Imagine a vast, physical archive that you’re able to visit in person for your research. When were you last able to clearly understand how an image or a document was produced, simply by observing and noting its physical characteristics? Arguably, never—the help of archivists and historians and media theorists is almost always required to reveal a wider context, and to interpret the plurality of stories that may be written in and around the artifacts that find us. Technology is always a part of the writing of those stories because tools have been ever present in the making of media. A real pleasure of archival research can be the unpacking of those stories in a more in-depth way, understanding how complex technologies construct their media, and how those media shift our understanding of how knowledge is produced. Machines like the printing press, the lens-based camera, the typewriter, the networked computer, the drone—and the softwares that runs them (and the ideologies that engineer them)—complicate any possibility of “pure space” in the creation and interpretation of documents and images and other media in the archive. There is no way to work in creative isolation away from the politics of the technical apparatus.
Humans are able to imprint, embed, or sometimes hide complex stories of inequity, injustice, and violence into the tools they create, which get transferred into the media they produce. These narratives are becoming less and less visible as technology becomes more obtuse, buried within seamless black bricks, or even disappearing into thin air as an ambient presence that totally erases the interface, making it almost impossible to have any kind of relationship to the inner workings of our tools. The ease with which a casual iPhone user may generate entirely new archives on a daily basis—think Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok—overshadows any criticality that’s required to truly understanding the politics behind the economies they engage. If there is a “pure space” in creative content generation today, it may be ignorance: a willful turning away from anything that challenges the instantly gratifying rewards of racial capitalism. There is nothing pure about this pure space, of course.
This media condition, now fueled by the added seduction of AI-generated image-making tools, makes possible the promise of instant archives on demand. As the speed and quality capabilities of these tools increase exponentially, so will AI-assisted content creation scale up massively, shifting our relationship to the traditional archive and research and history in general. Why bother with existing archives when you can make your own? Entire pre-existing archives will be “eaten” alive by these tools, used as reference material to create unimaginable variations and deviations.
AI generators like Dall-E and Midjourney and ChatGPT receive a lot of attention today because they’re fairly accessible and easy to use. Social media overflows with images, screenshots, and hot takes around the seemingly sudden appearance of magic, black-box tools that churn through enormous warehouses of data, enabling the creation of anything. Much of the debate around AI content creation centers on artistic labor and intellectual property, but these conversations will soon subside as the tools themselves begin to disappear within popular software, absorbed into powerful corporate economies that go well beyond the concerns of any individual maker. AI-generated JPGs produced with written language can look like lens-based photographs from the 1890s or hand-painted artwork or futuristic images created by an animator without the need for any of the tools or people traditionally associated with those media; this will not only dramatically transform how we work (as did the camera and the GUI and Photoshop) but forever change our relationship to all other pre-existing images. The overwhelming possibility that any image or text may be instantly created, unlimited by imagination or resources, now or in the future, is just too heavy a burden to bear by the limits of the traditional archive.
I’m in the middle of a gut renovation of a house in Providence, Rhode Island. We just finished the interior demolition, and I’ve been enjoying the newly exposed structure of the house, some of which hasn’t been seen since it was constructed in 1924. One day in the otherwise empty basement I found a photo in a picture frame, laying on a shelf. The glass was broken, so I slid the photo out, and saw that it was a Polaroid print, the old kind that I recognized from my own childhood when my parents documented our lives with a Land camera, the kind with a bellows. I posted the photo on Instagram and asked the contractor about it, and he said that “it just fell out of the ceiling.” Some quick research into the codes on the back of the print tells me that the “A4″ might mean a film manufacture date of January 1974. Based on the colors, styling, fashion, and interior depicted in the photo, I would guess it was generated in the 1970s or early 80s. How long was it stuck in the ceiling? Was it there since the photo was created, or tucked away some time after? Was it even stuck there at all? Maybe it was hidden, or accidentally misplaced.
There’s still so much to discover in the gaps. Look closely at what can be found, what’s lurking, waiting to be revealed. Outside the archive, latent images and language can suddenly appear out of nowhere, like magic. I’m thinking about how this object—yes, it’s a photograph, but it’s really a 3-dimensional object that fell from the ceiling, carrying so much more information than the photograph itself—has never been in any collection or traditional archive, as far as I know. Perhaps it’s never been seen by more than a couple of people since it was created. It’s in this moment that the domestic structure itself is revealed to be a magic black box, a bad archive perhaps, full of seams and creases that have the ability to expose its precious contents. And the archivist, whoever they may have been, was either excellent in their task, successfully protecting their artifact for almost 50 years, or a faulty steward who perhaps accidentally or willfully abandoned their material to an unknown future. Regardless of how it got there, the bad archive suddenly dropped this photo into view in 2022, when the ceiling was opened up, and its story continues.
“It fell out of the basement ceiling” means that this Polaroid photograph was stationed in the floorboards of the house, perfectly preserved under the lives and activities of the various occupants for decades. It’s as though the photo has been “developed” through some kind of creative process again, output from its black box, generated for a second time, and certainly visible on the network for the very first time. It’s not a figment of anyone’s imagination, but perhaps this image/object is impossible to truly understand. It’s not any imaginable photo, but this particular one, carrying with it an overload of meaning and specificity and locating it and its stories in many dimensions of overlapping time and space. It’s a charged, urgent artifact that has moved slowly through history. I don’t know anything about this woman or the leg in the foreground or the setting but there are so many clues. And with the clues, so many questions that are embedded in this image of Black joy. Did she live in the house? Who took the photo? It seems to be an image of a good moment. A night of enjoyment, lots of drinks on the table, a comfortable pose. But I’m already reading too much into it. I’m not equipped. We can keep getting closer, always looking for more, re-examining, searching. “It fell out of the basement ceiling” sounds like a weird accident but artifacts and evidence spontaneously appear like this all the time, all around us. Time travel happens all the time, if only we knew to stop and look and feel it happening. All of the possible archives are already here, and if we want to fill in the missing parts, we simply have to get closer, look harder, and start writing the stories. The questions we find, and the trajectories that are revealed, will show us the future.
