When I download the images from my digital camera and place them into a folder on my computer, it is with the expectation that at some future point these images will be looked at. This expectation coupled with the gesture of archiving can be thought of in terms of something that Jacques Derrida speaks of in Archive Fever.
Derrida states ‘As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future.’ An archive represents in a physical way this expectation, into the future: the promise of representing the present, as the past, in the future.
It is because of this promise that one can think about the archive as a generative space. Generative means the act of generating, producing. The archive, as a promise yet to be fulfilled, is thus something that is in process. It is not something that is static or preserved. By being in process it is open to re-meaning and re-interpretation. It is something in the act of becoming.