Socioplastics 11821 Every File Survived, the Exhibition Disappeared
A digital archive can preserve thousands of files while losing the relations that make them reliable evidence. DocumentationFray [11022] examines breaks between versions, captions, objects, dates and changes of custody. A curator may reopen an exhibition archive years later to find photographs and emails whose filenames changed across migrations, captions from a later installation and dates that conflict with shipping records. The records remain; reconstructing the event requires renewed work. Jacques Derrida’s writing on archives, Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s study of habitual new media offer different ways to consider archival authority and technological time. Their approaches direct attention to the connections among records. A photograph’s value depends on its relation to an object, a version, a location and a permission. Preserving those relations helps researchers establish what was shown and how it changed. A documentary handover test could ask a new researcher to reconstruct an exhibition from its archive. The record would include file histories, caption versions, object lists, authorisations and custody transfers. Where evidence conflicts, the archive would identify each source and preserve the unresolved relation for review. This test can guide migration procedures and show which contextual information needs to travel with a file. DocumentationFray makes archival reliability a question of linked evidence. It helps institutions evaluate preservation through the relationships that allow future users to interpret a collection and account for its history. The record can support future cataloguing by showing which relationships remain verified and which require further investigation.
REFERENCES
Chun, W.H.K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by E. Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive. Edited by J. Parikka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html