Table Of ContentM e m o r y
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social ETE
IRD
V I
OT
memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, INNE
D
art, architecture, and institutions – phenomena whose persistence DD B
R LY
over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set ØU I Archives,
SNN
SDA
in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how
AE
B
AM
social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, KOLO
instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much AM
N,
D i n
up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new tech
nologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly
investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.
CONTRIBUTORS: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Technology
Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, M
Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, e
m
Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho.
o
r M o t i o n
INA BLOM is Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, y
History of Art, and Ideas, University of Oslo. TROND LUNDEMO is i
n
Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at the Department of Media M
Studies, Stockholm University. EIVIND RØSSAAK is Associate o
and the Social
t
Professor in the Research Department at the National Library of i
o
Norway. n
INA BLOM,
EDITED BY
ISBN 978-94-629-8214-7
TROND LUNDEMO AND
Amsterdam
EIVIND RØSSAAK
AUP.nl University
Press
9 789462 982147
Memory in Motion
Sean Snyder: Ad in the Chicago Tribune (Uncalculated Algorithm), October 17, 2015
Memory in Motion
Archives, Technology, and the Social
Edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak
Amsterdam University Press
The book series Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality, and Cultural Tech-
niques provides a platform for cutting edge research in the field of media culture studies
with a particular focus on the cultural impact of media technology and the materialities of
communication. The series aims to be an internationally significant and exciting opening
into emerging ideas in media theory ranging from media materialism and hardware-oriented
studies to ecology, the post-human, the study of cultural techniques, and recent contribu-
tions to media archaeology. The series revolves around key themes:
– The material underpinning of media theory
– New advances in media archaeology and media philosophy
– Studies in cultural techniques
These themes resonate with some of the most interesting debates in international media
studies, where non-representational thought, the technicity of knowledge formations
and new materialities expressed through biological and technological developments are
changing the vocabularies of cultural theory. The series is also interested in the mediatic
conditions of such theoretical ideas and developing them as media theory.
Editorial Board
– Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton)
– Anna Tuschling (Ruhr-Universitat Bochum)
– Geofffrey Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia)
Cover illustration: Ephemerol Scan, 2016. Courtesy of the Scandinavian Institute for Computation-
al Vandalism (SICV). An object from the archive of Guttorm Guttormsgaard placed on a flatbed
scanner is minutely read on various levels of resolution, which are then arbitrarily distributed
across the image. The Ephemerol Scanner turns any object into a field of fluctuating pixels and
allows you to move within and between such images through wormholes of corresponding pixels.
Cover design: Suzan Beijer
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
isbn 978 94 6298 214 7
e-isbn 978 90 4853 206 3
doi 10.5117/9789462982147
nur 670
Creative Commons License CC BY NC
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0)
All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam, 2017
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 11
Rethinking Social Memory: Archives, Technology, and the Social
Ina Blom
Oralities
Chapter One 41
‘Electrified Voices’: Non-Human Agencies of Socio-Cultural Memory
Wolfgang Ernst
Chapter Two 61
Can Languages be Saved? Linguistic Heritage and the Moving
Archive
Sónia Matos
Softwares
Chapter Three 87
Big Diff, Granularity, Incoherence, and Production in the Github
Software Repository
Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Adrian Mackenzie, Richard Mills,
and Stuart Sharples
Chapter Four 103
The Post-Archival Constellation: The Archive under the Technical
Conditions of Computational Media
David M. Berry
Lives
Chapter Five 129
Planetary Goodbyes: Post-History and Future Memories of an
Ecological Past
Jussi Parikka
Chapter Six 153
Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality
Ina Blom
Chapter Seven 183
FileLife: Constant, Kurenniemi, and the Question of Living Archives
Eivind Røssaak
Images
Chapter Eight 213
Mapping the World: Les Archives de la Planète and the Mobilization
of Memory
Trond Lundemo
Chapter Nine 237
Stills from a Film That Was Never Made: Cinema, Gesture, Memory
Pasi Väliaho
Chapter Ten 257
The Archival Promise of the Biometric Passport
Liv Hausken
Socialities
Chapter Eleven 287
A Neomonadology of Social (Memory) Production
Tiziana Terranova
Chapter Twelve 307
On the Synthesis of Social Memories
Yuk Hui
Contributors 327
Name index 329
Acknowledgements
The following publication stems from a research project called The Archive
in Motion (2011-2014), a collaboration between the University of Oslo, the
University of Stockholm, and the National Library of Norway. We are grate-
ful for the generous research funding provided by the Norwegian Research
Council and the National Library of Norway as well as the support for open
access publication provided by the University of Oslo. We would also like to
thank the many brilliant scholars who have contributed to our seminars,
lectures, and conferences – a number of whom are authors in this book – as
well as the larger academic communities at our various institutions that
have hosted our project and its activities over the years. A special thank you
is due our research assistant Ellef Prestsæter, who prepared the manuscript
for publication and organized a series of exhibitions and seminars in col-
laboration with the Archives of Guttorm Guttormsgaard. Finally, we extend
our thanks to the editors and staff at Amsterdam University Press for all
their help and support.
Ina Blom,
Trond Lundemo,
Eivind Røssaak.
