Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

Left
Cody Trepte,
1 Year of
Archived
Email, 2005
Right
Tim Schwartz,
Card Catalog,
2008
Art, and more specifically media art, often deals with archives and
their intriguing content (data which is connected yet heterogeneous)
– still, the attitude of artists, when referring to paper archives, seems
to be to approach them from a retrospective point of view. An artist
referring to an archive will usually depict its traditional, physical form,
which is undoubtedly still the one we’re most familiar with, even after
a few decades of computers and databases.
For example, Cody Trepte’s installation 1 Year of Archived Email 285
consists of stacks of a few thousand punched cards (the oldest computer
storage medium), on which an entire year of personal e-mail has
been archived. The artist chose here a hybrid representation: the email
messages are indeed ‘archived’ (stored on punched cards, in much
the same way as if they had been recorded on a modern magnetic or
optical computer storage medium such as floppy or hard disk, CD or
DVD). But they are also in a certain sense ‘printed’, since they are visibly
reproduced on paper (though the cards are not in any normal sense
readable by humans; the digital encoding is designed to be deciphered
by a machine). The artist in his statement tells us how computers “have
become machines for remembering”; it is also interesting to note that
punched cards are actually the most durable form of computer storage.
The installation also contains some manually written (and almost
equally cryptic) indexes: for example, the exact date and time each email
message was sent or received, which uniquely identifies each message,
while the content of the messages themselves remains unreadable
– in plain view, yet inaccessible. As with other conceptually similar
artworks, we are shown here what happens when the sheer amount of
data involved – which was made invisible inside the computer’s hard
disk – suddenly reveals its full spatial dimension.
A similar approach was chosen by Tim Schwartz for his installation
Card Catalog: 286 a single drawer, more than 2 metres long, filled with
index cards cataloguing all of the 7,390 songs on the artist’s iPod, one
card for each song. In this case the data is human-readable, though it is
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