Separating Bodies, Synchronising Minds: The Role of Digital Technology in Mediating Distance

Abstract

Digital technology reconfigures the organization and status of archives. Immersed in the eternal present of their technological youth necessary for their consultation, digital archives potentially no longer bear the marks of time, whereas they show the past. They gain a new appetence, based on the communication uses of the moment. But how then to give them their sense of archive, how to restore their own temporality? The challenge is to allow what we call 'historical empathy' without falling into psychological anachronism. We argue here that the mediatization of digital audiovisual archives must allow us to feel concerned, with the concessions no doubt necessary to the technology and aesthetics of the moment, while perceiving the strangeness of the contents and the definitively bygone aspect of this past. It is therefore a particular critical hermeneutic to build, where mediation must show a past that technology displays in a permanent and persistent contemporaneity.