“Letus grind them into dust!”
The new aesthetics of digital archives

'Matt Locke Matt Locke

Archives are imagined as dusty places with serried rows of boxes, books or film canisters shrouded in a fine, grey-white cloak. Like a physical manifestation of forgetting, dust settles on the obsolete, and its removal is symbolic of re-use-the archivist pulls a dusty tome from the shelf, blows across the cover, and as the cloud of dust disperses, the obscure knowledge within is alive once more. Dust is a metaphor for rejection, for failure or dismissal—we “eat the dust”, “dust off” unwanted attention and ultimately “bite the dust”.(1) Vast amounts of the knowledge and creative output of the last century is fated to turn to dust, forgotten, unwanted and unknown.
Projects like the BBC’s Creative Archive (2) seek to liberate these archives through technology-to blow off the dust and digitize thousands of hours’ worth of audio and video content. Through digital networks, these things can be reanimated, made available again for new contexts and uses. By transforming dusty archives into clean databases, content can be reused and remixed, becoming the starting point for new stories instead of the final resting place for old ones.
But there is beauty in dust itself. The scientist and artist Hubert Duprat (3) has placed Caddis worm larvae in vitrines lined with gold dust and tiny particles of jewels. The Caddis larvae normally live on river-beds, and make cocoons for themselves from bark, gravel and other river detritus. Placed within Duprat’s vitrines of precious metals, the larvae construct beautiful geometric jewelry with alternating bands of stones and gold. The Caddis larvae re-order dust into something intimate and organized, creating objects with purpose and formal beauty.
We have long had a similar desire to order our overflowing, ephemeral stream of media into something intimate and meaningful. The cheap printing presses of the 19 ^th century created an overwhelming flood of newspapers, catalogues and magazines, and the new railway networks sent them to all corners of the developed world. Readers would capture knowledge from these cheap, ephemeral forms by making scrapbooks, often pasting clippings into other, unwanted, books.(4) Newspaper articles, instead of decaying to pulp or dust, were instead memorialized if they caught the attention of the reader, valued over the more rarified knowledge contained in expensive books. Ellen Gruber Garvey reports the following exchange between a writer and a scrapbook maker in the 19th century:

“Why,” said I. “You are using up good printed books!”
“Good for what!” was the reply […]. “There is nothing in them that we want, and so we propose putting in something, rather than having them stand idle. Hubert's, you see, is an old day-book, and we have one or two others. Some of them are old school-books, not much worn, but out of date. Almost every library has some useless books.”(5)

The gleaner’s bounty depends on the planter’s willingness not to squeeze every possible bit of profit from the land; following the biblical injunction to leave food for the gleaners, the planter does not pursue every scrap of grain or produce but leaves some unclaimed.(6)

When we touch an album [of photographs] and turn its pages, we put the photograph in motion, literally in an arc through space and metaphorically in a sequential narrative. Albums are also prompts for speech, an excuse for friends and families to gather, for stories to be exchanged, incidents to be recalled, biographies to be invented. When we view albums in museums, we can only imagine the murmur of laughing voices that would have animated and shaped the experience of leafing through them.(7)

[in photo albums] we are witness to the creative efforts of ordinary people who, by coordinating sound and smell as well as sight and by exploiting the possibilities of a touched and touchable photography, were able to express the intricacies of their social rituals, personal dreams, and project memories in tangible visual form.”(11)