Arqueologia da memória digital: a produção de (não) presença nos arquivos do Wayback Machine

Abstract

The present thesis proposes a genealogy of archival technologies, allowing us to articulate the World Wide Web through two main points: like a world archive and as a memory of itself. Although it plays the role of a universal library which promotes unrestricted access to all knowledge, only an initiative like the Wayback Machine is able to preserve digital culture memory, as it works as a time machine that indexes websites, providing renewed access to them. Taking such digital archive as an object of study, our goal is to comprehend the operational logics and the technocultural processes involved with this technical memory; for this reason, we selected media archaeology as the appropriate theoretical and methodological tool for operating the memory machine to identify its enunciations of materiality, mediality and temporality. As our research hypothesis, we propose that the Wayback Machine reconstructs the past while regenerates Web’s memory through the production of presence, and also of non-presence; with this in mind, both reflections of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Wolfgang Ernst on the topic are articulated together. The former advocates a spatial feature of the phenomenon; the latter indicates presence as a temporal shock. Lastly, the archeology made in the digital archive, among recurrences and gaps, comprises a series of layers (interfaces, source code, anachronism, crawler, ghost frames, error); they reassemble a media ecology of web memory experience, capable of reproducing the past in an auratic manner as well as producing noise due to operational failures and framed absences.