Provost's Lecture Series 2009/10
The Digital As Anti-Archive?
Monday, October 26, 2009, 5-6:30 p.m.
Love Auditorium, Levine Science Research Center
Diana Taylor, University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish and Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at the Tisch School of the Arts
The repertoire and the archive are two of several coterminous systems of creating, storing and transmitting knowledge—the former through ‘live’ embodied practice and behaviors, and the latter through print and material cultures—objects—that allow one to separate the knower from the known. What to make of the digital that displaces both bodies and objects even as it transmits more information faster than ever before? Digital technologies constitute another system of transmission that is rapidly altering our frames of knowledge. We are confronted by new questions around presence, time, space, embodiment, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) as well as those around copyright, authority, accessibility, and preservation (linked to the archive). Rather than assume that expansive digital capabilities usher in the ‘era of archive’ in which everyone can be his or her own archivist, perhaps we need to consider that the shift to the digital might actually prove profoundly anti-archival. What then might be the politics of this new digital era?
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