[Air-l] my e-mail archives

[Sean Cubitt]

The doyen of film archivists, Paolo Cherchi Usai, pointed out a conference
laste last year in Wellington that of approximately 47 minutes of film
exposed in 1896 we have about 42. Of about 9 billion hours of film and
television released in 1999, the world's archives hold less than 0.1 per
cent. Archiving, canon formation, biography as well as history  become tied
to arts of forgetting and erasure. Amnemotechnics replace
mnemotechnics.That said I have a 4Gb drive full of mail, a collection of
floppies, zips and CDs not to mention a variety of online stashes with
heinous quantities of archived images, animations, , PhDs, book and journal
manuscripts. The difficult thing is that you never know when you will
*absolutely* need the reference from the file you just erased, but erase we
must, and trust the wisdom of sysops to maintain what is public in the
public domain of listserve archives, while what is intimate belongs to the
lovers and enemies to whom the intimacies were addressed. One day no doubt
the world will mourn the loss of my juvenilia. The mourning will be a
better experience than reading them.

s



Sean Cubitt
Screen and Media Studies
Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
seanc at waikato.ac.nz
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/

Digital Aesthetics
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita
The Dundee Seminars
http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html