(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The prominence of information environments is challenging former definitions of space. The seamless merging of the physical and the digital on an operational level has formed a self-regulating space of interconnected elements with its own retrospective genealogy. To explore the latter, this paper turns to UNESCO’s 2003 report titled “Guidelines for the Preservation of Digital Heritage” which introduced new preservation methodologies for the digital age. This was largely driven by the notion that the architecture of the Internet posed a significant threat in the continuity of the digital heritage. According to the report, the rhizomatic topology of the Internet—presented as a factor of negative instability—does not allow for a central agency to exist, as the decentralization enables multiple agents to decidedly alter the material in an ad hoc manner. Additionally, the interconnectivity that defines the digital space allows changes in one part to jeopardize the integrity of the whole. Such space is also significantly mediated; once the tools that allow for the re-performativity of an artifact lose their validity, the artifact is considered lost. Finally, the same principal applies to its obscure materiality, with the storage carriers of these artifacts being vulnerable to damage, loss or deterioration. Based on these four axes of structure, agency, mediation and materiality, this paper expands on the report’s main thesis in an attempt to define new protocols for the preservation of spatial artifacts and events in today’s hybrid, non-linear informated space. To do so, it examines the radical shift of the act of ‘preservation’ from a logic of the ‘archive of originals’ towards one of aggressive multiplication and strategic distribution. It overall questions the validity of former preservation methodologies addressing exclusively digital domains, and attempts to rethink architecture as the de facto system of creating new retrieval protocols in non-linear information environments.