Clear Signs of a Fever

A repetitive notion that I have been left with both after this week's lecture as well as reading into the notion of archives is the idea that even though one would think archiving is the way to contain the past, it is in fact the method of unveiling the future. As abstract as this sounds, I thoroughly enjoy this idea and have immediately started shredding apart all of the platforms I currently use to "archive" and realise the way in which this "calls into question the coming of the future".
The method by which archives are formed is through this concept of memory which is discussed widely by 90's philosopher Jacques Derrida who makes the vital observation on the impact of technology to its relationship with the human memory and in essence the conceptions of the archive: 

The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content...archivisation produces as much as it records the event.

Considering Derrida was writing well before the immense rise in social media he should be credited for initially identifying the impact technology was having and indeed forecasted to have on the development of archives into the future. The most obvious archival platform that springs to mind upon archive discusssion is one that I interact with on an hourly basis belongs to the real-time web (Matthew Ogle) is Facebook. Facebook as well as its predecessor, Myspace is a perfect example of a technological archive constantly recording your presence, photos and comments that you make in the cyber world. With its latest development of timeline, it makes looking back through the years to find what you were 'thinking' in 2007 simply with a click of your mouse. Derrida makes note of the concept of archive fever focusing on the idea that:

"It is to have a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement”

I can relate to this idea personally as it is through Facebook that I am able to quickly see a snapshot of my life in England in 2010. 10 years ago, the ease at which one would be able to jump back to that time in your life would be completely different to what we have today. The 'desire' will come to me at random times and it is so simple to go back through various archived photo albums or messages sent to you from that time in your life.


Another platform of which I have only recently discovered is rather new and deals with purely image archiving. It is called Pinterest and is a perfect way to accumulate various images you find on the 'real-time web' and culminate them in the one place. The purpose of the site is to allow for an archive of photos of which you can look back through at ease. The interesting thing about Pinterest which I particularly love is that there is this complete network of people from around the world that will "Pin" photos from the internet to their respective "walls" and anyone can view them and get the option to "re-pin" or "like" them. This concept of merging private and public comes back to the idea of convergence and publishing in the public arena. As an example of the brilliant ways in which Pinterest allows you to archive work I have embedded some images of my "wall" as well as my "wall feed"...

Author(s): Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(Summer, 1995), pp. 9-63, The Johns Hopkins University Press


http://julierenszer.blogspot.com.au/2008/11/archive-fever-freudian-impression-by.html


http://mattogle.com/archivefever/