Dear colleagues,
As part of the conference 'The Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge
from the Encyclopaedia to Big Data', taking place at CRASSH, Cambridge,
19/20 March 2015, I'm pleased to announce details of the following public
lecture:
N. Katherine Hayles (Duke), 'A Theory of the Total Archive: Infinite
Expansion, Infinite Compression, and Apparatuses of Control' CRASSH, West
Road, Cambridge, 19 March 2015, 6pm
More info: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26072 /
https://www.facebook.com/events/676211939155262
Abstract below, no registration needed. I hope to see many of you there!
Best wishes,
Boris Jardine
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Munby Fellow in Bibliography, 2014/15
Cambridge University Library
Abstract:
A total archive is of course literally impossible, but in imaginative
literature, there are two ways to achieve it, as Borges has taught us:
infinite expansion ("The Library of Babel"), and infinite compression ("The
Aleph"). Apparent opposites, the two cycle continuously into and through
one another, as do outside/inside in a Möbius strip or interior/exterior in
a Klein bottle. The metaphor is not perfect, however, for while the
transition from outside/inside/outside is seamless in these physical
examples, with the Archive it is mediated by a hinge instantiated in
apparatuses of control: institutions, governments, corporations,
universities. Examples of the hinge's operation include the microbiome
project aiming to catalogue the DNA and to archive samples of all the
microbial organisms that inhabit human bodies; Christian Bök's project to
encode his poetry into the DNA of a microscopic organism known as the
extremophile; and the experimental print novel/project by J. J. Abrams and
Doug Dorst known as S. This talk will explore the implications of the
theory through the examples above and illustrate its operation in detail in
S.
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