{"id":23274,"date":"2018-01-15T11:11:53","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T10:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=23274"},"modified":"2018-01-22T11:24:53","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T10:24:53","slug":"life-or-contributions-to-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/life-or-contributions-to-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Or, Contributions to the Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Our memory will live on in a cloud’, or so read the title chosen by Esperanza Costa for the article she published in El Pa\u00eds<\/em> on 16 October 2013, a reflection on the relations between archivists and historians who face the vast amount of information constantly being posted on social media. A number of events celebrated in recent years reveal a new perception of this device of accumulation and archive we call the cloud. I’m thinking of the Big Bang Data<\/em> exhibition held at the Centre de Cultura Contempor\u00e0nia de Barcelona in 2014, the two ‘Archives of the Common’ seminars organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda in 2015 and 2017, the ‘Archives Matter’ lecture delivered at Goldsmiths in London in 2016, the ‘Engaging with Screens: Art, Book, Archive’ conference held at Loughborough University on 31 May 2017, or the recent symposium on ‘Technologies of Accumulation’ held at the University of Barcelona on 23 November 2017.<\/p>\n

In Big Bang Data<\/em>, Jos\u00e9 Luis de Vicente presented the installation entitled From the Secret to the Monument<\/em>, that illustrates what we’re saying because it showed the image of the stretchers of this huge cloud in which our memory is supposed to continue to live: data centres or an industrial unit in Council Bluffs, a robust urban building in New York, a cathedral in Helsinki and an old paper mill refurbished by Alvar Aalto in Hamina. These places have a whole infrastructure for obtaining the energy resources that will keep the memories they preserve alive, and for their instrumentality in the political and economic fields of techno-liberalism. This is a system that is constantly urging us to release data concerning our vital condition into the cloud, and which was criticised by researcher Diana Padr\u00f3n for its predominance of positivist culture and celebratory attitudes.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

So, to say that our memory will persist in a cloud is to say that most of our activities with interconnected things will be interpreted, transported, classified and automatically archived in buildings through which we will probably never wander. And this data identifies us and legitimates different behaviour, accounts and meanings that are structured on specific information. In connection with these conditions, several ‘other’ archival projects have emerged in the art context, such as the compilation of cases of censored cultural productions in the installation and digital archive titled The File Room<\/em> (1991 – ongoing) by Antoni Muntadas, the collection kept by Alicia Framis that she presented in The Room of Forbidden Books<\/em> (2014) or the Aids Anarchive<\/em> research project by Equipo Re (Aimar Arriola, Nancy Gar\u00edn and Linda Vald\u00e9s). The materials accumulated in the form of archives by these three projects allow us to map out memories that, as stated by Gar\u00edn, wouldn’t otherwise have a place to be stored because they are not normative.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

In the film Inside Out<\/em> (2015), human memory appears as an archive of corridors lined with shelves filled with memories. New memories are entered by workers, who have previously made room for them by removing older memories, sending them down a chute that casts discarded documents into a chasm of darkness. In reference to what they cast away, one of the workers declares, ‘Nothing comes back from the dump’. Human memory is an archive and old memories that are forgotten are sent to the memory dump, like the things we discard and throw into the wastepaper basket. I may be the producer of my recollections but I won’t decide what place they will occupy in my memory, how they will be classified or whether or not they’ll end up in the memory dump. To a certain extent, the same can be said of our actions with regard to interconnected objects. Our actions generate documents that record them, like the self-storage archives that are created independently of our will when we use computers. Like the rubbers we’ve used all our lives.<\/p>\n