Puff, Chaos in the Cloud
On the transit from archive to antiquary
Jan 16, 2025
reading time: 4 min
We drift, almost imperceptibly, from the structured story of the archive into the chaotic expanse of the antiquarian world, "as though the waters have evaporated, leaving us suspended air." - Pathetic.
Nobody knows how to navigate through an antiquary once the owner is dead. - Pathetic.
ANYWAYS. The egomania of self document is not new. It happened in small scale before we knew how to print; it happens in large scale after we discovered the principle of a lens. Overproduction gave birth to the archivist. So we adjusted and installed some humanity inside the libraries; called them responsible for the anthropological document, simply because SPACE IS LIMITED and there were increasingly more things. Long, long time we needed to print out what we wanted to store, architecture is small and vague and unstable - you just need to burn it.
By that the walls got shaped of the hands of historians, critics, and scholars who filtered the vast ocean of human experience into the digestible and orderly narrative. What was deemed worthy of preservation had to be something that will be also worthy being known in "tiny" to "middle long" future.
..... And once you print to remember, you bind to organize, then you put it in a shelf. Logic.
Historically, libraries and archives were the custodians of human knowledge, meticulously organizing and safeguarding physical documents. WITHIN SMALL WALLS.
The transformation from physical archives to digital storage (late 90' or early 00') marks a pivotal shift in how we preserve and access information.
The archivist became the futurist and murdered it with fanaticism. BECAUSE SHELF WALLS ARE LIMITED everybody seemingly developed taste.
The existence of online storage has redefined this paradigm to somewhat something that is due to personal questions. While on the other hand not many seem to know what critical thinking is. - Pathetic.
The endless expanse without boundaries challenges the very premise of curation. (We can see that everywhere; inclusively hand in hand growing with addiction). In a space where everything can be stored, the notion of selection becomes obsolete, everything hyper-personalized in an individually imprinted society.
Just one example: A library requires selection, chamber music demanded coordination: "we actually needed to invite them", and the earliest musical compositions (whatever the medium / AND / remind yourself that recordings are only possible since the invention of the phonautograph in 1857) were acts of deliberate arrangement in general.
ANYWAYS. The very first person to place two sounds together, to produce a meaningful combination, was already curating experience as much as creating it. Be it a hammer and stone [or Ammer & Console, added on Aug 18, 2025], a drum and voice, or nothing and not much: the act precedes any formal recognition of authorship or ownership. Each arrangement was simultaneously a discovery and a selection, a micro-archive of sensory experience. The question is not if a work is original, but whether it can exist without the framing of attention; and .... most important: if it's NEEDED to be documented - but that aside. Sound is just a good example for capitalism of documentation / the audacity of short-long-storing everything.
This hyper-individualism is a response and a consequence of the archive's collapse. And the archive collapsed, because hoarders became archivists.
Imagine printers everywhere, powdering paper in the cloud. Puff.
Just to say, that this inability to impose limits has birthed a realm where chaos reigns.
In the antiquarian world, there are no longer gatekeepers or filters, because seemingly there don't have to be ones. There is no police, saying "à la poubelle" / asking: "ist das Kunst oder kann das weg?"
And so more and more everything is preserved, not for posterity, but for the momentary relevance it holds to the individual.
You, you, me, me, importance to important people.
This unbridled proliferation is a departure from the structured preservation to an unrestrained celebration of the specific and the personal.
The antiquarian space is not a retreat from the past but a continuation of the impulse of self documentation in a new form. No journalist needed.
It is THE evolution from the collective to the individual, from the universal to the particular; "let's forget about the bigger picture". The queen is dead.
In embracing the chaos of the antiquary, we may find new ways of understanding, not through imposed order, but through the rich tapestry of individual perspectives and in a space where the past and the present collide, where the act of preservation becomes a deeply personal journey, unbound by the limitations of traditional curation. However, by that WE WILL FALL APART.
We no longer need the traditional anthology what makes us forgetting that it exists: the digital cosmos swallows everything whole, but indifferent to value or importance. The labor (and work of archivists) once devoted to distinguishing the vital from the trivial now seems redundant. The archive, that once-unassailable fortress of significance, is left to decay, its purpose eroded by the sheer volume of what can be preserved; everybody wants to archive, and now everybody can. IT WILL FALL APART.
No longer do people flock to libraries or museums with the reverence of seekers for wisdom, they glue everything and nothing because time feels increasing, but reading can't be replaced with overflying. Being explained isn't automatically understanding, although it seems like it's all on the internet (the human made mess). Playlists are the new songs. Even the artist, the thinker, the scholar of today operates under the assumption that the lessons of the past are already internalized, that their meanings extracted and assimilated.
When the infrastructure crumbles, who will sift through the rubble to reconstruct what was once methodically preserved?
After the sculptural form reached its zenith, we encountered the white square: an embodiment of reduction, the stripping away of all excess until only essence remained.
After that just video remakes, sound stealing, ai pictures; because whatever. Reduction, reduction, reduction, nothing.
Who is the one that understands it for the future ones to look back?
The antiquarian should CATALYZE us to reconsider what it means to preserve, to (not-)remember, and to find meaning in a world that no longer adheres to the old rules.
OR CAN SPEAK BY IT SELF.
In this new world, we swim in the limitless expanse of possibility, each of us the curator of our own life-growing collection. What can I say. SCARY. Maybe nobody ever was an observer but a collector, and now it's first epoch where the collection can be transported faster than a human could ever travel; where we use it, but not own. Who's that face, right?
ADDITION. Apparently it's called the death of MONOCULTURE [as of Jun 30, 2025, article added on Aug 18, 2025]. So it's the algorithm, if you want to find a villain.
(01/16/25 - 02:44am)