/security

Conflicting motives for wanting to record one's life?? security is involved, but not always related to wealth. to create a presentation of oneself for others, or to create it as a means of private record, that one can reconsider later, are two very different things. ok, what I'm trying to say is that I think there is a kind of archive that is meant for one user, and another kind of archive that is meant for many users. The idea remains the same, to catalogue not as the real thing, but with an intention to compare...we catalogue to compare, to create value, to create judgement....data sits as data in storage, but data created by any sentient being in never without judgement. only the act of attributing value does archiving have meaning, in the way that we use archives today. the act of attributing value is an act of power.

In a way, the person who makes the archive sits in a grey area, both master control, the most implicated, and also the least implicated, by creating the structure of the archive, and setting it free to users, it appears to be a generous position. But is it...

but, to contradict myself, I also like to think its resolution is in the rethinking of the archive as a poetic gesture...an action that can have no use except in the doing...a null gesture that only occupies time...ahhh, that's the type of archiving I like. Wasting time willfully is the most repeated punk gesture of today.

Interesting... "null gesture".
Speaking of nullification, what about the nullification of the present, by the act of recording? Are you really present when you are recording, or no? Is the archivist ever permitted to be present? (both in the moment and in the archive.) Example: I always marvel at the scores of parents at waterparks and tourist attractions, etc. that are so busy videotaping their child, that they are having absolutely no interactions with their child. To create a home-movie archive that will be watched - by whom?
Instead of enjoying the moment, they are consumed by a compulsion to capture the moment. And then, by virtue of being behind the camera, usually erased from the record of that moment.

On another tangent, what interests me as well is the vulnerable archive - the archive that is contantly overwritten. For example, I have a profile on Friendster, and spend a few minutes every couple days updating my cryptic little statements in the "About Me" and "Who I want to meet" boxes. Once it's overwritten, it's gone...(unless I cut and paste and create my own archive). Tracking changes seems to be to very important and yet often overlooked. Maybe it is not supposed to matter in certain contexts.

Just some random thoughts inspired by this discussion...

both of the archive possiblities have something in common i think- the vulnerable archive is something of a null gesture in the constant overwriting.
but sr did you mean archiving as a poetic gesture in the personal sense ( as in for one user) or did you mean it in terms of an archive that is meant for many users, or both? the example that i think mk gives is really personal somehow, but it is accessible to several thousand ppl.
i think the idea about tracking changes is really interesting, but that seems to contradict a null gesture- a sort of rescue net for information -what do you think?

well, I think, to go back, that what I was hinting at was that the person who contributes the information to the archive has a set of reasons and intuitions, things that are not explicitly said, when they choose what to put in the archive...any contribution being a kind of summary or abstract. In that sense, the act of recording is something selected in that moment, but that only hints at something so impossible to record. when we use this abstract/archive to track changes, quite possibly it the information in the archive, which is in itself quite a void, zeroes and ones, or information with no current use, which takes on an autonomy of its own.

So, the only way to reach for an archive of greatest value is to search for the flattest way of presenting the greatest amount of information, thereby giving the information less direction, and allowing the user, in the future, the most amount of possibilities.

But, here's the paradox. Given the current direction of this blog, and this is the archive of val's doing, there is direction, and it is going somewhere, but we are sharing the archive's creation, and the archive is created by many people reacting to each other. This is already a really different kind of archive, where the user has quite deliberately left the archive as the source of the archive. How the hell could this be the same type of archiving that we were talking earlier, as the null gesture?

Well, for me, this kettle of fish is boiling...the act of archiving is a sort of null gesture, in the moment, in itself, but in the re-investing of interest, interpretation and response, is separate from the archive itself. It is funny to say this, because, well, the only point to having the archive is to re-examine it later...so it's a funny object...it only has meaning in the good faith that we will choose to invest in it later...

So the act of doing it, only for doing it in itself, is constantly undermined by this hope, this pre-thinking of the future context of the information...that's what forms most archives.

yada yada...oh, but what's really funny is the notion of erasing the archive as we go along, because it's something implicitly done when we activate archives anyways. We erase the moment the archive was made...we erase the possibilities of standing within because, like the example of the parents and the kids, the recorder has already explicitly placed themselves as outside the action. But, in this kind of archive, the source, and the archive is implicitly within on both contexts. So, right on MK, it would be really funny to use this constant erasure in the explicit sense for a forum type of archive.

Oh, I forgot...some of where this coming from is from the completely absurdist ending of "until the end of the world," the Wim Wenders film, where, at the end, when we are able to record our dreams, people spend the rest of their lives, alone, living and reliving and redreaming, their dreams. Talk about the desert of the virtual.

Interesting ref. to the Wim Wenders film...

As for future uses of the archive, it's interesting because everything exists in some kind of context. Look up any website in archive.org... you look up the sites that interest you, because you are aware of their context. I look up interaccess.org because I know the organization well and want to see what kinds of web styles and conventions they observed in the early days... how did they represent their members, etc. But I would never 'browse' or choose something random. Why? Because interaccess.org has context for me and therefore interests me.

So what use is the contextless archive?
How does one present context or meta-data to make what could be an uninteresting data set interesting?