Scientists – but not only scientists – communicate through the form of positivity of their discourse, as Michel Foucault emphasised in 1969: »[This defines] a field where formal identities, thematic continuities, terminological transfers and polemical games may be able to develop. For this reason, positivity plays the role of something one could call a ›historical a priori‹« ¹ With this, Foucault describes the conditions of reality for statements; he examines an area of statements that he differentiates as a complex volume of formal and historical »a prioris«. Finally, he comes to the generic term for the discursive practices or statement systems into which the statements are placed as events or things: the archive. »The archive is, first of all, the law defining that which can be said: the system that rules the appearance of the statements as separate events.«

Much has been written about the challenging concept of the archive, both before and after Foucault, and the American philosopher Manual DeLanda also deals with this theme in the catalogue for the DEAF conference »Information is Alive« in Rotterdam. ² For Delanda, what is essential is the decisive point of the threshold – when a piece of information possesses the degree of importance that makes it worth archiving. The lower this threshold, the more general information from »normal« people – as opposed to the historiography of power – is reflected in the archives as well. Foucault no longer sees this inclusion of »true life« in historiography as a process of heroisation, but as one of objectivisation and subjectivisation. Particularly the new technologies of communication and data storage combine numerous digital data about individuals with electronic networks and archives. These days, the data on citizens stored by the Verfassungsschutz are certainly less representative than (virtually) stored credit data, data on personnel structures, or information concerning users of credit cards, the internet or mobile telephones. Here, DeLanda emphasises the new concepts of a necessary objectivisation through archived identities, whose analysis should result in a greater degree of control over the data flow of individually related information in the ever-growing archives. If, therefore, the old ideas on constructed identity still remain useful in a certain way, the facts about the archival history of the digital identity – which Foucault undertook, even if in a different way ³ – are more relevant.

The two initiators of the enterprise, Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, stress the current evidence of the transformation of traditional archive systems, in their form, structure, linearity, system and hierarchy, into immaterial databanks in which complex link and search functions replace the old systems of order: »Digital archives are unstable, plastic, living entities, like stories and rituals in oral cultures. […] The central theme of ›Information is Alive‹ is the analysis of new artistically significant and technologically surprising developments arising through the storage, linking, retrieval, transferral and entanglement of data (or perhaps material as well) that would otherwise simply remain as pure, raw information. […] We do not live in a society that uses digital archiving, but in an information society that itself forms a digital archive. Understanding the world thus means understanding what digital data processing can or cannot do.« ⁴

In addition to the introductory texts by Arjun Appadurai (about migration and the desires of collective memory), DeLanda and Sadie Plant (about knitting and ephemeral mobility), the catalogue presents data on population density, information quantities and the rapid spread of the Sapphire worm. The connotations of data knitting in archival philosophy are thus contained in social and technological data and facts related to the history of knowledge, making for a smooth transition to the art projects. These in their turn are interrupted by texts and interviews (George Dyson, Winy Maas, Ingo Günther and Antonio Damasio). Finally, Boris Groys (with the introduction to his book »Under Suspicion«), Scott Lash (interview about information flow and unintentional memory) and Ryszard Kapuscinski (about the war in Sudan) make pragmatic observations cushioned by data and statistics about endangered animals, national languages, migration and book production. In the midst of this abundance of theory is the practice: the eighteen art projects – some of a documentary or interactive character, some in the form of installations – range from very uninspired symbolism, as in Jeffrey Shaw's high-tech installation »Web of Life«, in which palm lines are scanned and presented as a 3-D projection, to simpler, committed works like the »Globe-Jungle-Project« of Yasuhiro Suzuki from Japan, in which a children's playground-globe acts as the motor and projection of an archive. A striking feature is how things, objects and information consist of small details, mostly designed for visual impact. This is also the case with George Legrady: here, personal items are scanned and transferred into a self-organised databank structure by calling up or entering data. Parallels and differences in the public are thus constructed and illustrated by random objects. The photo archive »Exactitudes« by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, which refers back to August Sander's portraits from the twenties and thirties, examines subcultural identity and collectivity and the relationship between authenticity and lies on the basis of fashion codes.

But aspects of surveillance and software control by the FBI, as in the network installation »PoliceState« by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (Radical Software Group) or the English project »Scotland Yard« by Blast Theory, based on the board game and the search for Mister X, attain their goal in a playful manner. The information flood and visual dominance to be found in urban representation, but not only there, are evident in Lev Manovich's »Soft Cinema« and Geert Muls' »100,000 Streets«. Both works highlight the clusters, patterns, speed, and indifference of a mixture between Rotterdam, Moscow, New York, Tokyo and Berlin. Finally, Ingo Günther's »Worldprocessor« is aimed at the static nature of traditional representation, again using a globe of the world as a reference to different global data and developments. The powerlessness of the statistical information in static systems is thus made beautifully visible without the use of any new media.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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