Category: Texts

Curating Your Memory
Curating Your Memory is an evening about deleting, curating and dealing with big data on a personal scale.

V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam
The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam

V2_: Thursday, 28 November 2013 at 8 pm

French philosopher Jacques Derrida made the claim that ‘the mutation in technology changes not simply the archiving process, but what is archivable – that is, the content of what has to be archived is changed by the technology’. What he means is that the style of the content is transformed through new processes and production. Moreover, the relation to time and space created by the fact that within mere seconds one can reach someone in every corner of the world, has also affected the content. Of course this also effects power relations, decision-making and accountability. It is generally known and accepted that archives construct a specific account of history, many things end up in an archive, but even more remains outside, to be forgotten. Questions like who is in charge of an archive, who selects, and for whom is the archive, have been plaguing archives from the beginning. One could argue that the digital accelerates this process, so how to relate to this new situation? What is the value of digital memory and how to deal with big data on a small scale? These questions form the start of an evening with three perspectives.

With Robert Sakrowski, Dragan Espenschied and Igor Štromajer, moderated by Annet Dekker.

This public event is organised by Piet Zwart Institute, Dept of Media Design – Networked & Lens-Based, and made possible with the support of Goethe Institute and V2_.

Igor Štromajer presenting at the V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, 28 Nov 2013, Photo: Sakrowski