RHIZOMEMIND

The archive is not a static repository of unambiguous objects and data. It is always to some extent changing—and with it, our understanding of what it holds. Analog and geographically fixed archives relying on the likes of paper or film obviously degrade over time. But digital archives also degrade, as they rely on networks of quite material infrastructure, as well as people to maintain them, and lands to house them. How do archives specifically, and data-sets, modelling tools, and representational practices generally, account for this decay, or entropy, in their very construction and life cycle? How might AI and other new media incorporate change, decay, and re-growth into archival practices in ways that are not just reflected in their construction but also in their content?

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What we are calling the animated archive, following digital humanities research, highlights the nature of embodiment, temporality, and ecological change through the lens of digital technologies. The animated archive can act as a meeting point for creative, narrative ecological engagement; it may also allow us to responsibly bear witness to, and even begin to redress, what might otherwise be unbearable. For example, how can we archive, document, and witness climate change, climate stewardship, and environmental relations in today’s world of digitization, artificial intelligence, and augmented and virtual realities?  

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Media technologies in general are also not just tools for sensing what is already there: they are creative, or poetic, in their own right (Frosh 2018). They create part of the world that they help reveal. Such is the case with archives, and the animated archive in particular, through the premium it places on ongoing audience or visitor interaction. This shift from mere sensing or consuming what is already there to creative potential also aligns with what Smith and Hennessey (2018) note as being a reconstitution of relationships between archived ‘material’ and human being. 

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Following Sayers’s definition, a “digital humanities” approach to the archive means integrating into the methodology of study the very technology this study would take as an object. The animated or living archive draws attention to its own fluidity, transience, and construction, as well as to the ways that visitors to the archive are always also participants in its (re)construction, its maintenance, as well as its dilapidation. This view is in line with many western scientific models of ecology as well as many Indigenous ecological worldviews (Kimmerer 2013; Whyte 2018; Lewis et al. 2018). In both cases, though in rather different ways, the human and the ‘natural’ world are not distinct entities but fundamentally interrelated.  

 

Still, there is a tension in the animated archive between distance and immediacy. As we’ve seen, the infrastructures and points of access to the digital archive are dependent on place, on materials, and on people. But the animated archive also presents a kind of “fugitivity” or unruliness with respect to geographical place: it can’t be pinned down to ‘just here’ or ‘just there’ (Smith and Hennessey). This means that connections to others, other times, and other places become possible without promoting the same sense of immediacy or closeness that lends itself to easy consumption or appropriation (see Szabo 2018, 2020). Both the archive itself and its contents are in circulation.  For example, while cultural appropriation or settler-colonial violence is not expunged or redressed in such scenarios, the animated archive can help bring to light these dangers. Most important, it can also offer a space or site of its own in which to collaboratively approach the possibility of alternative futures.