Knowledge seems to build on top of each other. Even the stories of our personal lives are a recollection of moments where knowledge has been expanding in different directions. We can create the archive of our lives, so it can be stored, recorded for posterity. However, that which Vannevar Bush emphasizes on As We May Think puts the intentionality back into perspective, for "a record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all, it must be consulted". Hence, even if a personal archive is extended, stored, an even annotated, it is useless unless it is consulted. It would be ideal to pass down some sort of legacy or knowledge so that whoever consults the archive –even if it is only a fraction– they can profit from the stored data.
I have always wondered how to structure and build though association. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari took on the rhizome as a way of reproducing thinking processes. I find Bush's Memes in their anti-genealogical arborescent bifurcations that use our life experience as a system of indexing (Bush, 1945). I can't seem to think of the concept of a rhizome and not make the attempt to see it. At the moment we can visualize an image of thought, it goes beyond the medium, embodying experiences and emotions at the same time. However, I find these emotions personal, and as sources of non-tangible archival memory. Since according to Marshall McLuhan "the content of any medium is always another medium," is it safe to say that the content of our visually represented memories is, in fact, a medium for remembrance? However, since the medium itself decodes the way we associate the content to our daily lives, would we be remembering because of the message encoding in the medium or because of the outside trigger that leads us to remembering? On the other hand, if the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964) is the labor that went into making the medium embedded in the cultural nuances of the medium itself? And does it have certain implications of how the message is conceived? If labor can be flexible (Nakamura,2014), and a message is culturally racialized as a product of modernity, then the medium should be too –creatively cultural, I might add.
Because an archive in itself is defined by the possibility of future actions (Halpern, 2012). It is the recombination of data that enables us to transform that inundation and overflow of data into something coherent. By going into the archive, we make those unexpected connections that Halpern mentions in Eames' work, it is a rhizomatic endeavor that makes us select one source over another based on our own personal memex –embedded with our own cultural associations. We might not be aware of the dynamism because our memories are deeply embedded in immersive structures of the subconscious. I find myself as a somnambulist conforming beholder of my own self (McLuhan, 1964), with my memories –or those created through my Instagram feed timeline. I scroll again, and an image makes me shiver. There is knowledge in that vision because emotion (Halpern, 2012) is embedded in the medium –either weaving, microchips, or wired screens. I do believe we handle data without limit, as the oral tradition would do back in Socrates' Greece (Inns, 1950). Hypermediated or not, it all comes back to our self-defining intangible memex. Could we materialize our own to archive the self– as I feel was Eames' intent?
I have always wondered how to structure and build though association. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari took on the rhizome as a way of reproducing thinking processes. I find Bush's Memes in their anti-genealogical arborescent bifurcations that use our life experience as a system of indexing (Bush, 1945). I can't seem to think of the concept of a rhizome and not make the attempt to see it. At the moment we can visualize an image of thought, it goes beyond the medium, embodying experiences and emotions at the same time. However, I find these emotions personal, and as sources of non-tangible archival memory. Since according to Marshall McLuhan "the content of any medium is always another medium," is it safe to say that the content of our visually represented memories is, in fact, a medium for remembrance? However, since the medium itself decodes the way we associate the content to our daily lives, would we be remembering because of the message encoding in the medium or because of the outside trigger that leads us to remembering? On the other hand, if the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964) is the labor that went into making the medium embedded in the cultural nuances of the medium itself? And does it have certain implications of how the message is conceived? If labor can be flexible (Nakamura,2014), and a message is culturally racialized as a product of modernity, then the medium should be too –creatively cultural, I might add.
Because an archive in itself is defined by the possibility of future actions (Halpern, 2012). It is the recombination of data that enables us to transform that inundation and overflow of data into something coherent. By going into the archive, we make those unexpected connections that Halpern mentions in Eames' work, it is a rhizomatic endeavor that makes us select one source over another based on our own personal memex –embedded with our own cultural associations. We might not be aware of the dynamism because our memories are deeply embedded in immersive structures of the subconscious. I find myself as a somnambulist conforming beholder of my own self (McLuhan, 1964), with my memories –or those created through my Instagram feed timeline. I scroll again, and an image makes me shiver. There is knowledge in that vision because emotion (Halpern, 2012) is embedded in the medium –either weaving, microchips, or wired screens. I do believe we handle data without limit, as the oral tradition would do back in Socrates' Greece (Inns, 1950). Hypermediated or not, it all comes back to our self-defining intangible memex. Could we materialize our own to archive the self– as I feel was Eames' intent?
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