Podcast: “The living archive”

How empowering people to take responsibility for archiving and using data can be a real strategy for the vitality of creation, both artistically and economically.

In this podcast (44 minutes), I lay the conceptual and technical foundations, then propose strategies, based on concrete examples. Among the topics covered are: digital heritage, the long tail, Agnès Varda, Netflix, Disney, Chris Anderson, Moore’s Law, TED conferences, indirect business models, etc.

This podcast was recorded as a contribution to the colloquium “Clicking the archive - the digital and the safeguarding of artistic practices” organized by Vincent Rioux (École des Beaux-Arts de Paris) and Benjamin Efrati (EHESS/BNF). The symposium takes place on December 12 and 13, 2023 at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris (Amphitéâtre des Loges - 14 Rue Bonaparte 75006 Paris), and is free of charge.

Conference presentation text

What happens when the archive becomes accessible at the click of a button from our computers?

Long associated with time and history, the notion of the archive has undergone major changes over the last forty years. It now also applies to the safeguarding of digital data.

Since 1992, French law has made digital production part of France’s cultural heritage. However, a large part of the cultural community is unaware of the concept of digital legal deposit. Over the past thirty years, artistic and creative practices have constantly evolved and adapted to the digital tools developed by the web giants and the Open Source community. Despite the emergence of a variety of archiving practices (cloud storage, streaming platforms, etc.), the question of archiving artistic practices remains an unresolved issue, even though it directly concerns the various cultural milieus (artistic production, research, heritage).

The aim of this symposium is to set out a number of observations and draw up an overview of current practices in terms of individual and collective preservation. How can we approach natively digital artistic experiences and the digital documentation of material practices? Are there any “best practices” in terms of individual digital archiving? What is the place of the digital in the heritage of culture from the point of view of the French state? This overview of the relationship between artistic practice and digital archiving is aimed primarily at art students and young artists, as well as professionals and researchers.

Since 1992, the appearance and disappearance of proprietary media, operating systems and processors have been the driving forces behind the evolution of the computer ecosystem, storage media and digital practices. As a result, the preservation of works of art in dematerialized form has been put to the test by the versatility of computing techniques. How much data has been lost, erased, formatted?

If we agree that the construction of databases and the interfaces that enable them to be consulted is the hallmark of the digital age, then sampling digital artistic practices is a particularly important issue in accounting for the cultural and social transformations that characterize the early 21^st century. What will future archaeologists conclude by examining the remains of our current databases?

This colloquium proposes a reflection on the archiving and patrimonialization of digital creative practices from a variety of perspectives. It will be an opportunity to examine legal, juridical and philosophical issues.

Podcast Transcript

A presentation in which I start from the most concrete level, what digital data really is and where it is stored, in order to explain how we preserve a digital heritage both in the present and over time. I then turn to the artistic and economic stakes of the archive, with the examples of Agnès Varda and Disney, and the concept of the long tail, to show that a well-kept archive is not a dusty collection but the very thing that gives a practice its freedom and its continuity.

My name is Benoît Labourdette. I am a filmmaker, an educator, a researcher, a consultant in cultural innovation and digital strategy, and a multidisciplinary artist. Why am I the one talking to you about archives? I worked a great deal in the field of DVD, with filmmakers and film libraries, I founded film festivals such as the Pocket Films festival in 2005, I took part in creating video platforms, I collaborate with the BNF (the French National Library), and I worked with Agnès Varda for a long time. The question of archives is therefore part of my daily work. I am also keenly aware of the political stakes of data, what is called big data, because I have been involved in computing for a very long time. As a teenager, I even created a website before the internet itself existed, back in the days of the Minitel, the ancestor of the internet: I had set up a Minitel server. And besides, I have a website, benoitlabourdette.com, on which I share a great many resources and which is itself a living archive.

In this presentation, I will go over a number of concepts and notions you may have heard of, clarifying them, and then I will take concrete, economic and professional examples of what makes the archive something so powerful and so constructive of an artistic practice and of its economy.

The digital world is 0s and 1s stored somewhere

First point: what I am talking about is audiovisual archives, audio and visual, multimedia, which includes text, music and video. Digitised archives, then. To give a short definition, what is the digital? We are constantly converting images, sounds and texts into a sequence of 0s and 1s, the binary code. These 0s and 1s are called bits, and they are grouped in eights to form a byte. Eight 0s and 1s side by side make it possible to count from 0 to 255: a byte goes from 0 to 255.

This may seem technical, but take an example you know. In Photoshop, you choose the colour of each pixel, and that colour is defined by a little red, a little green and a little blue. You may have noticed that red goes from 0 to 255, that is 256 shades, green likewise, blue likewise. Red, green, blue, that makes three bytes, so twenty-four 0s and 1s needed to store the colour of each pixel. A byte also corresponds to an alphanumeric character: A, B, C, the digits, the upper-case and lower-case letters, which are distinct. For sound, it is the same principle. Sound is a variation in acoustic pressure, so it is a curve. We divide time into a certain number of samples, fractions of a second, for instance 44,000 per second, and within each one we measure the level on a scale from 0 to 255, or in 16 bits. The audio CD, for example, is 16 bits, that is two bytes, which makes it possible to count from 0 to 65,535: we have 65,536 shades for each fraction of a second.

I won’t go any further into the technical side, but this helps to understand what I am talking about. These are series of 0s and 1s that can be copied without loss. A 0, when you copy it, stays a 0; a 1 stays a 1. There is none of that generational degradation we had in the analogue era: you can make copies with no loss at all in the digital age.

The OVH fire in Strasbourg

This data is physically somewhere. We are led to believe that the digital is the cloud, the clouds in the sky. No, this data is on hard drives, which may be located in the data centres of Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft, but they really are hard drives. Remember: in 2021, there was a fire at a data centre in Strasbourg, the one belonging to the largest European hosting provider, OVH. One of their centres burned down, and from one moment to the next 400,000 websites vanished. Those who had made backups, who had kept a duplicate of the data on their own hard drive, were able to rebuild their site. Those who had not lost it for good. There is therefore this paradox in digital data: replication without loss is possible, but so is irreversible loss, and faster than with other kinds of data.

These 0s and 1s can be on any kind of medium. A QR code, with its black and white squares, is made of 0s and 1s. A signal in an optical fibre, the internet signal that travels through the fibres under the sea, is made of 0s and 1s, simply a light that switches on and off at very high speed. It is no more complicated than that. You may remember the sound of modems, that “krrr krrr” of the 80s, 90s and 2000s: those were the 0s and 1s you could hear, current, no current, current, no current, at very high speed, which produced those high and varying sounds. You could hear the digital.

I am telling you all this because of one thing that seems very important to me regarding archives: this data is concrete and physically stored somewhere. The digital is no less material than anything else, it is fully material. We access it in an extremely fluid way, but it is stored in material objects, hard drives, USB sticks, paper such as QR codes, film stock, magnetic tapes. We must not believe there is any magic. Magic does not exist, it is an illusion. We have the illusion that it is magical, but it is not. If we care about our own archives, we therefore have to pay attention to this data, to know where it is and to look after it in a very concrete way. I am not saying you need hard drives everywhere, but there are two keys to preservation, and I will talk about them before turning to economic models and to artistic creation.

Securing your data in the present

There are two keys to digital archiving: archiving in the present, that is, securing the data today, and archiving over time. We have seen the extreme fragility of digital data. How do we secure that fragility in the present? It is very simple: you have to keep that data duplicated in two different places, if possible more than 900 kilometres apart. In France in particular, we have many nuclear power plants, and at a distance of 900 kilometres, in the event of an accident, there should in principle be no problem. It is not science fiction to imagine that nuclear accidents could happen. And just because a power plant blows up does not mean it is a reason to lose your data. This may seem a little strange, because if a nuclear plant blows up, people die. But humanity creates its history, its narrative, through this data, and it is important to envisage catastrophe. The world is unpredictable, and the archive is precisely what fights against that unpredictability, against the orality of the present.

To be very concrete, it means keeping that data in two different places. If you have an Apple phone, for instance, it does it on its own, you have nothing to do. The data is on your phone, your text messages, your photos, and that data is duplicated in real time on Apple’s servers. It is indeed in two distinct places, separated in space. If there is a bug on Apple’s servers, which can always happen even though they do everything to avoid it, the data is also on your phone. And if your phone is stolen, if you lose it or it is damaged, the data is also on Apple’s servers.

For those who are not in the Apple religion, which is not my case, it is a kind of religion, but why not, I have nothing against religions, it is even good to believe in something, how do you go about it? Apple is practical, they manage everything for us, which has consequences in terms of freedom. Everyone does it their own way. You can, for example, use Dropbox, which duplicates the contents of folders you choose on your computer and synchronises them in real time: the data is then in two different places. Be careful, though: if you delete something by mistake, since it is synchronised, it will also be deleted on Dropbox. But Dropbox keeps a 30-day history, a kind of trash bin that takes 30 days to empty. There are also backup programs, what is called incremental backup, which compare two hard drives, or a hard drive and a remote server you rent, and only copy what has been modified. That is synchronisation. There is a very good program, with a free version, called SyncBack, available on PC and not yet on Mac, but very practical for this. So much for data in the present: in two different places, secured.

Preserving your data into the future

Second aspect: data in the future. As of today, there is no durable medium for preserving digital data. We do not know how long the media last. A hard drive has an average lifespan of 7 to 10 years, which is not very long. USB sticks, SSD drives, we don’t really know, it depends on many conditions. There are methods of going back onto film, onto 35 mm stock from the old cinema, on which the data is printed visually, the 0s and 1s, and which is rated to last 500 years. It is feasible because it is visual, but it is expensive, fairly complicated, few providers do it, and it is not easy to retrieve: it is by no means within everyone’s reach. There are also magnetic tapes, formerly the DLT tapes, today the LTO tapes. I have old DLT tapes rated to last 25 years, and some of mine are 15 years old, but the readers no longer exist: the data is on my tape, and I can no longer read it today.

So how do you secure your data into the future? There is a trick which may seem a little basic, but which works: our two media, kept in two different places, we copy them every 5 years onto a new medium that is current at the time. You might think you will secure your hard drive so that it is in perfect condition in 30 years. Perhaps it will be, but will the USB port of today that lets you plug it in still exist in 30 years? Surely not, the interfaces will have changed, you will no longer be able to connect it. Copying every 5 years onto new media is therefore the best way to proceed, little by little. It requires effort and has a certain cost, but if you want to create an archive, a heritage, though the word is not a very happy one, it is patriarchal, an archive that is useful for the future, you have to look after it: organise your data, know where it is and how it is organised, and take care to preserve it over time by changing the medium every 5 years.

There is good news, though: Moore’s law. Gordon Moore is one of the founders of Intel, which makes the microprocessors that equip a large share of today’s computers. In the 60s, he formulated this very empirical law, it is not a scientific law, which he revised several times and which is the subject of debate and controversy. What I am giving you here is a general idea, not an absolute truth, but a fairly accurate idea that has held up well. In the 1971 version, he says something that remains roughly valid: every 2 years, computing capacity doubles at an equivalent cost. Concretely, today you go to the Fnac and, for 100 euros, you get, say, a 4-terabyte hard drive. If you go back to the same Fnac in 2 years, for the same 100 euros you will get an 8-terabyte hard drive. It is an exponential progression: 2 years later it will be 16 terabytes, then 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. Capacity, including storage capacity, increases at an equivalent cost. Some will say it is not exactly that rate, sometimes it speeds up much more, sometimes less, but it is a certainty that, at an equivalent cost, there is a swelling of storage capacity. This means that every 5 years, when you copy your data onto new hard drives, they will probably be drives so much larger than five years earlier that you will end up with fewer and fewer of them. If you are a little organised, then, it is neither a problem nor a prohibitive cost to secure your data into the future and to look after it.

Agnès Varda and her catalogue

I now come back to the subject of the living archive, after all these notions. Why is an archive living and constructive? Here I am speaking more in political, strategic, artistic and economic terms, which is my field, and less about the technical side I covered earlier. I will start with an example, and finish with the concept, for a change.

I take the example of Agnès Varda, whom I knew well and with whom I worked. On what? On making DVDs. Agnès Varda, who died a few years ago, a very great French filmmaker, had her own production company. What was the company’s main activity? Promoting the archives of her films and those of her late husband, Jacques Demy. Promoting her films means carrying out restorations, organising exhibitions, re-releases, editions of books and DVDs, partnerships, crowdfunding campaigns so that people get involved. In France, but in other countries too. The heritage was not huge, neither the number of films Agnès Varda made nor the number Jacques Demy made, but had she not carried out this heritage work over the long term, had she not managed and championed it herself, perhaps today we would not remember Agnès Varda, and the young people who are fans of hers would never have heard of her. I had also looked after her website, on top of the DVDs, and we had talked a great deal about these heritage issues.

You will tell me that being an archivist and being an artist have nothing to do with each other, given how much time archiving takes. Think again. Agnès Varda was someone free and independent. The fact that she worked on her catalogue, that she went on building an economy in a steady way through distribution and through the public’s encounter with her works and those of her husband, is what guaranteed her independence and her legitimacy. It was that income that gave her the freedom to create new films. She was also responsible for her heritage. That is why I speak of a living archive: an attitude that consists in capitalising on what one has acquired and keeping it alive. Something old is not necessarily dusty and uninteresting.

Disney and Snow White

Agnès Varda is not the only one to take this approach. A very large American media company, Walt Disney, has exactly the same attitude, on different industrial levels. Disney’s early films are constantly being re-released. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first original feature film, is re-released, you can buy it in a new edition, it is on platforms, there is a whole range of things around it, even today, although it is very old. This film has not aged a day, and it has not aged a day because this archive is always kept alive, promoted, and because, in Disney’s case, it gives rise to sequels and inspirations. Disney has worked very hard for a very long time on the techniques of preservation and promotion, they are very active on the question of archives, and that does not stop them at all from producing new things: it all comes together.

Looking after your heritage is a choice

You will tell me that personally you are neither Agnès Varda nor Walt Disney, and that it is not really your problem. I think these are choices. You can decide not to care about your archives, not to take responsibility for this matter. It is a choice, but it is a choice to cut yourself off from the past. And be aware that today no one will do it for you. Whether you are an artist or a company, a production or distribution firm, it is up to each of us to take the responsibility of archiving our own productions, and why not a little of other things too. For those who do not, the data will be held by others: you may have to pay to retrieve it, and those others may not have kept all of it.

A few years ago, at the invitation of the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, now deceased, who had founded in 2006 the Institute for Research and Innovation at the Centre Pompidou, and following a request from the Ministry of Culture, a group of us reflected on recommendations for young artists. One recommendation I argued for, and which would seem to me to fall within a public-service mission, was for the Ministry to offer a kind of cloud, a place where artists would have an access code to deposit digitised works, photos, films, whatever you like, and where the Ministry would guarantee free of charge, funded by the common good, say 25 years of preservation of those works. If such a service existed, practical, open and free, and I am not talking about distribution but solely about archiving, the French State would equip itself with a tool for building a digital heritage. This notion of digital heritage is very important. Heritage is buildings, books, architecture, and there is even intangible heritage. But the vast majority of what we produce today is in digital form. Do we care about that heritage? The Ministry did not take up my proposal. I do not know what happened afterwards, but there have been projects along these lines at various times, and I am far from the only one to think this. In any case, it does not exist today. So we are left being responsible for our own heritage. We have to take care of it. You take care of your library, which is something material, you take care of your furniture: your digital data is exactly the same, there is no difference. There is no ontological difference between something digital and something that is not. It is material somewhere too.

The long tail, from the poetry book to Amazon

The last concept, an argument that I hope will convince you even more to care about your digital heritage, is the long tail, a concept from 2006 formulated by Chris Anderson, an American economist and journalist, editor-in-chief of the magazine Wired, about technology. Like the others, it is a concept that is debated: some say the long tail is nonsense, that it does not exist. For my part, I find it operative and interesting. It is not a truth, it is a hypothesis, but for me an extremely operative and important one. I will summarise it for you in a basic way, as Chris Anderson does in his book. It distinguishes the economy of cultural goods before the internet, in the material world, from the economy of cultural goods in the internet age, in order to characterise the specificity of the economy with the internet.

Let us place ourselves at the dawn of the internet. Close your eyes: 1995, or rather 1996. A site has just appeared, Amazon, which sells books online: you go to the site, you order books. And then there is the Fnac, which does not yet have a website. I take these examples to convey the concept, which is simple to set out but not at all simplistic. Let us compare the sale of a book on Amazon and at the Fnac in 1996. Today it is different, but in 1996. Take a poetry book that comes out. In France, in publishing, 50,000 new titles come out every year. You go to the Fnac Montparnasse, there is a poetry section, and at the start of the literary season a poetry book is on the shelf, and it is superb. Over the year, let us say three people buy it. The following year, there are new poetry books, and the shelves are not extensible. Sorry, but only three copies were sold: out it goes, and another one, no less good, takes its place. In the material economy, the economy of shelves, there is the 80/20 rule: 20% of titles, the new releases and the best-sellers, account for 80% of revenue, and 80% of titles, all the others, account for only 20% of revenue. Inevitably, the following year, the title that sold little is neither among the new releases nor among the best-sellers, it cannot stay on the shelf. You will tell me you could order it from the publisher, except that, since you no longer see it on the shelf, you do not even know it exists. It is the exception that proves the rule. In practice, the poetry book will have sold three.

Let us move to Amazon, at the same time, in 1996. The same poetry book is on sale, in exactly the same way, on Amazon, or let us say on the internet. The new releases and the best-sellers bring in a lot of money, of course. But the book of which three copies were sold in a year remains available: there are no shelves on Amazon. Amazon is a platform that connects customers and publishers, with a distribution system. They themselves hold no stock in the classic sense; the Amazon warehouses, which did not exist at the time and exist today, are distribution platforms designed to speed up delivery. Amazon connects the publisher and the customer, and has no reason to take this book off the shelf, since there is no shelf. This book, exactly as in a bookshop, is connected to others: if you are interested in a certain kind of poetry, you see the other books of the same kind. On Amazon, this book will sell three copies the first year, as at the Fnac, but it will sell three more the following year, and three the year after, because it does not disappear. Over 10 years, it will have sold thirty, whereas at the Fnac it will have sold three.

That is the long tail: the whole of this diversity of small things which each amount to little, but which are far more numerous on the internet than in a physical bookshop, where there is a shelf limit. On the internet, there is no shelf limit. The difference is that at the Fnac this long tail, which is not very long, accounts for 20% of revenue, whereas on the internet it accounts for 50%. New releases and best-sellers make up 50% of revenue, and all the rest, all the very diverse little things, make up just as much. The economy on the internet therefore feeds as much on the present and on fashion, on the quantity of the present, as on the very long term. It is paradoxical and counter-intuitive, but the economy of the internet is an economy of the very long term. It is an immense opportunity for diversity and for niches, those specialised things.

Indexing and search rankings over time

About ten years ago, I worked with the Arte channel as it was going digital, on questions of search-engine indexing and of managing their videos in the long tail. Arte Live Web, for instance, is archiving over the very long term. There is a very important key on the internet here: search-engine referencing, that is, the way something put online remains accessible in the years to come. This is what is called referencing, and in particular the natural referencing invented by Google in 1998, when Google appeared. If we take a video, everything around it, its title, its credits, its summary, its keywords, is text. When you do a search on Google, everything goes through text. One day will come the recognition of images, of voices, it already exists in part, and potentially indexing by the very content of audiovisual works. But today, referencing is managed by yourself, with what are called metadata, all that textual data you add. The more a video is documented, with summaries, the names of all the actors and technicians, the more chance someone has of coming across it in a search. If the list of all the sets, of all the places where the film was shot, is written somewhere at the bottom of the page, someone interested in one of those places may come across this film even in 15 years’ time, and will be glad to watch it. For the long tail to work over time, you therefore have to think, on the internet, about indexing.

Cultivating your niche through the archive

Here we find Agnès Varda again. Agnès Varda is a niche, it is not popular cinema, but a niche with real fans, people who adore her, and which she herself cultivated over the years. You can do exactly the same thing on the internet: create a website, put things online, document them, and care about the data, that is, not put your videos on YouTube but on your own server, which you pay for each year. There is no technical necessity whatsoever for a video to be on a platform. You just encode the file as a light MP4 and put it on your server, just as you put an image or an MP3 there. It has worked this way since 2005, so for a long time, but people do not necessarily know it.

If I tell you this, it is because you can, like Agnès Varda, create your niche and, over the years, thanks to the long tail, assert, embody and deepen your artistic identity. I am not saying it is the only possible approach, but it is an extremely powerful one, like Disney’s, because it is rooted in a narrative. You step out of this dictatorship of the present, of the imperative to be absolutely in the news. That exists, no problem, but there is also plenty of room, as soon as you put attention into it, for diversity, for very specialised and demanding things, cultivated through the long tail and through good management of the archive. This archive makes it possible to give life constantly to new things, through the circulation that access makes possible.

YouTube, the living archive par excellence

The concept of the long tail is at the heart of the economic models of all the major platforms of the web. YouTube, for instance, is the very example of a living archive, as is TikTok in its own way. YouTube’s big audiences are not the successes of the present. It is over 10 years that these videos build their big audiences, on viral things that find their success in the long tail, because YouTube has existed since 2005. There are also things of the present, but YouTube remains the very example of a living archive: it is thanks to the archive that there is the whole of the present. It is the opposite of television, or rather it is the new television, television with archives built in. That is the internet. I believe that the digital and the internet offer us this possibility of narrative and of inscription, without it costing much. Web hosting today, whether you go to OVH, which had its fire, or to other French hosting providers such as O2switch, costs you 100 euros a year, and with no limit on storage space. Overall, they make their money back. There is therefore no limit to sharing and to the long tail. Why can they do it? Because of Moore’s law: every 2 years, storage space costs them half as much, so they can perfectly well offer large amounts.

That is why I think caring for your archives, promoting them, keeping them alive, making them public and why not free of charge, at least for things of the past if not of the present, is important. Free access means more people can reach them, which anchors our symbolic existence in the narrative, a word I often use and which perhaps ought to be defined a little more. This establishes what is called social capital, something very concrete that can be converted into hard cash, and on the basis of which you can build direct or indirect economic models.

Netflix, TED conferences and the indirect economy

Direct or indirect economic model, this is a very important distinction on the internet, and it is another subject, even if there are links with archives. I will finish with one last example: Netflix, which is an indirect economic model. I pay a subscription, I do not pay for each film. When people watch films, it costs Netflix bandwidth: the more viewers a film has, the more it costs them, whereas they charge everyone the same subscription. You might think their interest is for people to stay subscribed while watching as few films as possible. Their interest is for people to stay subscribed. So they maintain a level of quality relative to their own criteria and to their customers’ desires, a contextualised quality, which does not make it the criterion of quality. But it is not the film as an object that is sold, and a film does not directly earn money because it is watched a lot on Netflix. It is indirect: what earns money is the subscriptions, something flat-rate. It is not at all the same thing as direct models, such as when you pay for your cinema ticket.

On this point, I refer you to another excellent book by Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, published after The Long Tail, in 2009, which explains very well how to build an economy on indirect models, just as operative as direct ones. Do you know TED conferences? Everything is free, and yet they make a fortune. Look at how much a ticket costs to attend a TED conference live: it is extremely expensive. You might say that, live, you get the same content you can have for free, so why pay? To go and do business with people who, like you, pay. And the higher the quality of the TED conference, the higher the ticket price, all the more so as this content is legitimised by its very wide free audience around the world. That is the future of the cinema theatre. I believe in it. Thank you.

All contributions to the symposium (audio)