The two readings from this week had me considering several things about audiovisual installments in both traditional and digital archives. On page 90 of Digital Memory and the Archive, Ernst reiterates Volker Kahl’s idea that “…electronic communication ‘is based on time. It leaves no traces apart from the result, which lies outside this process, unless traces are deliberately laid…’ Audiovisual media art is, by its nature, transient and unarchivable.” Applying this idea to film archives, such as the Scottish Screen Archive, discussed by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, seems to become particularly problematic (252). For, if audiovisual media art is “transient and unarchivable” then a film is, in essence, a highly incomplete text, missing not only the process that led up to the resultant film, but the contextual data—political, historical influences and the like—that spurred on the creation of the film before the process even began. Thus, what exists in the film archives is (contentually, not materially) a single version of a film, vacant of the multiplicity of narratives that were involved in its composition; it is a captured moment in the transient process that has been archived and considered the totality of the film, a “latent archive” (Ernst, 82). Thought of in this perspective, brought about by Kahl and Ernst, can it then be said that the film archive is merely a great collection of last pages torn from thick manuscripts? There is, of course, the possibility of bridging this incompleteness with written documents to scaffold the unseen/unheard political unconscious, and to supply for viewers deliberately laid traces of the process. Would this not, though, disrupt the precedent of the films in the film archive, making traditional documentation of equal importance in the archiving of the films, and thus transforming the film archive into more of an archive that contains some films, amongst other things?

The second main idea I was forced to contemplate with these readings was the idea of YouTube as an archive (Roscaroli, 252). Brought up by Roscaroli, Young, and Monahan, I quickly began to consider the immateriality of the site’s archived videos. Like the three authors also discussed, digital records in past forms, such as reels, VHSs—even on the personal level—are collected and archived for both their form and content. Items like these—and like someday soon, I’m sure, the floppy disk and CD-ROM—are not recognized for their formal archival value until they are part of a closed historical era of technology. For, in the yet-open present, they cannot be recognized or known as something that will soon pass away in light of the next technological advance. In the case of websites like YouTube, however, how should such an archive be preserved in an open present? And, when it is a member of a closed historical era, won’t it have progressed to the then-present, disrupting the data and metadata of its archive as a representative of the historical moment of the then-past? Obviously, as Ernst notes, the Internet is transient along with its audiovisual content, but if something, like YouTube, is to be named an archive, should it be made latent at some point before potentially valuable archival material is lost? If so, would this mean recreating YouTube ever few years, or is their no proper answer for the transient, archival site, but to let it continue moving through time with little trace of its origin and process?