A Visual Archive of Cinematographic Topics: Sorting and Storing Images (Wolfgang Ernst)

The cultural memory of images has traditionally linked images with texts, titles, and other verbal indices. Confronted with the transition of images to digital storage, non-verbal methods of classification are gradually becoming more important. It is not the archival question as such which makes video memory a problem; but that search methods used to find pictorial information are still limited to models developed for retrieving texts: ‘Typically, available methods depend on file ID’s, keywords, or texts associated with the images. They do not allow queries based directly on the visual properties of the images, [and they] are dependent on the particular vocabulary used’.

In his 1766 essay ‘Laocoon’, G. E. Lessing discussed the aesthetic conflict between the logic of language and the logic of images in terms of a genuinely multimedia semiotics: pictura is no longer – as Horace declared – ut poiesis; time-based media (like dramatic speech and linear narratives) differ from space-based media (like simultaneous pictures). The digitisation of images today provides a technical basis of inquiry into this conflict, so that this investigation can be grounded in the terms of the computer.

The archive here is seen as a medium of storage and a form of organisation of all that can be accessed as knowledge. The function of archives of images such as museums or data banks exceeds by far the mere storage and conservation of images. Instead of just collecting passively and subsequently storing these holdings, archives actively define what is to be known, remembered, and archivable at all. In so far that archives also determine what is allowed to be forgotten. In terms of technology, an archive is a coupling of storage media, the format of contents, and address structure. In this case, the images must be conceived as data format. Methodologically this implies leaving behind the contemplation and description of single images in favour of an investigation of sets of images. In terms of knowledge and memory, image archives pose, the following questions: what new kinds of knowledge will exist exclusively in the form of images; what part of traditional knowledge can be transformed into images; and what part might just vanish altogether?