About 110 billion humans have ever lived and 8 billion live today [1]. If the population grows exponentially, then one day there will be as many alive as ever died. Will we get a Netflix series that makes episodes faster than they can be watched? By 2021, 1 billion security cameras are projected to occupy the world [2] - one day more surface area of the world may be recorded than not. Data-hoarding and cloud backups abound. Internet archives are used to bypass censorship . When we use technology we assume that data is backed up and preserved by default. Eventually we may have quantum computers which prevent information loss in a deeper way. A world in which everything is kept by default and nothing is lost may be a world overcome by its own archive.
In “The Perverse Library” Craig Dworkin makes the point that libraries are defined more by what they omit than they contain. For example, according to early commentators the Library of Alexandria was an attempt simply to catalogue and “to collect [...] all the books in the world” [3]. The library became meaningful not by what it contained but through its loss. This destruction occurred gradually by neglect rather than fires. What if, for example, there is no possibility that Google servers ever collapse? What does the archive-world we are making look like? Is a library that is preserved infinitely a library at all?
Stone Island archives, 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdGDlMeNyoQ
12 microludes for string quartet, György Kurtág (Hagen Quartett)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCiTY3soMnb/
MC Boli composition for Medea
If the universe was infinitely repeating then our lives would turn up infinite times. Everything we decide to do becomes infinitely important if it repeats forever. In the same way, the prospect of eternal preservation changes the importance of that data. Mass recommendation algorithms increasingly take on a time-neutral perspective where past and present posts are treated the same. Old videos frequently resurface and become viral in the context of current events. Google's recommendation algorithm learns from each search, and the first ever public google search was "Gerhard Casper" [4]. So how different might our search outcomes be in 1000 years if the first ever search input was something else? Data we may consider meaningless becomes important when information is protected forever. The archive-world is a term I’m using to refer to this imagined archive of the world's information where no information is ever lost.
In “A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order” [5] Judith Flanders writes, “Alphabetical order, looked like resistance, even rebellion, against the order of divine creation. Or possibly ignorance: an author who placed angeli, angels, before deus, God, simply because A comes before D, was an author who had failed to comprehend the order of the universe.” The powerful aspect of alphabetical over logographic writing systems is that it lends itself to this kind of ordering. Flanders observes how for example in 1880 Yale College still ordered students by their families’ social statuses. The relative arbitrariness of alphabetical ordering helps to make it universally understandable. Walter Benjamin wrote “If there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue” [6].
Compared with the archive-world however, the egalitarian and accessible practise of alphabetical order seems a distant past. When information is preserved infinitely and without decay, human curation is no longer possible - only machines can navigate the archive-world.
Peter Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers, ‘56’ and ‘57’
https://youtu.be/tN9Xp3r_Nv8?t=106
Mozart Sinafonia K.364, bar 58
When the archive-world is only accessible by algorithms, to us its contents seem equally far apart. This blurring of information relationships makes its way into the public sphere. How do you debate someone who draws the opposite conclusion from your exact argument? A personal conflict is hardest to resolve when both people accuse each other of the same thing. With expansive references all at equal footing, the setting and scope of arguments broadens and so debates decline into truisms or contradictions. The connection between ideas has become so hard to disentangle that frequently people can say the same thing while meaning the opposite, (or say the opposite thing but mean the same). Take for example the end of the Trump campaign in 2016 which whispered of a Bernie-like sentiment, Trump’s criticisms of “political establishment” extended to include the corporate elite that had "robbed the working class". Or take another example - despite the absurdity of many conspiracy theories, they still consistently cite economic gain as the motivating factor - indeed we all are subject to the pressures of neoliberalism. When access to the archive-world becomes distorted, so does our ability to identify and distinguish claims in public discourse.
As the archive-world creeps into daily life our selves become embodied in places we also can’t access. I can’t reach my 40,000 iPhone photos if I stop paying Apple $1.39 USD. My mind sprawls across Google drive in scrolls of notes. I come up with sentences just by starting them out loud then finishing them like autocomplete - how much has this been shaped by Google’s own autocomplete? How can we reach a sense of freedom for ourselves when we don't even know where it all is. As the archive-world encompasses us, does the meaning and consequence of every day actions shrink? Like in the ocean beneath sea ice, light blurs equally in all directions, and we can only seek the next break to take a breath.
David Ostrowski at Triest, 2020
At the same time our information is being projected forever into the future, that same future is becoming more and more inconceivable. Yet the common belief is that more information about the world will make it more predictable. Machine Learning works from examples of inputs and outputs programmed to find a relationship between them. Using these examples of before and after we can attempt to predict what happens next. The archive-world treats the past and future equally, so the future is predicted in the same way the past is known. Still, the archive-world has a limited horizon of predictability.
David Ostrowski and Tobias Spichtig at Avant-Garde Institute Studio of Edward Krasinki, 2020
If climate collapse is inevitable, that the future will look like the world did pre-civilisation, then the least devastating way to return to that state could be to take the same path we came from there but in reverse - an undoing. Imagine global communication systems start breaking down, civil discourse fails, we reduce to theistic explanations of the world, we stop being able to form steel and other important alloys, horses rewild and agriculture begins to fail. Would we be most equipped to deal with these challenges by consulting our archives of these periods of history? Within the horizon of the archive-world, this would be the most conceivable picture of a climate collapse.
In reality, it is our modern mental landscape that is looking as difficult to survive as did the pre-civilisation physical landscape. Although the predictions of the archive-world close in on history and around us, perhaps there is a permanent break in the ice.
The alleged location of Sandy Island, New Caledonia, mapped in 1774 and undiscovered in 2012, and the bus from ‘‘Into the Wild’ being removed in June 2020
Truman at the library
Truman in ‘The Truman Show’ still has access to the real world's information but that isn’t what helps him escape the fake one. If we have no hope of navigating the ocean we are thrown into, can we travel without it? We should travel in a way that archival heterogeneity can’t capture, in a way that uses the information we don’t have rather than do. For the archive-world the past and future is no different, but for us, records of the past can be deleted and the future not. According to the sociologist Phillip Rieff in “The Mind of a Moralist” (1959) [7], if “everything could be expressed by everyone identically,” then “nothing would remain to be expressed individually” and so the ultimate activity of culture is to “prevent the expression of everything”. Or as Deleuze said “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say” [8]. Rather than progressively discovering and archiving the world, it should be constantly undiscovered, deleted and rewound so only some amount of the world is accessible at the same time. According to Walter Benjamin [9] land-art stands against the possessability of images. Where then is today's refuge from ‘possessability’? A world that is too full can't be accessed, so we should turn away.
Tobias Spichtig at SALTS gallery 2019
To travel outside the horizon of the archive-world means also keeping our own private algorithms. We should remove our footprints and burn our maps, our path not predicted but only revealed at each step. Let’s synchronise our metadata with our friends. We can make our own lines, jump over hills and fold streams. We can travel lightly, sending a letter while keeping it by our side. We should work toward a definition of a kind of information commons or landscape - that allows this freedom. In this way we can fly and balance in the air.
Hussien Chalayan paper-letter dress 1998 and Carol Christian Poell paper-rainboots 2010
Tobias Spichtig at Malta Contemporary Art, 2018
If humans left the physical world for a while, it would rewild to something like it was before us. Species could reflourish free from human contingencies. The solutions to our problems may already be in the archive-world, just not in the right arrangement. If we could fly away from our thought-archive, what would there be left to come back to? Might the archive order itself, and give us the information we need.
[1] Toshiko Kaneda, Charlotte Greenbaum, and Kaitlyn Patierno, 2019 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2019)
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billion-surveillance-cameras-forecast-to-be-watching-within-two-years-11575565402?mod=hp_listb_pos1
[3] Enslin, M. and Hadas, M., 1953. Aristeas to Philocrates (Letter of Aristeas). The American Journal of Philology, 74(2)
[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/get-rich-u
[5] Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
[6] Benjamin, Walter. and Jay, M., 2010. Unpacking My Library. San Francisco: Arion Press.
[7] Rieff, Phillip., 1961. Freud. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
[8] Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Columbia University Press.
[9] Benjamin, W., 2008. The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin Books.
Ben Macintosh is a Philosophy and Physics graduate living in Sydney/Cadigal. Ben is interested in ecological and architectural theory that points towards an ontologically diverse and compassionate future. Ben shares silly pics at https://www.instagram.com/
About 110 billion humans have ever lived and 8 billion live today [1]. If the population grows exponentially, then one day there will be as many alive as ever died. Will we get a Netflix series that makes episodes faster than they can be watched? By 2021, 1 billion security cameras are projected to occupy the world [2] - one day more surface area of the world may be recorded than not. Data-hoarding and cloud backups abound. Internet archives are used to bypass censorship . When we use technology we assume that data is backed up and preserved by default. Eventually we may have quantum computers which prevent information loss in a deeper way. A world in which everything is kept by default and nothing is lost may be a world overcome by its own archive.
In “The Perverse Library” Craig Dworkin makes the point that libraries are defined more by what they omit than they contain. For example, according to early commentators the Library of Alexandria was an attempt simply to catalogue and “to collect [...] all the books in the world” [3]. The library became meaningful not by what it contained but through its loss. This destruction occurred gradually by neglect rather than fires. What if, for example, there is no possibility that Google servers ever collapse? What does the archive-world we are making look like? Is a library that is preserved infinitely a library at all?
Stone Island archives, 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdGDlMeNyoQ
12 microludes for string quartet, György Kurtág (Hagen Quartett)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCiTY3soMnb/
MC Boli composition for Medea
If the universe was infinitely repeating then our lives would turn up infinite times. Everything we decide to do becomes infinitely important if it repeats forever. In the same way, the prospect of eternal preservation changes the importance of that data. Mass recommendation algorithms increasingly take on a time-neutral perspective where past and present posts are treated the same. Old videos frequently resurface and become viral in the context of current events. Google's recommendation algorithm learns from each search, and the first ever public google search was "Gerhard Casper" [4]. So how different might our search outcomes be in 1000 years if the first ever search input was something else? Data we may consider meaningless becomes important when information is protected forever. The archive-world is a term I’m using to refer to this imagined archive of the world's information where no information is ever lost.
In “A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order” [5] Judith Flanders writes, “Alphabetical order, looked like resistance, even rebellion, against the order of divine creation. Or possibly ignorance: an author who placed angeli, angels, before deus, God, simply because A comes before D, was an author who had failed to comprehend the order of the universe.” The powerful aspect of alphabetical over logographic writing systems is that it lends itself to this kind of ordering. Flanders observes how for example in 1880 Yale College still ordered students by their families’ social statuses. The relative arbitrariness of alphabetical ordering helps to make it universally understandable. Walter Benjamin wrote “If there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue” [6].
Compared with the archive-world however, the egalitarian and accessible practise of alphabetical order seems a distant past. When information is preserved infinitely and without decay, human curation is no longer possible - only machines can navigate the archive-world.
Peter Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers, ‘56’ and ‘57’
https://youtu.be/tN9Xp3r_Nv8?t=106
Mozart Sinafonia K.364, bar 58
When the archive-world is only accessible by algorithms, to us its contents seem equally far apart. This blurring of information relationships makes its way into the public sphere. How do you debate someone who draws the opposite conclusion from your exact argument? A personal conflict is hardest to resolve when both people accuse each other of the same thing. With expansive references all at equal footing, the setting and scope of arguments broadens and so debates decline into truisms or contradictions. The connection between ideas has become so hard to disentangle that frequently people can say the same thing while meaning the opposite, (or say the opposite thing but mean the same). Take for example the end of the Trump campaign in 2016 which whispered of a Bernie-like sentiment, Trump’s criticisms of “political establishment” extended to include the corporate elite that had "robbed the working class". Or take another example - despite the absurdity of many conspiracy theories, they still consistently cite economic gain as the motivating factor - indeed we all are subject to the pressures of neoliberalism. When access to the archive-world becomes distorted, so does our ability to identify and distinguish claims in public discourse.
As the archive-world creeps into daily life our selves become embodied in places we also can’t access. I can’t reach my 40,000 iPhone photos if I stop paying Apple $1.39 USD. My mind sprawls across Google drive in scrolls of notes. I come up with sentences just by starting them out loud then finishing them like autocomplete - how much has this been shaped by Google’s own autocomplete? How can we reach a sense of freedom for ourselves when we don't even know where it all is. As the archive-world encompasses us, does the meaning and consequence of every day actions shrink? Like in the ocean beneath sea ice, light blurs equally in all directions, and we can only seek the next break to take a breath.
David Ostrowski at Triest, 2020
At the same time our information is being projected forever into the future, that same future is becoming more and more inconceivable. Yet the common belief is that more information about the world will make it more predictable. Machine Learning works from examples of inputs and outputs programmed to find a relationship between them. Using these examples of before and after we can attempt to predict what happens next. The archive-world treats the past and future equally, so the future is predicted in the same way the past is known. Still, the archive-world has a limited horizon of predictability.
David Ostrowski and Tobias Spichtig at Avant-Garde Institute Studio of Edward Krasinki, 2020
If climate collapse is inevitable, that the future will look like the world did pre-civilisation, then the least devastating way to return to that state could be to take the same path we came from there but in reverse - an undoing. Imagine global communication systems start breaking down, civil discourse fails, we reduce to theistic explanations of the world, we stop being able to form steel and other important alloys, horses rewild and agriculture begins to fail. Would we be most equipped to deal with these challenges by consulting our archives of these periods of history? Within the horizon of the archive-world, this would be the most conceivable picture of a climate collapse.
In reality, it is our modern mental landscape that is looking as difficult to survive as did the pre-civilisation physical landscape. Although the predictions of the archive-world close in on history and around us, perhaps there is a permanent break in the ice.
The alleged location of Sandy Island, New Caledonia, mapped in 1774 and undiscovered in 2012, and the bus from ‘‘Into the Wild’ being removed in June 2020
Truman at the library
Truman in ‘The Truman Show’ still has access to the real world's information but that isn’t what helps him escape the fake one. If we have no hope of navigating the ocean we are thrown into, can we travel without it? We should travel in a way that archival heterogeneity can’t capture, in a way that uses the information we don’t have rather than do. For the archive-world the past and future is no different, but for us, records of the past can be deleted and the future not. According to the sociologist Phillip Rieff in “The Mind of a Moralist” (1959) [7], if “everything could be expressed by everyone identically,” then “nothing would remain to be expressed individually” and so the ultimate activity of culture is to “prevent the expression of everything”. Or as Deleuze said “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say” [8]. Rather than progressively discovering and archiving the world, it should be constantly undiscovered, deleted and rewound so only some amount of the world is accessible at the same time. According to Walter Benjamin [9] land-art stands against the possessability of images. Where then is today's refuge from ‘possessability’? A world that is too full can't be accessed, so we should turn away.
Tobias Spichtig at SALTS gallery 2019
To travel outside the horizon of the archive-world means also keeping our own private algorithms. We should remove our footprints and burn our maps, our path not predicted but only revealed at each step. Let’s synchronise our metadata with our friends. We can make our own lines, jump over hills and fold streams. We can travel lightly, sending a letter while keeping it by our side. We should work toward a definition of a kind of information commons or landscape - that allows this freedom. In this way we can fly and balance in the air.
Hussien Chalayan paper-letter dress 1998 and Carol Christian Poell paper-rainboots 2010
Tobias Spichtig at Malta Contemporary Art, 2018
If humans left the physical world for a while, it would rewild to something like it was before us. Species could reflourish free from human contingencies. The solutions to our problems may already be in the archive-world, just not in the right arrangement. If we could fly away from our thought-archive, what would there be left to come back to? Might the archive order itself, and give us the information we need.
[1] Toshiko Kaneda, Charlotte Greenbaum, and Kaitlyn Patierno, 2019 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2019)
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billion-surveillance-cameras-forecast-to-be-watching-within-two-years-11575565402?mod=hp_listb_pos1
[3] Enslin, M. and Hadas, M., 1953. Aristeas to Philocrates (Letter of Aristeas). The American Journal of Philology, 74(2)
[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/30/get-rich-u
[5] Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
[6] Benjamin, Walter. and Jay, M., 2010. Unpacking My Library. San Francisco: Arion Press.
[7] Rieff, Phillip., 1961. Freud. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
[8] Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Columbia University Press.
[9] Benjamin, W., 2008. The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin Books.
Ben Macintosh is a Philosophy and Physics graduate living in Sydney/Cadigal. Ben is interested in ecological and architectural theory that points towards an ontologically diverse and compassionate future. Ben shares silly pics at https://www.instagram.com/
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.