[this paper was presented at the Balance/UnBalance Conference at Arizona State University in March where I also joined a panel with Mél Hogan, et al.]
We are living in a time where the wholesale storage of information exerts a dominant influence across the entire social system. The connection between this archive and both the stability and sustainability of the social system is direct. Few people are cognizant that it takes real(!) energy to drive “Big Data,” nor are they aware that such wide-scaled archiving (in “The Cloud”) directly affects the wider global environment.
This paper reflects on the fundamental energy (thermodynamic) conditions that apply to any ordered system. Order, as a temporal state — whether arising autopoetically or whether created intentionally within a wider structured system — functions as an information transfer or communication system and always requires an influx of energy to be maintained. The crucial issue embedded at the root of any archive relates directly to this necessity. Where does that energy come from, how is it secured, and what is the cost? As a near-ubiquitous feature of any social structure, the archive — as an ordered expression of information — is one such system. As there are apparently no violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics in the observed universe, is the fate of the archive the same as that of the cosmos: a slow heat-death? Obliquely invoking an interpretation of living (or general) systems theory, it is possible to 1) demarcate the trajectory of the archive (as (social) memory); 2) examine in the widest conceptual sense the cost of information storage and reproduction; and 3) predict the path that individual and collective knowledge takes into the future.
I will briefly introduce systems theory, as well as some principles of thermodynamics that will, as models, undergird the discussion. Relating energy, order, and information, I will tie these conceptions into the actuality of the contemporary archive by exploring the question: What does it mean to have a sustainable archive? As a creative media arts practitioner and, as a consequence, an analog and digital archivist, I will include in the discussion pertinent fragments of personal narrative that arise from that lived praxis.
Keywords: archive, thermodynamics, entropy, energy, information, systems, code, analog, digital, media arts, sustainability