In the last few years we have all benefited from online digital archives, but none of us needs to go through a major loss of personal and cherished material stored on a computer or on a device that has now become unreadable, to understand that digital data is vulnerable. A computer data loss can indeed be compared to a memory loss in a human being.
Finding ways to preserve current digital data, being able to read data stored on old supports and protecting libraries and paper-based documents have therefore become key points to save our collective histories and personal memories.
The third "Archives and Exhibitions" conference taking place today at the Biennale Library in Venice (in the context of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition) will look at these issues. Entitled "Archives and the digital training in the digital era", the conference will focus on key issues such as the dissipation of the memory and vulnerability of digital data, while touching upon local problems like the digitalization of the Biennale Historical Archives and the archiving of the exhibitions.
"You can't hold an exhibition without having recourse to archives", explains the President of la Biennale Paolo Baratta in an official press release. "The use of archive documents in exhibitions is growing, but also a lot of interest and questions about the evolution of the arts and architecture is growing, this is why the dialogue between archives and exhibitions is now necessary. The fact that the Biennale needs archives is not only a technical matter, it is also a fact that raises questions about the evolution of contemporary art itself."
At the end of the first working session (10:30 am - 1:00 pm) the documentary Digital Amnesia, directed by the Dutch journalist Bregtje van der Haak and produced by VPRO Backlight, The Netherlands, will also be screened.
The documentary - available to watch also on YouTube - manages to make a few points about the consequences of our accelerating culture focused on the here and now. By looking at the closure of the library of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, a victim of austerity and budget cuts, Van der Haak wonders what would be the consequence of living in a digital Dark Age caused by the loss of collective histories, interviewing the founders of The Internet Archive, The Long Now and the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (based in an old McDonald's and therefore dubbed McMoon).
Preserving the past to avoid living in a perpetual present is the final message of Digital Amnesia, a documentary that also makes anoother important point: since it brings all knowledge together and makes it available to people, the Internet is the final dream of every librarian, Ismail Serageldin - director of the world-famous Library of Alexandria - states in the documentary, but we must all become custodians of the past to create a laboratory of the new. Indeed, exploring our past means to go back to our roots and project ourselves into the future, while living in a constant present is not offering any in-depth knowledge, but it's destroying some disciplines (including fashion where words such as archives and heritage are used in random ways to add prestige and credibility to a collection...).
The afternoon round table at the Venice conference (3:00 pm - 6:00 pm) will bring together the representatives of cutting edge institutions in document conservation, plus scholars, archivists, and new digital technologies experts.
Will budget cuts, the loss of our personal and global histories, the remarkable speed of modern information, and a technology guaranteed to lose our data mean we will suffer from digital and collective amnesia? We may not know the final answer to all these questions (and to these visions of a dystopic future...), but we can all try and find ways to avoid it all. In the meantime, you can join the debate by watching the Venice conference, livestreamed today on www.labiennale.org
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