Archive et mémoire : le numérique et les mnémophores

Abstract

Digital technology reconfigures the organization and status of archives. Immersed in the eternal present of the technological up-to-dateness necessary for their consultation, digital archives potentially no longer bear the marks of time, whereas they do show the past. They entail a new appetence, based on the communicative uses of the moment. But how then to give them their sense as archives, and how to restore the temporality which is their own? The challenge is to allow what we call “historical empathy” without falling into psychological anachronism. We argue here that the mediatization of digital audiovisual archives must allow us to feel concerned, with the concessions no doubt necessary to the technology and aesthetics of the moment, while perceiving the strangeness of the contents and the forever bygone nature of this past. It is therefore a particular critical hermeneutic which must be built, where mediation must show a past that technology displays in a permanent and persistent contemporaneity.

Keywords

• writing
• digital
• time
• mediation