Abstract
The prism of archival theory and practice formed on and tailored to the character of an analogue medium (materiality and technology), which dominated the global audiovisual industry until the early 2010s, cannot grasp digital artefacts due to their different materialities. Digital technologies have signalled a rupture in understanding the relationship between the audiovisual medium and the technological background. As Benoît Turquety (2014: 51) notes, “at the time of mechanisation, technique and technology were cinematic notions; in the digital era, the link between the cinema and those concepts has changed, because the paradigms have changed around them, perhaps the episteme itself.” Therefore, there is a gap between created digital artefacts and the archive paradigm based on analogue materiality – this crack is the beginning of this project. The proposal addresses the fundamental question – of what comes after the post-cinematic condition – from the view of archiving.
The artefact – the DVD menu – will be a crucial point as a case study through which the paper elaborates on the problem of digital objects' ephemerality for archival theory. How to define a digital artefact to acquire object-ness for archival theory? Or, to be more accurate, how to try to capture from the perspective of theory and practise something that is transformable, variable, and ephemeral?
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Turquety B (2014) Toward an Archaeology of the Cinema/Technology Relation: From Mechanization to ‘Digital Cinema.’ In: van den Oever A (ed) Technē/ Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 50–64.