Session I CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Siegfried Zielinski
Professor for media theory, Universität der Künste, Berlin








An-Archives, Genealogies, Variantologies
„History will do that which we will enable it to do and that which we will wrench from it. I do not believe that in the future we will have a smaller amount of long-term cultural memory. We are faced with the great task of choosing astutely and incisively from a myriad of data. We are compelled to have a „memorising“ approach to fleeting phenomena. For this we need good, i.e. incisive contructs. These constructs are less a matter of technological hardware, but rather of theories and methods. Time is running. We must at last start to take the cumbersome objectification of the past seriously, so that it can be made useful for the future. The „archos“ does not merely contain the origin, but always also connotes leadership. The idea of the an-archive implies carrying on collecting and finding passionately, without knowing where all this will lead us.“

 

 


Biography

Siegfried Zielinski is professor for media theory/archaeology and variantology of the media at the Berlin University of the Arts, Michel-Foucault-professor for techno-aesthetics and media archaeology at the European Graduate School Saas Fee and director of the Vilém-Flusser-Archiv in Berlin. He was Founding Rector of the Academy of Arts and the Media in Cologne (1994-2000). He is the author of Deep Time of the Media (2006), and the book series Variantology - On Deep Time Relations between the Arts, Sciences and Technologies, four volumes so far (2005-2010). Zielinski is member of the Academy of Sciences and the Arts in NRW, the Academy of Arts Berlin and the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain.


Foto: MONOKROM