‘Having everything, possessing nothing’: archives and archiving in the digital era

Abstract

The article explores meaning-making by investigating the subject-object relation and human-machine intra-action within the context of archive and archiving practices. It discusses changing relations between humans, machines, and objects in changing technological environments. Entering the digital archive’s cosmos, the subject-object relation transfers the focus on human-machine intra-action. The article examines the thingness of digital objects and the role of search engines in generating data collections as prerequisites for the intelligibility of the entangled parts. In digital flowness, search engines provoke a stasis in the constant movement of information, creating ephemeral collections. Thus, meaning emerges as a temporal pause within the ongoing continuum. The article argues that in the processual continuum of movement-stasis, meaning is a process – always a momentum, always stillborn, thus, intelligible to both the human and the machine. Conceiving meaning as a process within the condition of digital flowness signifies the transcendence of content in favor of processual entanglements between the human and the machine.