Not only their contents but digital archives themselves are always already historical. Economically, following Marx's description of technologies as dead labour, technical media embody the knowledge and skills of our ancestors. We are now in a position to see that technologies are also the congealed form of primordial natural materials and processes as well as human skills and knowledge. Archives are then technical-ancestral, and ecological, like any capitalist industry. They are also discursive domains, and therefore contested operations of power, a contest which includes not only social conflict but conflict with technologiesour ancestorsand the ecologies in which they subsist. We now inhabit a system which exploits not only present humans and ecologies but ancestral technologies and ecologies. An ethical and political imperative derives from these conditions of the archive's existence. Because they are conditioned by exploitation, archival artefacts and practices can only condone, contemplate or contradict the conditions of their existence. Following Walter Benjamin's redemptive theology, an archive cannot simply store the old, but must address and redress the labour and materials, the land laid waste, the animals slaughtered, energy expended and the downtrodden whose sufferings paid for the materials it holds.
EphemeralAt an event in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2000, the film archivist Paulo Cherchi Usai informed us that of approximately 47 minutes of film exposed in the year 1895, the world's archives held about 42 minutes. But of the billions of hours of recorded footage from 1999, the archives contained only a pitiful point-something of a per cent. The proportion has only got diminished in the intervening two decades. The question of the digital archive concerns a number of characteristics that come to light in comparison with the century of film that ended, broadly, in the year 2000.Films, the individual artefacts, became cultural icons. We still watch Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jnr in amazement, to laugh and to learn. Jennifer Fay's wonderful essay on Keaton's Anthropocene (Fay 2014, reprinted in Fay 2018) and British video artist Steve McQueen's 1997 recreations of one of the film's most memorable stunts, Deadpan, are exemplary of the staying power of old movies. Great classics, cult favourites, forgotten gems and rediscovered wonders pepper the archival record. We recall whole films, scenes, shots and lines of dialogue with the same kind of respect and affection we have for poems and paintings. It is less likely that we will memorise the moves in a Tik Tok clip or the mannerisms of an Instagram influencer. This is not because there is an intrinsic lack of quality in these works, or that they show no cultural values of the kind that we still regard as the preserve of 'culture'. It is rather that the forms evolved in
