Reboot 9 — Creuser l’archive — Palais de Tokyo — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Thursday, December 15, 2011

Evening organized by Jean-Michel Baconnier and Julien Prévieux with Jérôme Thièvre and Bénédicte Defontaines

It is understood that when a computer is rebooted, unlike when it is reset, this involves restarting it, while preserving the data memorized on it.

Therefore it is only logical, in the context of our “Reboot” evenings, that Christophe Kihm has suggested we should archive the entire year’s sessions and provide a restoration of them in the form of projects, at the end of the cycle, then finally relaunch the cycle. So we have attended the whole year’s presentations trying to collect and store as much information as possible. The data shared by those giving lectures have been archived with the help of all the recording supports and procedures available in this context: cerebral memories, digital memories, handwritten and typewritten texts, drawings, photographs, sound recordings, videos, PowerPoint, etc.

Well, what should be done with such an archive when it comes to relaunching the machine? How is such a quantity of information to be restored? And what consultation tools are to be used? Are we currently living through the dream of Gordon Bell, a computer expert working for Microsoft, who is recording every second of his life, or will we remain haunted, as he is, by inevitable lapses of memory? Even if these questions have steered our research during these last months, this final evening it will not be concerned with drawing up an exhaustive inventory of our archived data, any more than with producing a summary of the sessions, or imposing a definitive, fixed form on the archives of them. On the other hand, we will be attempting to suggest leads that integrate the data collected within projects in order to make better use of them outside the framework of “Reboot” events. Rather than being involved in a strictly defined restoration of the archive of the evening meetings, we wish to think about archiving tools, and ways of giving archives shape, and operating actions that result from the use of systems, or from flaws in the memorization methods. In order to develop the questions tackled in greater depth and to support our aim, we have invited researchers engaged in two large areas of the contemporary study of memory: Internet archiving and the neurosciences.

As you will have understood, this evening does not serve to draw things to a close, but sets out to relaunch the issues tackled during this annual cycle of interventions from the angle of their own archival storage.

This meeting has received support from the Culture Service of the City of Lausanne and the Cultural Affairs office of the canton of Vaud.