Video: Wendy Chun - the Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory
Wendy’s blurb about the lecture:
Key to the digital as the new is an ideological conflation of memory and storage that undermines and underlines digital media’s archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral. As I explain in this talk, it does so not simply through some inherent technological feature, but rather because everyday usage and parlance seeks to arrest memory and its degenerative possibilities in order to support dreams of digital programmability, of the future unfolding predictably from memory. Unpacking the theoretical implications of constantly disseminated and regenerated digital content, this paper argues these dreams create, rather than solve, archival nightmares. They proliferate non-simultaneous enduring ephemerals.
I first watch this video maybe a year ago, and really enjoyed it. Wendy Chun teaches at Brown in the Modern Culture and Media department.