Digital memories
On Funes' fallancy between the art of registration and forgetfulness
«There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.»
Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1995.
Throughout the twentieth Century, imaginative visions or inescapable dystopias have been inspired by the flawed relationship between human beings and machines, moving between an absolute collaboration or a total prevarication of one to the other. In this sense, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon in which human beings live freerly and the mechanized and caste-divided society that inhabits the Brave New World described by Aldous Huxley represent antithetical prefigurations.
The irreversible process of automation that characterizes our era profoundly modifies the role of the human being from an active producer of goods to a consumer of goods and a producer of documents about himself.
There are 1.7 Megabytes of data per second that each human being creates, for a total of about 2.5 quintillion bytes produced every day. In this sense, the idea of abundance of data embraces a condition of immeasurable size, of inhuman excess, thanks to more performing and advanced technological supports.
The human urge of “leaving traces” (Ferraris, 2014) meets, in fact, a growing ease of recording and archiving which however challenges the very condition of existence of memory: its finite being.
The refusal of oblivion, intended as the conscious cancellation of unimportant traces, such as filtering, tends towards an indistinct transcription that rejects the idea of unarchivable. In this sense, the difference between simple data and knowledge lies in sieving the overabundance through our mind through, using Umberto Eco’s words, a process not only of retention but also of repulsion.
Precisely the human mind, the tabula par excellence on which to transcribe experiences, turns out to be an imperfect support, unable to record the growing accumulation of information unlike the virtually infinite virtual storage space. Cloud storage conforms as a digital transposition of an unlimited mind which nevertheless condemns us to a spasmodic and non-cognitive accumulation.
The character of Funes described by Jorge Luis Borges (1944) personifies an exceptional archive, much closer to the ideal performance of the machine than to the human intellect, capable of recording an abundance of images, details, notions while losing the ability to articulate thoughts. Informations, therefore, instead of the knowledge pervade the mind of the fictional character, critically resembling the condition of our era.
In this regard, in 1989 Richard Saul Wurman defined information anxiety as “the product of the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we understand” (Wurman, 1991), clarifying how the enormous growth in the number of data produced leads to less and less knowledge of them.
As for el memorioso, the Cloud stores knowledge by making itself an immaterial transposition of the Mundaneum (P.Otlet and H.M. Le Fontaine) capable of collecting everything known in a systematized and above all digitally accessible space.
The idea that the archive substantiates itself precisely in the “place of original and structural weakness of […] memory” (Derrida, 1991, p. 18) introduces the concept of “archiving archive” investigated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Starting from the contribution The Concept of Archive: A Freudian Impression, 1994, for the Memory: The Question of Archives conference, then collected in the famous Mal d’Archive, Derrida recognizes all the archive has the dual role of container space aimed at preserving events to perpetuate them and make them collective memory, and a recording process that sifts through these same events, accepting their cancellation as a condition of existence. As a tangible means of accumulation, the archive is not detached from the very method of transcription and ordering of the data which allows its readability.
The process of accumulation and selection of documents has historically identified different types of media capable of handing down human memory. Libraries, deposits but also rituals and transcriptions are fundamental recording and transmission devices of our civilization.
The same artistic operation by Alberto Burri in the Belice Valley of sealing the remains of the city of Gibellina destroyed by the earthquake of 1968, in fact makes the Grande Cretto an archive of memories that eternalizes an urban layout that can no longer be revitalized.
Or again, the accumulation of everyday objects that Andy Warhol collected in 621 Time Capsules, carefully selecting them from 1974 until his death and now conserved at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Counting around half a million objects, the capsule apparatus serves as a documentary counterpoint to the art collection on display in the museum, gathering materials used by the artist, audio recordings, photos, posters, interviews and wigs.
He himself clarifies that “the thing you should do is keep a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month throw it away. You should try to leave a trace of it, but if you can’t and it gets lost, that’s okay, because it’s one less thing to think about, one less load off your mind” (Warhol, 2008). If filtered recording exists starting from a process of removal, today’s digital transcription defines an atypical space for storing memories that embraces the excessive and indefinite dimension of document production.
Cloud storage, contrary to how ethereal the name may evoke, consists of huge and apparently inaccessible fortresses in which, referring to the Foucaultian idea of heterotopia, “time never ceases to accumulate and collect itself” (Foucault, 2010, p.25).
The Data Center, which collects extremely precious content, can only be considered the contemporary and most technologically advanced transposition of the archive, since it rejects the selectivity of registration. On the contrary, it is a deposit capable of accumulating everything.
Scattered in the extra-urban landscape for purely economic reasons (areas with lower taxation) and energy reasons (close to available sources of energy), Data Centers are configured as hyper-technological and hierarchically dominant containers. These are generic deposits, immeasurable but paradoxically invisible, excluded from contemporary urban planning and architectural investigation, but absolutely necessary for our lives.
Taking up the critical investigation that Archizoom propose of the urban process through No-Stop City, understood as a “quantitative accumulation” detached from any figurative code, it becomes clear that the built landscape is today surmounted by an immaterial network of flows, relationships and exchanges that finds its operating infrastructure right in the huge data containers.
Is it possible to imagine a different interaction with the Cloud in which the human being is not overwhelmed but is able to filter information, making it known? Can the contemporary space of data accumulation, today an inaccessible fortress designed for mere functional optimization, open up to human experience as well? So is the Data Center an architectural fact?
Technological progress allows ever greater efficiency in recording data, which is transcribed on ever smaller physical support. The coded recording on punched cards of the 1920s and 1940s was replaced in the middle of the last century by transcription by electromagnetism on special reels which allows for the archiving of 225 Kb of data (equivalent to 1,920 punched cards). In 1956 the first hard disk in history was created, the IBM 350 Disk File, the minimum unit of today’s Data Centers, with a storage capacity of 3.75 Mb. It is a turning point in the recording process in the first instance because it allowed access to data in real time and secondly because, being composed of platters divided into concentric rings and sectors, hard disks allowed the archived data to be found according to a specific reference system.
Today, the thousands of racks neatly arranged inside the Data Center collect about 1 extrabyte of Cloud data, equal to 500,000 2 Terabyte Hard Disks and 9 million billion punch cards.
The evolution of the supports and consequently of the data storage space demonstrates its absolute centrality, at the same time revealing some of its main characteristics, becoming proper figurative invariants.
The size of the huge containers establishes an unbalanced relationship with the context they are placed into, resulting in complete disregard. The fascinating excess, which refers to the deepest idea of the sublime, nevertheless establishes a complete estrangement from the human being, who becomes an observer, like admiration for a work of painting or sculpture.
If Rem Koolhaas compares the huge and silent data containers to Land Art works, precisely in the relationship they establish with the landscape they occupy, it is the inaccessibility of the Data Center that makes it an “inhuman space”, shaped solely on functional optimization and completely inhospitable to even human habitability. Seemingly silent and impregnable, these contemporary fortresses are utterly introverted, welcoming one or very few access points through which to reach some of the interior spaces. The space for man is narrow, signposted. The permanence time of the human being inside is limited and allowed for strictly maintenance purposes, making the Data Center a real simulacrum of the immaterial content it preserves.
If it would indicate a clear separation between the spaces of accumulation of data and the places of their effective use, that is between the traditional location of the Data Centers and the city center and human life, some contemporary trends would seem to subvert this logic.
An emblematic case in this sense is the project The Spark by the Norwegian studio Snohetta which since 2018 has been working on the implementation of the Power City, an urban settlement capable of producing more energy than it is able to consume. The iconic storage space of the over 200 racks located becomes the epicenter of the new settlement, around which collective activities and public spaces are arranged. The roof of the new system includes vegetable gardens, steps and squares, while the roof of the mineral core that houses the accumulation of data becomes accessible, proposing a new system that aims to reduce the energy consumption of a traditional Data Center by 40%.
Once the mainly utilitarian vocation of the data container has been proven, it appears evident that the content it holds is indispensable to the life of the human being, determining the Data Center as an absolutely necessary space.
The hypothesis of including the presence of the Data Center in the urban fabric and more generally in the new settlements, also in terms of energy, makes these inhuman spaces absolutely open not simply to the human access, but open to welcoming new meanings.
The space for custody and consultation is reduced, being able to contribute to the identification of a dimension of coexistence in which the filtering and selection of information appear possible, ideally making the deposit of data a container of memories.
Data Center is fully included in analytical researches which look forward a multidisciplinary critical reading of it with ethical, social, compositional and economic implications. Above all, it is understood as a tangible and concrete space of the ethereal Cloud which, if on the one hand represents its “weight” in a tangible way, also in environmental and economic terms, on the other it becomes a dimension coinciding between the “space of flows” (Manuel Castells, 2009) and the traditional meaning of place.
It is possible to state that the difference between accumulation and memory lies in the distance between the simple recording of data and their selection and stratification until they become collective memory. If the improvement of recording media, from punch cards to Cloud storage, has made access to data democratic, the overabundance of their transcription has prevented correct filtering.
Twentieth-century utopias and dystopias contaminate each other in a contemporaneity in a precarious balance between technological progress and the human being’s ability to use. It seems clear that the challenge to face, in a data-centric world, is not the acquisition of information but rather our ability to select it. If memory, especially collective memory, constitutes civilization itself, it is necessary to filter the information that stratifies it in order not to risk stopping at the most superficial layer of contemporaneity, transforming us into a digital inhumanity.