Animating Archives

I was not able to attend as many sessions of the conference as I would have liked but one notion that I unfortunately did not see but was recounted during the closing round table was the idea of "save" versus "save as." Rather than simply engage at a level of the loss of materiality of the thing that is digitally archived this dynamic presents new and interesting ways to conceive of data. The act of "save" versus "save as" seems to reconstitute a materiality in the digital. It also plays an important role in suggesting that the archive remains at the center of politics of choice. The archive as "saved" represents an update, an addition or subtraction of elements that cover the preceding archive. As "saved as" this allows for a constitution of multiple archives in favor of a singular destructive process. It calls to question the ways in which copies with even miniscule differences result in a new archiving. This constitutes almost an archiving of archives. Perhaps more can be elaborated on the original talk that gave way to this notion.