A Prototypical History - Text 2
Chris Marker, a bricoleur, made a DVD-ROM which gave him the opportunity to organize a series of reminiscences and new paths. He brought together several kinds of objects: part of his photographic archives, artisanal computer graphics, texts and minimalist sound creations. Going through this DVD-ROM, one is faced with typical Marker-like trajectories which mix imaginary autobiography, travel experiences, thoughts on war and an interrogation of the act of creation. These function as ironic punctuation of the choices offered by the object’s interactivity. The series Anarchives is a project which invents the form of an interactive museum. Each volume in this series is a DVD-ROM made by an author (Antoni Muntadas, Michael Snow, Thierry Kuntzel, Jean Otth and Fujiko Nakaya) who becomes the chief curator of a presentation of his or her own archives, along with elements he or she attaches to it to structure the visit. For its part, Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Darker Side of the American Dream is a collection of twelve CD-ROMs. The materials which make up the heart of the project are films from the Prelinger archive: industrial films, commercial films and other kinds of “useful movies.”[2] Rick Prelinger, the project’s director, is the “lecturer” appearing in the video clips inserted into the archival images. He has created a montage out of traces of American civilization found in films and diverse discourse on the country.
An authorial creation (Immemory), a museum project (Anarchives) and a film anthology (Our Secret Century): these three projects connected to a “database logic,” a concept proposed and examined in depth by Lev Manovich,[3] provided the history of media with a new path for transmitting objects, for connecting discourses on the contexts around them and for the invention of a way of leading viewers to discover all that. These digital supports, the CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, in addition to transmitting audiovisual fragments accompanied by a discourse, also contained an experimental manner of exhibiting them, each time inventing the structure connecting them and the interface for gaining access to them. Invaluable from the perspective of creative and innovative knowledge sharing, these objects met with fleeting fortune. While the Digital Snow volume of Anarchives has benefitted from migration to the Web – it is still accessible online – the other objects are difficult to consult today because of changes to the way electronic files are read. This may be one reason for their existence as prototypes only.[4]
The web documentary, which blossomed a decade later, benefits from being placed in series with the author’s archivist constructions.[5] Like the latter, the webdoc tends towards a kind of knowledge sharing which involves active viewers able to follow complex paths and to fill in the gaps which a non-linear structure will always have.
