Para-Archives : Rethinking Personal Archiving Practices in the Times of Capture Culture

This study explores possibilities for alternate modes of personal archiving in the context of contemporary techno-culture and dominant practices of personal data capture. An intensified proliferation of various capturing technologies concerned with collecting, storing and analyzing personal data allows to problematize personal archiving as one of the most prevalent everyday media practices that people engage in today, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The main point of departure for this thesis is a recognition of a certain polarization of perspectives and debates prompted by this new techno-cultural condition defined in this research as capture culture. If on hand we are presented with an enthusiastic scenario of a certain infallibility of digital memory and possibility to fully control the way one construct's his/her digital archive, the opposite view confronts us with a pessimistic vision of a full penetrability of our digital repositories (and hence everyday lives), ever more tightly dependent on the imperceptible dynamics of network technologies. In this thesis I investigate a possibility to move beyond these ramifications and seek for alternate techniques for personal archiving by engaging in a practice-based research and media archaeological inquiry into (archival) media histories. The practice-based case study unfolds as an auto-ethnography of the author’s personal recording techniques over the last decade. It traces the trajectory from a paper notebook, through a series of digital recording techniques excerpting various subsets of the surrounding world, to the post-digital, archival cabinet organizing analog and digital traces from these practices. As a result, this thesis puts forward a concept of para-archiving, a creative media practice presenting alternate ways of configuring a subjective position in capture culture, a departure from the dominant motivations for engaging with it. As part of an experimental methodological assemblage defined as media practice approach, the author also uses his practice as a vehicle enabling a critical reflection on the implications of today's pervasive technologies on, for example, material, performative and agential aspects of personal memory and archiving. While located within the field of media and communications the thesis borrows from such fields and debates as philosophy of technology, media archaeology, cultural studies and (media) arts