The archive with a virtual museum: The (im)possibility of the digital archive in Chris Marker’s Ouvroir

Abstract

Can digital platforms such as the database and the virtual museum offer new possibilities of the archive? What concept of the archive can be pursued by contemporary practices that are appropriate and explore the digital forms in order to engage with the radical transformation of the experience and memory of older arts and media? This article seeks to address these questions by investigating Ouvroir (2008), a Second Life virtual museum created by Chris Marker. The author argues that Marker’s model of the virtual museum allows for the dialectic of the archive as marked by both new possibilities for documentation and memory and its inherent room for loss, fragmentation, and disorientation. This dialectical concept of the archive challenges not simply the traditional concept of the archive that presumes the totality of preservation and the systematic classification of information but also the utopian account of the virtual museum or archive, according to which its simulation, free accessibility, and universal connectivity contribute to overcome the physical museum or archive.

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