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thank you very much it's wonderful to be here and I'm just going to say I have a little bit of a cough so if I start coughing don't worry I'll probably survive so thanks very much so save as memory and the archive in the age of digital technologies the digital raises new issues about memory and knowledge production and transmission in the so called era of the archive technologies offer new futures for our pasts and present and the past and the present are increasingly thought through in terms of future access and preservation this temporal dislocation perfectly captures the moment in which we currently find ourselves in relation to digital technologies the feeling of not being coterminous with our time the belatedness and not there yet quality of the now as my colleague Clay Shirky puts it it's as if we were once again inhabiting the uncertainty of the early 1500s looking back at the Gutenberg era now and is easy to describe the world before the invention of the printing press in the early 1400s or after the spread of print culture in the late 1500s but what about the long transition period when people knew where they'd been but had no idea where they were headed that is where we all find ourselves now academics artists scientists publishers computer whizzes designers and economic forecasters alike the anxiety however cannot be limited to technology to weather this or that system or platform will predominate neither can we attribute it to the competing economic models brought into conflict by shifting consumer habits or the struggles for control played out in many arenas from national interests to global markets rather we know from that earlier shift from embodied oral cultures to print culture that what we know is radically altered by how we know it while embodied cultures relied on now of physical presence and relations being there together for transmission print made it possible to separate Noah from known and transmit knowledge through letters books and other documents over broad stretches of time and space in an earlier work I describe these epistemic systems as a repertoire of embodied knowledge the doing repeating and mimetic practices that are performances gestures orality movement and singing in short all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral non reproducible knowledge transferred from body to body and the archive of supposedly lasting stable objects such as books documents bones photographs and so on that theoretically resist change over time while the live nature of the repertoire confined to the ever-changing now has long lived under the sign of erasure the archive constructed and safeguarded unknowable past that could be accessed over time the different systems provoke different ways of knowing and being in the world the repertoire supports embodied cognition collective collective thinking and knowing in place where as archival culture favors rational linear and so-called objective and universal thought and individualism the rise of memory in history as differentiated categories seems to stem from the embodied documented divide but these are not static binaries or a sequential pre post but active processes two of several interrelated and confirmative systems that continually participate in the creation storage and transmission of knowledge digital technologies constitute yet another system of transmission that is rapidly complicating Western systems of knowledge raising new issues around presents temporality space embodiment sociality and memory usually associated with the repertoire and those of copyright Authority history and preservation link to the archive digital databases seemingly combine the access to vast reservoirs of materials we normally associate with with archives and the ephemerality of the live a website crash reminds us of the fragility of this technology although the digital will not replace print culture any more than print replaced embodied practice the ways in which it alters expands challenges and otherwise affects our current ways of knowing and being have not completely come into focus if the repertoire consists of embodied acts of transfer and the archive preserves and safeguards print and material culture objects what to make of the digital that displaces both bodies and objects as it transmits more information far faster and more broadly than ever before here I will argue that the digital that enables almost limitless access to information yet shifts constantly rushers in not the age of the archive nor simply a new dimension of interaction for the repertoire but something quite different that draws on and simultaneously alters both again I want to insist that the embodied the archival and the digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other we have always lived in a mixed reality the Aztecs performed elaborate ceremonies in attempts to mirror and control the powerful cosmic forces that govern their lives Suellen case argues that the medieval cathedral staged the virtual while the 17th century theatre patented its ownership of virtual space clearly the technologies of the virtual have changed more than the concept of living simultaneously in contiguous spaces losing oneself in a literary work of fiction or getting caught up in the as if nosov a performance or entering a trance state in Gundam play have long preceded the experience of living an alternate reality provided by the virtual realm online but the digital and the virtual are not interchangeable even though they often used if they were the change in technologies is profoundly significant since the late 19th century for example Kodak has socialized people into living with and using new technologies this is a 1913 photograph this camera was light enough for women to handle as they enjoyed the increasing independence mobility and leisure time of class privilege the affluent could make memories now to use later in order to sell memory as a commodity Kodak also actively promoted nostalgia as an epistemic lens the urgency of the photo rests on our knowing that the photographed object and subject will be lost that the present vanishes and that these happy moments are bound to end the nostalgia is built into the technology itself a memento mori as were the first miniature paintings of loved ones these early technology stage the vanishing now to construct a past that can be accessed or mourned and possessed as as as even the caption at some later time the pace of the socialization into the digital has accelerated vertiginous Lee as paradigms and practices shift in the storing and transmission of knowledge we are getting glimpses into the range of implications from the most practical how and where do we store materials if we want to preserve them to the most existential does the epistemic change radically alter our subjectivity or the change is qualitative or quantitative does the current shift from reasonable past ones say the transition from an oral culture to print or does the move towards digital technologies enact its own specific social and ethical presuppositions well the digital reconfigures both alive and the archival I will start with the latter the new digital era is obsessed with with archives as metaphor as place as symptom and as a logic of knowledge production transmission and preservation so why the term archive has become increasingly capacious interchangeable with save contain record upload preserve and share and with systems of organization such as collection library inventory catalog and museum archive seems to magically transcend the contradictions between open and closed democratic and elitist a fetish it covers over several contradictory and irreconcilable mechanisms of power but without understanding the power and control that underwrite the archive it's difficult to assess the political and economic implications of what is saved and what is forgotten since the are conserved as a place where official documents were filed and stored in ancient Greece the archive has been synonymous with government and power before discussing what I feel is at stake in these changing definitions and distinctions I will clarify how I understand archive an archive is simultaneously unauthorized place the physical or digital site housing collections a thing or object a collection of things the historical records and unique or representative objects marked for inclusion and a practice the logic of selection organization access and preservation over time the themes certain objects archivable place thing practice function in a mutually sustaining way the thing is nameable storable and preservable imbued with the power and authority perhaps even aura of both place and selection we know the thing is important because it has been selected to be preserved in the archive it does not matter whether the thing was made to be saved carbon copies of letters and even daily newspapers or handouts of a protest march take on a special status in the archive in turn notions of historical accuracy of authenticity authorship property including copier specialized knowledge expertise cultural relative cultural relevance and even truth are underwritten by faith in the object found in the archive the circular legitimating epistemic system again affirms the centrality of the place the archive comes to function Foucault noted not simply as the space of Annunciation but the place from which one speaks but also and primarily the law of what can be said place thing practice exists in a tightly bound connection in which each relies on the other for its authority each has a different logic and politics of making visible but why has archive gained such enormous power for better become the site of such conversations of power as we move into the digital age on one hand digital technologies offer the updated Marxist promise for the 21st century that is that we individual users now control the means of production distribution and access to information communities and online worlds while the capitalist grids and surveillance systems sustaining the digital remain if anything stronger than ever the Galit aryan and even revolutionary promise is compelling in 2006 Time magazine declared you Person of the Year because you control the Information Age YouTube invites us to broadcast ourselves Facebook allows us to share our daily lives with our community of friends Twitter provides real-time updates on where we are and what we're doing Second Life offers us a chance to design our own avatars and explore shop meet and live online in ways that perhaps can't happen in first life Philip Rosedale its founder envisions life as a project rather than an existential condition a meta verse he calls it as opposed to a universe there is no doubt about the potentially Democrat democratizing power of Internet technologies particularly as opposed to television that seemed to offer as many points of entry and navigation as there are users the role of Facebook in organizing rallies in Turkey texting by protesters demonstrating against the g20 and twittering in Iran recently indicate a level of inclusivity and immediacy in the digital that would be unthinkable in archival practice I take the contradictory complicated multivalent aspects of digital technologies as a given a necessary starting place with I am questioning however is whether digital technologies merely extend what we do in embodied and print or material cultures the repertoire and the archive into cyberspace or whether they constitute their very own system of transmission that share some of the features we are used to while moving us into a very different system of knowledge and subjectivity what is at stake in this argument in archive and repertoire I asked what was gained or lost by extending archive to include the live embodied practices measured by the knowledge regime sustained by the archive I argued fail to provide hard evidence of the past the impossibility of archiving the live came to equate absence and disappearance historical documents prove that the land belonged to the settlers not to the native populations etc the personal and political repercussions have been devastating here I posed a similar question what is gained or lost by using the word archive to describe the seemingly democratic participatory non-specialized readily available uploading publication and access to materials in cyberspace some digital archives function much in the way brick-and-mortar archives do the hemispheric institute's digital video library hid BL that I helped create is an online archive hid VL is a growing online repository of some 600 hours of non downloadable streaming videos of performance from throughout the Americas it's free and accessible for viewing hid BL started in the early days of online video archiving in 2000 as a special collection of NYU's libraries and will be made and will be maintained for a very long time each video for each our video cost more than a thousand dollars to process not counting the intellectual labor that has gone into curating the materials developing a trilingual interface creating artist profiles indices search tools and so on different technologies for different practices and vice versa and different things to collect digital technologies for exceed print in offering scholars and artists a way to both document and consult live practices video captures a sense of the kinetic and oral dimensions of the event or the work the physical and facial expressions of participants the choreographies of meaning we knew the wonderful performance work in the Americas had either not been documented or if it had videos were rapidly decomposing in boxes under the artists beds and in their closets digitizing them would not only preserve them but would also make them widely and easily accessible a major issue in Latin America where universities have limited holdings and publications have very limited circulation we were also eager to explore the theoretical complexities of archiving performance and the complicated relationships between the live between live performance and its many mediations on one level then we were simply transferring video from one digital format to another on another we were commissioning and recording performances that we then transferred to hid BL so while we were adding to the collection we also helped generate new work some performances staged the archive revivals based in part on old scripts and videos other performances such as the work of anna deavere Smith are better known as video than his live solo work some performances become themselves only through the process of documentation say Anna Mindy Etta's work which was staged for the camera and on through photographs or video we have worn digital materials that never had an original in another medium this is the work of Falana if you haven't seen it you've got to see it it's fantastic these materials give rise to a new scholarly thinking about the many lives of performance past and present and allow us access to work and traditions that we cannot see live and encourage us to reflect on what happens in live events that rely so heavily on context and audience when shown to people from very different contexts I would love to speculate what viewers in five hundred years will make of Reverend Billy and the Church of stop shopping this is Reverend Billy but this is not the time the politics of the copy rather than the original helps us imagine hid BL as a post-colonial archive we return the materials and a digital copy to the creator's who maintain the rights we capture or copy the original signal of the videos and store them in Iron Mountain the archive of archives the new digital Authority I'm not kidding this is where the videos live they are in a mountain this is the control center it's the same place where the US government keeps many of its records where Disney keeps all its original tapes so we're in very good company so if the world comes to an end at least part of it will be available to be viewed by who knows whom in that age anyway so so anyway all these the original signal is kept and updated and copied into new formats as the technologies change but copy as a form of transmission also differentiates the archival from the digital and most profoundly from the repertoire people make copy the way that others dance or speak but we usually call this mimesis or imitation a form of learning through doing or parody another's actions each iteration differs from the next living creatures engaged in recognizable behaviors that are not performed the same way twice even with strenuous discipline embodied practices will always show a slight degree of variation a copy of a book however is virtually indistinguishable from others of the same run the only difference is stem from use the underlined word or a torn jacket nonetheless the number of books in a run is finite if I give away my last copy it is gone the function controls see allows me to copy automatically without a discernible limit unlike the archive based on the logic and era of the original or representative item the digital result relies on the logic and mechanism of the copy that enables the migration from one system of format to another that secures preservation save as interestingly the aura that comes from the selection process can accrue to the digital copies archived in collections Laura may have as much to do with the nature of the selection process as it does for the status of the thing in other ways however hid BL replicates the hierarchies and exclusions inherent in the archival project itself the process of selection and valorisation by experts maintains the logic of the archive intact dreams of unlimited access seduce users to participate in the colonialist fantasy the total access is not simply an ideal but a right while performance scholarship worries about context audience and reception more than about the original or authentic which is impossible insofar as performance is never the same way twice the human effort that goes into this project the emphasis on training and expertise the institutional auspices provided by the university and the required levels of financial support makes us facetiously compare ourselves to medieval monks nonetheless most of what people call online archives are not archives though they may have some archival features kids posted on YouTube or other sites are not archived even though YouTube has been referred to as the media archive this is actually not a technological issue or even a preservation issue because storage is cheap it's a commitment issue the owners may or may not commit to preserving materials long term further there is no selection process for materials uploaded online no one vouchers as to which sources or veracity expertise is irrelevant the material seemed free and available to anyone with internet access avoiding the rituals of participation governing traditional archives power and politics continue to underwrite access lo at first it's not clear how these so-called digital archives can be characterized as by as what n Katherine Hayles calls a skeuomorph a design function that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time so the trash can icon on our computers that makes a swishing noise is a skeuomorph sorry so are digital documents and stickies all reference past functions to help users adapt to new ways of organizing information let's see if I make it it's a familiarity with these past things and practices that facilitate the leap into a virtual place via technologies most people cannot really comprehend or control the things and practices of course are not the same either online items are composed of bits not atoms digital technology demands that everything or practice be transformed into an object and tagged a relationship with the thing also changes we can link to an image but we cannot hold touch taste or smell a person or object memory memory of distant memory so there's something wrong with this thing here but just my point was that memory of so the memory is distant and locatable in the imprint culture but the here-and-now of the web is immediate and only apparently unlock a table as we're gonna see some of the new digital variations severely challenged the dominance and logic of the archive many of the very large projects like Google Books are commercial so they claim to provide free access of incomplete versions of texts thus assuring neither access nor preservation though the order icon is ready at hand google claims sole ownership of orphan books and end run around laws pertaining to content authorship and copyright if print culture produced a copyright it's not clear yet what the legal and legitimating mechanisms will control issues of access and transmission online as important as the pressure of on the thing or content perhaps is the invisible politics of place where do these collections and archives live you know where are this right Google at all or when the operating systems and databases that enable access to their massive repositories this poses other legal issues not covered in conventional copyright agreements by owning the operating systems these commercial giants in fact become the ultimate guarantors of value and control they can censor materials cherry-pick titles and rescind licensing privileges for us who now lease rather than own copies of books these digital practices loop back into print culture as well the most obvious repercussion who wants to pay for a book they can access free online I am NOT against freely sharing materials a Latin American scholars and students survive on pirated books and articles nonetheless it's important to note that what's online is not free nonetheless the economic models have long-term repercussions across a range of archival practices to do with understandings of content ownership Authority peer-review copyright and so on preservation of digital materials for us is not the happy byproduct of digitizing or uploading well it may be true that that'll never die it is also true that they live as bits of information that we might not be able to access changing technologies and platforms render our materials obsolete far more often than they archive or preserve them finally I would like to take a quick look at the complicated and changing ways embodied print and digital cultures affect the what we know and how we know it by going back to Time magazine's 2006 issue Person of the Year here is an image of my copy time Person of the Year a computer with a thin red line reminiscent of YouTube cuts across the monitor running toward 0-0 2006 this screen is a reflective shiny silver mylar mirror you on the bottom left-hand side yes you you control the information age welcome to your world nicely balanced on the cover to the right of you is well me sort of the mailing sticker has my name misspelled and address on it the cover proclaims the imperative to perform you insert yourself yes you your face on the cover there's a twist here too well the magazine requires an embodied response from me I need to hold it in my hands and up to my face to see myself the design conceit of the video monitor with the timeline transports me to the digital I try to align the discursive you with the embodied me I hold the magazine close even so I hardly recognize myself this distorting mirror shows you me as not me only the vaguest image a concept more than a person and who is the invisible eye that names me you this is the Uncle Sam's pointing finger from the world war two posters Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market all fooders hailing you the unseen eye of surveillance that demands if you see something say something or a combination a parody of hailing and recognition Marcin Berbers I thou - the I inside the cover an ad for Chevrolet announces this is our person of the year and the truck of the year that dominates the environment the contest and contestation of who really controls the world and its resources start before I even get to the table of contents and here is the issue in Times Online archive the bowl black.you dominates the screen yes--you is centered under the screen rather than to the left who needs a mailing label online the delivery system is quite different the reflective surface is gone time's managing editor acknowledges the challenges in reproducing the effect of the mirror when quote there's no one standing in front of it so time created an animated online version using photos apparently submitted by readers that appeared in the print version to keep something of the interactive quality of the original this clearly is a very different kind of performance where UI is positioned as a spectator to other people's photographs rather than a subject or protagonist the online mu becomes the object of my looking one more commodity it doesn't take much to see that these photos could not have been generated by readers they are all posed an identical candy colored boxes again a photo simulated to look like YouTube you comes in all colors with one odd exception you is young beautiful under 30 happy self-satisfied cool independent on-the-go not doing much of anything except listening to music or performing for the viewer I didn't put them all up here but you get a sense only two of the men seem to have traditional professions the doctor who is scratching his head in bewilderment and the soldier the new you is a global citizen mobile if necessaries transcend geographical divides race and gender are now a style or fashion statement we're all post races and post sexism the image suggests space of course is produced this is a studio backdrop you is unlocated well in other ways as well there are no hints as to where people are or where they come from no other people in the shots no family photos two women photograph themselves very you the celebratory images of firm embodiment the designer body seemingly provides an entry point to the world but these are not the bodies of the repertoire this you actually exists not in relation to but as separate from there is no outside no exterior with which you might maintain a relationship the interpenetration of self exterior the merleau-ponty Roda intersubjectivity is possible only through technology you might chat and text but not talk or read this you is a product rather than the producer of the information age there is much more to say about the construction of you both as person of the year and in these images which can not be included here but it is important to note that the online U is an elusive object when I try to access the virtual gallery a year later it was gone the Lynx took me to Vladimir Putin when I looked again after six months some of the images from the gallery were online but as loose images not as part of the magazine's layout or organizing concept however other images not included in the original publication had also been added as if they were part of the original while others had been relocated Asst that erases rather than preserves the traces of its former incarnation the time archive then does not maintain the objects for even digital renditions my experience with the issue is different I cannot hold it I cannot flip pages there are no page numbers online reading has morphed into navigation or surfing instead of linear and sequential cause-and-effect the digital is about simultaneity interruption and multitasking everything written for online media tends to be short the digital has its own attention span I engage in politics online even as I do something else the essays extracted from the issues are searchable and clearly attributed to authors and identifiable with URLs but I cannot get a sense of connections between various social economic and political relations by examining the layouts and the physical placement of essays and ads where is the happy cowboy the real person of the year according to Chevrolet I cannot go back and examine the magazine issue as a flimsily bound microcosm of cultural concerns fears and strategies made visible in the competing messages instead of an editor in charge of putting the materials together the online curatorial process is driven by data mining techniques and crawlers to identify patterns of information in the database I too am being constantly updated by today's ads or program to pick up keywords and customize the display to suit my tastes this too is all about me or you but in a different way it is my profile not the editors that arranges the information for me the web's interactivity filters my information and sends it to those who would pay for access to me as Wendy Chung notes online in order to use one has to agree to be used the digital archival practice I believe can prove profoundly anti archival the shift from the archive to the digital has moved us away from the institutional that confined the long term of fucose disciplinary society to the control society outlined by the loose free-floating short term rapidly changing we move from the analog to the digital from signature to password from citizens of nomads from typographic man to graphic man as McLuhan put it history now is something we can that can be packaged and owned this you see down here one more possession to enjoy is in the code etiquette add for better and for worse the politics of the archive are not the politics of the digital what counts as embodied knowledge is also morphed cyberspace is forces to name and delimit the real real time is not the same as the present live is not the same as alive online community is not the same as a group of people the flesh body is not the same as the very powerful electronic body the one whose credit ratings or medical history or suspicious activities can sink an application or have a person strip-searched at the border the digital has also provoked an upset in terms of expertise many major scholars feel totally incompetent with ever-changing technologies the young are the true masters of this field but even the young no less than the younger it's not just the ever accelerating generational shifts that make people feel that they are out of the meaning-making loop the subject as consumer is tied into the rapid cycle of obsolescence necessary to sell forgetting as Paul Connerton notes is an essentially gradient in the operation of the market the feeling of not being coterminous with our time then is built into the technologies themselves the anxiety about loss and forgetting I believe might explain our current obsession with archives and the nostalgia both for embodiment and for the object technologies code the effect in the constant mandate to save and save as and we experience a symptom the need to preserve not just things documents bones fossils the ways of thinking and knowing sociability affect emotions gesture memories and also processes the ways in which we work select transmit access and preserve but the digital I suggested will not replace archives or repertoires if anything earlier distinctions between online and offline have crumbled for the many of us across the social spectrum who are now never offline either because we have cell phones or because our money is kept in bank accounts the simultaneity of these systems of transmission makes us think about them in new ways archival practice once a devastating tool of empire now seems the guarantor of authentic and enduring digital technologies have only heightened the appreciation of embodiment perhaps the current rush to archive has less to do with place thing practice and more with trying to save and preserve a sense of self as we face the uncertain future emphasizing our agency in the selection and meaning making process that we fear threatens to our paces thank you thank you very much it seems to me that this occasion this event itself it's in some ways proof of one prong of your thesis that of the overlapping of the embodied the archival and the digital in the sense that you're here with us and we with you in an embodied form you draw on an archive this is being recorded for an archive that will nonetheless live in digital space and we'll see what after that meanwhile we have time for questions diana has agreed to take some questions and so I would ask if you do want to ask a question to come forward to the microphone here is the end there so that we can get your questions as well as the responses as part of the audio recording and Diana will feel the questions are high I was you mentioned the colonizing power of the Internet as sort of the voyeuristic element of that and I was wondering if he could speak just a little bit more of the colonizing versus subversive power of the Internet and digital technology sorry I think it's true that the that the Internet does have a huge colonizing power one of the things for example it was really clear to to me when we were doing the hemispheric because it's trilingual is that everything is meant to be in English right so actually getting the internet to do things in Spanish or Portuguese or other languages is very difficult even in the in the meta tagging in the labeling of things right so and all the back end things it's very very difficult so there's that right and it introduces a whole way of other thinking and so forth but I think the subversive level is very powerful as well and especially this immediacy the the immediate power to respond you know I I think it's I think it's an incredible tool and I could not personally live without the internet not one day but I think just my point is basically that the Internet is so controlled that we're not always aware of how it's controlled right and we don't know when we're using a who owns the Internet and how they get to get you offline if they want to if they want to target you they can cut you out right they can make it impossible for you to go online or they can trace everything that you do online so that's just a trade off right so while it's it's easy I guess or easier to see that kind of thing taking on an embodied practice right they stop you at borders you have to show your ID you know there's many many ways in which we're constantly being asked to identify ourselves the internet seems such a free space that I think that we feel the putting in our password and like that saves our privacy or secures our privacy when in fact I think the myth of privacy online is just it's myth so yeah I was just trying to point out that as well thank you so much for your talk and very suggestive in many ways so my question would be I would like to know how do you think that all these memories of things that human beings we've been constructing for so many centuries can be preserved if they cannot be digitalized because everything cannot be under the digital substance thank you well I guess I would say that there's a lot of things I have been preserved for generations and generations that have never been digitized right like practice so you know there's I was talking to a group of students from theater dance and performance series this morning about dance it's been performed in the Americas as far as we know from the sixteenth century but there's evidence that it goes back way before then and it's still being performed right that never passed through digital and it didn't pass through print culture either right this we're things that were just passed on from one generation to another and I think that we can see many many instances of that and so in this earlier work my point was basically that we hadn't learned how to think about those practices and authorize them while authorized is the wrong word right because that's from author so the reason that we haven't legitimated them is because they were unauthorized so how do we think about transmission in that way and the things that have endured and will continue to endure so for example someone said in fact Katherine Hayles who I admire enormously but she's done a huge amount of work on the digital and is doing a collection of works that have been written literate literary pieces have been written for the archive but she says these works are going to be obsolete because we can't maintain these formats that we're creating so a lot of the stuff that were archiving now is not going to be there so she says this new period is going to be like a new Dark Ages now she meant that in a kind of a negative way right like we assumed the dark ages pretty dark but I'm thinking what about all the embodied practice stuff I mean what about all the stuff that people have always been doing right so if we think more about embodied in us we see how important it is alongside print and how important that is and some of the stuff in the digital I think is much more about them now it's much more about sociability and connecting and talking to your friend on skype who lives someplace else and like that then it is about archiving so I think that as far as archiving goes it's not going to have the stability that we are thinking it has so just one more example I have a friend who's putting all her kind of memory eggs in the digital basket and so she had a birthday and I made a photo album a traditional photo album with photographs and they said keep this because you're not going to be able to see your other one right because we always have this argument right she thinks it's gonna last I said suck in the last if you if you think about say a disc that you had five years ago your computer can't read that disc anymore right so you have to go to a special place to get that read/write their systems already there's document systems on my Mac that don't read my earlier Mac document systems right so it's this way in which everything that we're producing is unreadable by the same system that produced it so it's so it's just a very very serious problem but I think it's much more about so my next piece I'm writing now is about the digital and the repertoire which i think is really where the interesting part of the digital for me at least lies thank you for your talk it's really illuminating and I thought that um I wanted to just add a PS to what you were saying and also find out your thoughts about it I work on the National Archives project the Emma Goldman papers and they insists that your record all the documents be put on microfilm and they're in Iron Mountain right and they're available all around the world and yet everybody's throwing out their microphone so do you think that that's something that would actually last or is them or is it the National Archives is way behind I don't know I think I think that you would I would say is I mean if we're just talking about archival that what we want is a lot of duplication or or replication or redundancy I guess would be the word right I would keep the text I would keep the microfiche or film I would keep the digital I would update the digital and we just hope right but it's very interesting what gets lost in those transmissions from one technology to another it's really really interesting because say for example if you have a whole collection I don't know anything about this but somebody was telling me about what happened when you had the canisters the wax canisters they had the music yes and exactly so when they went from that to the to the record I guess about 80 percent of it had to be thrown that did not make that leap it's imagine all those materials that we think somehow it preserved they're just not available right and of course it's all the women's work that gets not transferred I mean then we know what the politics and the selection elements are right I mean that sort of is always the same but the fact that every single time that we do something like that we lose and we missed a lot of material thank you very much that was wonderful I guess I wanted to take up two things that you said one might now and one earlier one from the talk at the end when you said trying to to develop and preserve a sense of self through the digital I thought was really beautiful and then also your your late comment about Skype and various social networking things as being simply about communication as opposed to about not embodied practices and I was thinking with for example the Facebook movie is coming out tomorrow this film catfish I don't know if you've seen it yet or read about it it was a huge hit at Sundance which is about three filmmakers who develop a relationship with a family on Facebook with a full set of network of people and they go out to meet this person and it's a mystery it's like a thriller because again the sense of self that's being that being archived is not always the actual self itself right so then what one-zip happening there is it looks at the social networking stuff is its own form what happens if we look at that stuff as a form of embodied practice what does that do to the larger ideas of the digital that you were talking about before well I think maybe I didn't express myself very well because I'm really thinking that the really interesting part of the digital is as sociability and the new kinds of relationships are getting developed there so it's not the same as embodied it's a different thing and if somebody says you know who has like eight hundred friends like my daughter has on Facebook I mean nobody has 800 friends I mean even on Facebook I only have like a hundred so friend me now that we're in the race for friends but but it's interesting that those kinds of relationships like what I'm saying the Skype for example or those kinds of relationships are really asking us then to redefine what we think of this by like prisons are we present together it is and I think that that's that's why I'm saying that I think that the long-term repercussions of this are really about subjectivity I mean I think it's a profound I don't think it's simply about where we're gonna keep our stuff I think it's really about how we understand the relationship between first and second life or is this all first life or is this you know those relationships are very real relationships and some people live and the other thing I think is really important to think about is for example there parts of the world where very few people have access to Internet but I don't think that that means that they don't live in the world it's primarily but or primarily in one way right because they're there are materials on them even if they don't have access to them are it's gonna be pretty scary thank you for a really beautiful presentation and I think my my reaction to hearing you speak and also that question then triggered something in terms of the way in which just in your presentation today the sort of repertoire and the archive or the digital were not so much in opposition but sort of separate and I was thinking well how is the the rep how is the digital affecting the repertoire like so the other way if you like in terms and and then I had an anxiety that was about well okay the repertoire may continue and certainly it continues to be taught through oral and and bodily tradition but performance tradition but equally it would seem that the digital must be surely impacting on the rectum are and that sort of gave rise to a concern as to whether we're so sort of aware our awareness of each other's communication outside of the digital realm is being funny does that as it perhaps has been in the past how is it being affected by this technology well I'll give you one good example I think it's a wonderful example at least I didn't where you the freshman class or the first-year class a lot of the students had met each other online before they got together you know they met their roommates and like this but they were very shy about greeting each other face to face so the university had to have a meet and greet where they taught them how to get together and say hello to each other in real life because they had developed a relationship online had nothing to do with with the embodied experience so I mean that's pretty strange right I mean it's a different kind of sociability that's that's happening but I guess I would just also say that I think about embodied practice very broadly so like for example these are forums they get repeated and that will likely be repeated unless you're completely replaced by an online university right I mean there's many ways in which knowledge production happens to embody practice and it could be you know cooking with somebody or it can be you know singing recomm being whatever right so there's a lot of things that are part of our daily lives that I'm confident will continue to exist right so it's not just the formal thing about the dance or the ritual or the theater piece I think my question might relate a bit to what you were just asking and it has to do with the notion of the copy in the digital realm right and it just seems that you know this question of the repertoire as sort of having an inherent quality of difference in repetition that it seemed as if you're saying that in digital in the digital realm that doesn't quite work the same way at the time when you mention the copy and the notion of saving you suggested that there was a sort of infinite way in which things can be copied or saved in the digital but I wondered because the way that I think of that function save as that's in your title is about difference right so save save as versus versus save for me is that when you when you just press save you're just sort of infinitely reproducing what's already there but when you press save as you can make a difference to the document and have two separate copies that that have slightly different things it might just be that you know that the tagline of the second file has my name in it rather than you know just the name of the document but it seems to me that the title of your talk suggested that in the digital there's a sort of quality of potential difference in repetition and I wondered if that might have something to do it's a question of the digital in the repertoire well that's really interesting because when when you're migrating materials online you always have to save ass right you're saving into a different format but the saving is almost always a loss right because things get lost in every single time that you copy from one format to another so I meant it more I guess in in terms of but you're right there seems to be like an inherent I just call it say I'm not sure because I don't think I don't think of save that's just the one after the other after the other after the other I'm thinking about in terms of migration from format to format which still try to be really different as a book or print culture or the way we might dance or learn a language from somebody or you know learn through that kind of a process I have to think about that some more or changed my title thanks this actually is bouncing off of that save and save as because I had a question that I couldn't articulate and that helped me do it so I'm involved with an archive that happens to be housed at NYU an archive of historical materials that up until the digital age they were responsible for saving preserving if you will now they're beginning to digitize it so digitization is thought of as a way of preserving and I'm just sort of curious with I mean now so much is being done to digitize physical archives photographs of objects are now being digitized so they're accessible online how do we understand that as preservation versus you know there's what is being obviously something to be something's being lost but also an archive is not permanent an archive deteriorates an archive you know eventually the papers wear out or the objects become less usable it does preserve relate in any way figure into this idea of save and save as and and what do you think about this digitization of archives as a project in general I think it's very important I think it's incredible all I'm saying is that there are online archives right and they're like the NYU ones I'm sure you have them here they're special collections and those are made to be preserved over time because the commitment in those is that they're going to upgrade and migrate the materials into different technologies right so it doesn't matter that my computer can't read an image but the systems that they have in place will be able to read them and will upgrade them to the next format and for the next format and you know theoretically they capture the original signal I have no idea what that means but I take it from them that that's going to ensure the quality so there's not this loss every single time that we're making a another copy of it right that's the idea so yes it's some of these business to do that it takes huge amount of resources and it takes a library or you know you know these are really really important in this way because if universities don't do it who's gonna do it Google's certainly not going to preserve a lot of the stuff that we're interested in preserving so I think that there it becomes the project for universities that doesn't mean to me that it replaces the physical you sure don't throw out the the microfilm you know it becomes more and more weigh in the fact that it's accessible you know generally I think it's fantastic because most people can't go I mean there's that whole latest thing right about the archive is being somehow closed you have to have permission to visit it you have to be able to get there physically I mean what you can do when you put it online it's incredible when I was I guess contesting is this idea that New York Times has an archive of its pieces if you've ever tried to use it you know that that does not exist it's not an archive Time magazine all of these things that theoretically have archives they don't have archives and so the things that we think are getting archived I mean a lot of people think that the stuff that they put in YouTube is going to be there forever it's not going to be there forever it's gonna be there until they get tired of doing that and they'll do something else and so I think it's just a consciousness of how we preserve certain materials and what the digital actually does which i think is much more along the lines of those social abilities and new ways of attracting that do have long-term implications in terms of you know how we think about you know life as an extension is that this life or that life or live or alive or however we think of all of those contexts I think in that sense it's much more you have much longer repercussions on us than just the ability to do this extraordinary stuff which is to archive materials right yeah I guess the just final comment the two things that concern me are that the access to the actual object is becoming less important and there is something to be learned from access to the actual object to the turning of the page to the seeing the artifact and secondly and this is an issue that is in fact in case of this archive that financially the money's available this is a material issue are either going towards the digits today or towards the preservation of those objects and in some way those are being equated by the librarians whereas the objects are becoming less and less available because now they say well they're online we don't need to preserve the object in the to the extent or we don't have the money to preserve that object to the extent that we use to anymore so there is kind of a just seems to me some sort of a trade-off happening accessibility versus preservation perhaps yeah I'm not sure I would put it that bleakly on that side because I think libraries are still preserving there are objects tell me then why you is certainly preserving the objects even as it's trying to get stuff online for access I don't think that's exactly the the trade-off I think Kathy Katherine so I just wanted to hear how this fits into you mentioned the next piece of this so what's what's the bigger thing is that it's a new book you know I'm full of contradictions right I mean no I mean can you give us a sense of what that bigger project looks like no no be ready very soon I'll be ready very soon I can't you know why Katherine because I don't have a title and until I don't have a title I can't I can't name it so I was thinking about it this afternoon I mean I think about it all the time I'm searching I'm wracking my brain so when it comes up with the title then although so um is it oh yeah it's the first I didn't think it was working thank you like everyone else I really enjoyed your talk I I what one of the things that I really appreciated about the talk is that that it gave more evidence for a way that I think many of us try to teach you teacher work but a concern that I sometimes have is that reductive readings of your work sometimes associate the archive with domination and the repertoire with subversion and what I really appreciated about this talk was via the discussion of the digital that that was all mixed up there and that there was there were moments there where you were talking about the lack of archival intervention as as something that is potentially missing from some situations that call themselves archives as well as that sort of sense that sometimes in the use of digital interaction or social media we might feel ourselves to be in the midst of social agency of some sort untrackable in the mode of transmitted behavior when in fact we very much are in you know so I just wondered if you could talk a bit more about about the the mixing up of subversion and domination in these modes and that just seemed to me that no domain has a purchase on what absolutely no and in fact in my archive book I say that you know very explicitly I said for example we have repertoires of you know I was thinking because of my work in Argentina right of these military parades there were very clearly parodying I mean consciously the Nazi kind of rallies right and then you have the skinheads that you know so these repertoires are very alive and very very terrifying so it's absolutely not that at all not that at all I just rather not write about the Nazis and the skinheads and so may seem more like a you know it's always writing about you know the liberating power of it but absolutely I think that on the contrary you know there's so many regimes if you want of of embodied practice in so many ways in which that's very controlled and very inhibiting and like that that that's a real that's not a reductive reading I think that's a real misreading of what I write a quick question hopefully I know you said the next steps would be to look at humor interested in the digital in the repertoire I'm we're interested in the digital in the archive okay so what do you make of the whole Twitter the TWiT the tweets that might be archived at the Library of Congress how does that fit into how we should think about these two worlds coming together yeah no I think they you know if the Library of Congress decides to archive them then that's fine I think that like I said before right even things that we're not meant to be archived Rauf an archive we have newspapers we have pamphlets we have all sorts of things that theoretically are ephemeral they're made to be for one occasion that are archived that's a fantastic collection and I think that's great but what I'm interested in the tweets is much more than sociability where people are following each other's jokes and they follow each other and they read you know certain kinds of tweets and you know it's like oh well what the tone so say today even if it's somebody you don't know you're just following them on these tweets so that kind of sociability is really interesting right what those connections are and how that becomes almost like people you know that you follow in a kind of a very different way then you would talk to a friend or you would I mean maybe it's like reading a columnist or something but it's like this immediate thing all the time so and the brevity of it right so you know I think and as you said I mean all of these things work across the media all the different forms it's just what happens I don't think that the logic of one is the logic of the other and I think that's why differentiating them and the politics are not the same so I think separating them out is kind of important if we're going to take embody practice seriously right because who can compare with the archive ring in terms of durablity Authority all of that but the digital is really interesting too and what that's going to do to to change all sorts of different kinds of relationships that we've established and we've grown comfortable with well I'm gonna propose propose that we take maybe one more question I mean the questions have been so wonderful and your answers so forthcoming but maybe in light of the hour one one more if there is one let's go over to this side of the room yeah thanks thanks for you talk I I was thinking about what you were saying things that might get lost or new things that might emerge excuse me I'll try okay I was thinking about what you said that things might get lost or things might emerge with this new form of archiving the digital and I also thought about that book all that is solid melts into air you know that thing that for 500 years things have been getting lost and yet as yours as you said there are certain performances that are still very much alive know so I wonder if what we see or the anxiety because I have that anxiety with that digital as well might be related to a form of institutions or power that we're not used to deal with so directly because in the archive we're used to search the state or institutions we that are more recognizable but in a way dealing with with the web it's as you said who's there who's behind this and I wonder if it's just feeling that the subjectivity they might emerge from that it's related complete or left bare to the market to market forces and not forms or institutions that we can recognize you may be I mean I don't know where all that anxiety comes from but I know that this thing about we have to save there's this threat of loss it just seems super prevalent to me I mean even in performance I mean if you think about the Marina Abramovic the Reaper formance is and all of this it's like now we have to say performance you know in the embodied practice way right rather than there's a document and this thing about saving preserving keep it's it seems to me just very very prevalent and the talk about the technology not just digital but about technology in general seems to echo that and it seems to be kind of clustered around technology I'm not sure that it is I'm not sure how related that is to that right I mean I don't think things will be more lost or found than they were before but it seems to accrue to technologies this whole thing about saving and in loss and and maybe how far the memory gets away from the body right I mean now when we go up to the web 3.0 and we're talking about these clusters and clouds and all of that then that memory is really really far away from the body it's certainly not in my head and it's not even on my computer anymore right it's somewhere where I don't know where it is so maybe it's a distance between me and my memory I don't know thank you very much