A Library for the Multitude
NETWORKED CINEMA and the ARCHIVE as AMBIENT LANDSCAPE
GSAPP Spring 2008 vertical studio
Prof: Ed Keller Special Guest: Rene Daalder TA: Ezio Blasetti
"One day the man demands of the beast: "Why do you not talk to me about your happiness and only gaze at me?" The beast wants to answer, too, and say: "That comes about because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say." But by then the beast has already forgotten this reply and remains silent, so that the man wonders on once more. But he also wonders about himself, that he is not able to learn to forget and that he always hangs onto past things. No matter how far or how fast he runs, this chain runs with him. It is something amazing: the moment, in one sudden motion there, in one sudden motion gone, before nothing, afterwards nothing, nevertheless comes back again as a ghost and disturbs the tranquility of each later moment. A leaf is continuously released from the roll of time, falls out, flutters away--and suddenly flutters back again into the man's lap. For the man says, "I remember," and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever."
Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History
The Library, the Archive, is the technical solution we humans have deployed to solve this challenge of amnesia; a technique which intends to keep the supposed beast inside each of us at bay. Yet given our contemporary global, political and technological situation, it is impossible to consider the 'Library' as an institution without acknowledging that an absolute redefinition of power is taking place. If information in many ways equals power, and if awareness and intelligence are ever more modulated by the emerging infrastructure free and wireless Net, then the Library must radically reconfigure itself as a new institution if it hopes to survive. In fact, there is little hope for the Library as a conventional bastion of power and law. By the time today's policy makers realize the extent of the technological revolution, distributed networks and information reservoirs will have self-deployed to such an extent that the traditional form of the library will be extinct. As well, the spatial relationships that have defined the transfer of knowledge in the city, in the library as an institution, will also have suffered a sea change.
As we watch new kinds of collectivity emerge with this faster and more turbulent global urbanism, comprised of the early members of Toni Negri's 'multitude', the Library is also migrating.
The oft discussed concept of the 'archive' in our postmodern and globalized world has to incorporate the fact of a newly mobilized global constituency, whose participation in determining the new network comes as much through the recent cacerolozo protests in Argentina, worldwide demonstrations against war in 2003 or assemblies at Porto Alegre, as the mainstream channels of facebook and ebay.
There are unforeseen avenues for information to migrate from one space to another- today's lightweight teenage hackers, occasionally capable of freezing the net for a few days, will be genetic engineers in a few years, with under the table freeware apps allowing the hybridization of new viruses as easily as improvising a guitar solo. This disruption of official power will be rapid and incomprehensible by today's standards and ideas of control, yielding radical new freedoms; but on the flip side, the potential for disaster will be equally serious. P2P music and video trading is a minor hurdle as we progress to new distributed forms of the archive.
One of the most profound design problems we face as we enter this next century will be the reconciliation of dangerous time, non human time- with the kinds of time we have been accustomed to live in for the past two millenia. Indeed, the time of the genetic, the time of the cosmological, the time of the atomic- these scales of time are all increasingly accessible to the everday.
The conflicts that this clash will precipitate- not just of fundamentalisms but of temporal modalities- are part of our design mandate for a new library. How can we reconcile the hacker ethic that information wants to and should be free, with the increasing danger of information? Where should the ARKHE assert her role as design authority, as arbiter or censor?
The Library as an institution has traditionally been a center of the preservation of culture, and has at the same time been the place where checks and balances are imposed on access to information. Ever more these filters are eroding. By some accounts there are over 150 million migrant laborers worldwide, travelling across borders constantly to work and to pursue new freedoms. Today, I can [and do] carry literally hundreds of books and songs on my celphone. Many of the millions of global migrants have access to similar technology, and in ten years will use networked computational devices orders of magnitude more powerful than today's cutting edge laptop, at one tenth the price. Today's surveillance culture insists that global safety depends on an all seeing eye, a total pervasion of information visibility. Much theorized by thinkers like Virilio, we will engage this idea of an extended visibility and the erasure of space, in the consideration of how we can design a library that might function adequately as a filter, bulwark or conversely accelerator in this coming new age of control.
DESIGNING the LIBRARY
'…man is only a roundabout, subsidiary response to the problem of growth. Doubtless, through labor and technique, he has made possible an extension of growth beyond the given limits. But just as the herbivore relative to the plant, and the carnivore relative to the herbivore, is a luxury, man is the most suited of all living beings to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations befitting the solar origins of its movement.' Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
The studio's program will be to design a contemporary archive, with a strong technology and film component. The highway and the road, as understood as unique channels for cinema, will be the main site. The project will be a road movie; a networked cinema; a library; a boneyard for military storage such as the Mojave or El Mirage Dry Lake sites; a museum in a major city; an ecologically oriented archive, like the seed bank being built in Norway; or from a more apocalyptic point of view, the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, preserving the skeletal traces of life across the millennia.
We will investigate a full range of archive types. Traditionally ordered and catalogued text and A/V can be compared to raw information [ with acknowledgements to Neal Stephenson's ideas in Snow Crash], or genetic databases. Various precedent typologies could include the RUIN, MONUMENT, CEMETARY, HIGHWAY, PRISON, MUSEUM, or of course, the LIBRARY.
Similarly, extending Borges' idea of the universe itself as a library- or Manual Delanda's work studying the intrisic computational process in matter itself- we will consider raw material: water, iron, gold, uranium, salt, as the substance of the library. Also raw energy itself, or the human forms of it as geo- and bio-power: wealth, intellectual and financial capital, and military resources are all elements in the Library of the Multitude. Our project this semester will be to decide what we truly believe is worth remembering, and in contrast, what might be truly necessary to forget.
THEMES
There are a series of THEMES or AXIOMS that we will confront in our design of the Library: '[in 1967 Foucault identified] specific kinds of lived space... cemeteries, formal gardens, theaters, libraries, and museums [are] "heterotopias" to reflect the "space in which we live," as opposed to the utopian spaces that we can only imagine. He singles out libraries and museums under his fourth principle, which links heterotopias to slices in time. Since the end of the seventeenth century, these places have served as general archives to accumulate everything--to enclose in one place, which is itself inaccessible to the ravages of time, "all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes . . ." '
Jeffrey R. Galin and Joan Latchaw
This transformative vision of the archive is one that we will juxtapose against a series of other positions, some more and some less optimistic.
o Borges' Library of Babel: the Library as a fantastic archive of everything; the universe itself as a Library; the Library as a philosophical catalyst
o the City itself understood as Library and Archive
o the GeoPolitic, the Global, and the new Library
China, the third world, software theft, and P2P networks: the reconfiguration of economic borders and methods of exchange
o the GeoBiological Archive
BioMetrics and new forms of information storage, processing and filtering
o POWER: the juridical process in the Library
"Arkhe, we recall, names the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence-physical, historical, or ontological principle-but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given....the meaning of 'archive,' its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded." The archons possess the right to make or to represent the law as well as interpret the archive. This is the reason why the archons are the guardians of the documents ensuring their physical security as well as juridical value. "Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this speaking the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization."
Derrida, Archive Fever
"...de Certeau gives an example of the National Archives in Paris, which, according to him, in effect implies the combination of a group (the "erudite"), a place (a "library"), and a system of practices (of copying, printing, classification, etc.) that were a consequence of a technical system inaugurated in the West with the private collections assembled by great patrons, who wanted to appropriate history for themselves, in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and England."
Michal Kobialka, Can There be a Postmodern Archive?
o Cultural memory, cultural Amnesia
The Net and the NEW COLLECTIVITY; REED's LAW as applied to the traditionally slowmoving model of the archive