Mapping images
When it comes to displaying a text, the data are already given and unambiguously identifiable (usually on the basis of a word). But what is to be done if these data still have to be generated when dealing with images. How can images be recorded formally and descriptively when so far no descriptive systems for electronic images have been developed (despite art history)? How can moving images be indexed? If images are analysed as data packages, our text-based approach takes us as far as Google shows us we can go: searching for images by examining the text associated with them. The fundamental question is: why is it still at all necessary to continue with the «structuralisticlinguistic paradigm» (cf. Wolfgang Ernst, «Beyond the Archive: Bit Mapping« of subordinating the image to the word? We do not have to address this generally in order to ask the simple question of what happens if the image, the data package or the video has no text attached to it? Any media archaeology that does not already know what it is looking for deductively but constructs classifications and relationsthrough inductive cluster analysis and iterative processes has to face these questions.
In television archives, editors are already working with the first forms of automatic video item sequencing. These software solutions work with algorithmically manufactured storyboards, so it is simple for the editors to search for material that can be used again. This pictorial analysis is not applicable only to narrative, but makes it possible to analyse any amount of visual data in relation to structures, textures, colour values and other parameters. [28] Behind this already lies the concrete practice, not just the vision, of searching for images with visual references, not on the basis of text. Images look for other images, images recognize text, especially handwriting, videos are broken down into visual indexes. In all these cases, patterns and structures help comparative analysis. These image search engines carry out a change from simple meta-data to complex annotations and to the semantics of the image. By analogy with full text searches, this could be called a full image search. [29] But what Wolfgang Ernst and Harun Farocki now call the «Visual Archive of Cinematic Topoi,» [30] following the «Encyclopedia Cinematographica» project, no longer means analysing images in terms of art history and semantics, but a surprising, unexpected algorithmic image analysis. Understanding images as data that can be ‹read› by the computer ultimately also means not just addressing images through a computer, but the individual «picture elements,» known as «pixels.» This analysis rejects semantics in favour of a media archaeology or a «technoimage archaeology that uses mathematical, intelligent machine-related agents to analyse and map images and thus create a visual grammar. One way or another, the images are registered and identified, or one might almost say, handled as if by an intelligence service. Thus mapping a process of this kind is linked with the literally archaeological concept of data-mining or displaying data.
Data-mining and the dynamic archive
The implications of profiling will not be discussed here, though the interesting feature of this for the our present context is that a mapping system functions as a recording device only when it operates ‹secretly› (heimlich), and is thus linked with the ‹uncanny› (unheimlich), as Warren Sack points out. Claus Pias also expresses a suspicion that any image search project is consciously or unconsciously part of research conducted by intelligence services or the police, and thus has some highly problematical aspects. The «Firefly-Agent,» [46] developed by Pattie Maes at the MIT Media Lab, generates patterns on the basis of simple ratings that are then presented to the user for a second rating, and possibly for a third, etc. But the subjective decisions are accompanied by data from other people who have selected similar intersections as positive. In this way, the users’ open and active participation builds up algorithmic knowledge about intersubjective preferences (here with reference to taste in music). In principle this works in precisely the same way as image results ratings in the Viper project. Behind this is the vision of a semantic network of references that was not developed according to archival, curatorial or other institutional (including police) criteria, but by the users’ saving and adjustment of the data. Here, over and above the populistic rating, the aim is also to explore meaningful contingencies via a statistical database correlation program: «In other words the machine does not know that James Taylor belongs in the «Soft Rock» corner, but only that other users who like Tracy Chapman had time for JamesTaylor.« [47]
This can also be applied to neuronal nets: they do not ‹know› the semantics of the memory path, but they adjust to previous patterns, creating coherence and cultural continuity. [48] A practice is inscribed in anarchiving program and so becomes a monument or document, both concepts that produce cultural continuity, but at the same time this act changes the practice and the social process. We are in a cybernetic system of cycles and recursive processes, similar to the self-organizing community illustrations demonstrated by the Celis or Mongrel projects.
But examining language also shows how alterity and co-presence create a possibility-space in literature or also within the psychological processes of suppression and actualization of suppressed content, a space that operates with connotations and replacements. This emphasizes the paradigmatic axes of meaning. Thus every word has a meaning-volume that—and this is important for our concept of a dynamic archive—is always realized fragmentarily and differently. [49]
Jacques Derrida goes a step further by questioning «whether contradiction between the act of memory or archiving on the one hand and suppression on the other remains irreducible. As though one could not remember and archive precisely what one is suppressing, archive it by suppressing it (as suppression is archiving).» [50] Thus the archive is no longer a ‹given›, but a process of actualization, interpretation and re-impression, as Derrida calls it. So the data collection process takes place beyond conscious ordering. Showing this in its media performance is one of the key aspects of all artistic work with databases, archives and displays.
Thinking of the archive as an open, dynamic system also means replacing the intransitive term with the transitive, and processual ‹archiving› and the ‹store› with the ‹generator›, means «[…] following a (one’s) inventory- or catalogue-structure, which is open in principle—an index form that IT long since rediscovered as a hypercard.» [51] But there is still a long way to go to an interlinked map of transmedial archiving processes, and it is a way that will always come up against the inertia of people and language. This resistance reminds us not to pursue the hubris of linking everything with everything else.
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MAL DE ARCHIVO. Una impresión freudiana
Jaccques Derrida
Conferencia pronunciada en Londres el 5 de junio de 1994 en un coloquio internacional titulado: Memory: The Question of Archives. Organizado por iniciativa de René Major y Elisabeth Roudinesco, el coloquio tuvo lugar bajo los auspicios de la Société ínternationale d’Histoire de la Psychiatrie et de la Psychanalyse, del Freud Museum y del Courtauld Institute of Art.
¿Por qué reelaborar hoy día un concepto del archivo? ¿En una sola y misma configuración, a la vez técnica y política y jurídica?
Este ensayo designa discretamente el horizonte de esta cuestión, hasta tal punto quema su evidencia. Los desastres que marcan este fin de milenio son también archivos del mal; disimulados o destruidos, prohibidos, desviados, «reprimidos». Su tratamiento es a la vez masivo y refinado en el transcurso de guerras civiles o internacionales, de manipulaciones privadas o secretas. Nunca se renuncia, es el inconsciente mismo, a apropiarse de un poder sobre el documento, sobre su posesión, su retención o su interpretación. ¿Mas a quién compete en última instancia la autoridad sobre la institución del archivo? ¿Cómo responder de las relaciones entre el memorándum, el indicio, la prueba y el testimonio? Pensemos en los debates acerca de todos los «revisionismos». Pensemos en los seismos de la historiografía, en las conmociones técnicas a lo largo de la constitución y el tratamiento de tantos «dossiers».
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