The Pararchive Project

Sanket Somaiya shares his thoughts on the importance of archiving artefacts, on the lessons they teach us, and on the value we derive from them.

“How do people assign meaning and weight to past events? Sociologists have coined the term “collective memory” to describe it. And it turns out that collective memory doesn’t just dictate the way groups recall the past en masse. Rather, wrote Jeannette A. Bastian, an event’s “memory trajectory” also influences the ways archivists preserve history—and opens…

In this piece by Gina Fairley, not only is the link between archives and culture made explicit, but the role of digitisation in facilitating broader access to and wider engagement with shared heritage is highlighted. The following comments from a contributor to the piece appear to capture this well: “Archives are unsettling, and have within…

As Palestinian history is erased, its archive becomes a nomadic war machine … What happens when the colonial archive, with its deletions and partial erasures, tells a story that clashes so intensely with lived history? When the archive actually obfuscates the past instead of elucidating it (a fantasy we entertain of the recording of history),…

Adam Curtis’ stylish and thrilling documentaries, The Power Of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace were early influences on the Pararchive project. His experimental works illustrated how the BBC’s archival footage could be remixed into radically new narratives, often challenging the original readings. His works do have a tendency to reframe history as a series of conspiratorial…

It’s easy to become cynical about the current fashion of story as the metaphor for everything from politics to religion to marketing to design. Indeed, I find myself rolling my eyes as another story-centric service is launched at us. However story is at the heart of Pararchive and Yarn and for a good reason. Dean…

“He said this was archaeology: ‘You’re digging up websites and restoring them to their former glory. You’re recontextualising them and they’re telling us about dotcom culture. What I’m trying to do…is bring back the website together with the technology that it was built in and for. It’s not just about the website itself, but about…