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SUMMARY:The Total Archive: Dreams of Universal Knowledge from the Encyclop
 aedia to Big Data - Speaker to be confirmed
DTSTART:20150319T090000Z
DTEND:20150319T180000Z
UID:TALK55725@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:24901
DESCRIPTION:The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of scienc
 e fiction\, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon
 ’s House\, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – 
 of Enlightenment\, High Modernism and absolute governance.\n\nFar from end
 ing the dream of a total archive\, twentieth-century positivist rationalit
 y brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum to Mass-Observatio
 n\, from the Unity of Science movement to Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Ga
 lactica\, from the Whole Earth Catalog to Wikipedia\, the dream of univers
 al knowledge dies hard. These projects triumphantly burst their own bounds
 \, generating more archival material\, more information\, than can ever be
  processed. When it encounters well defined areas – the sportsfield or t
 he model organism – the total archive tracks every movement of every pla
 yer\, of recording every gene and mutation. Increasingly this approach is 
 inverted: databases are linked\; quantities are demanded where only qualit
 ies existed before. The Human Genome Project is the most famous\, but now 
 there are countless databases demanding ever more varied input. Here the q
 uestion of what is excluded becomes central.\n\nThe total archive is a pol
 itical tool. It encompasses population statistics\, GDP\, indices of the S
 tandard of Living and the international ideology of UNESCO\, the WHO\, the
  free market and\, most recently\, Big Data. The information-gathering pra
 ctices of statecraft are the total archive par excellence\, carrying the p
 otential to transfer power into the open fields of economics and law – o
 r divest it into the hands of criminals\, researchers and activists.\n\nQu
 estions of the total archive they engage key issues in the philosophy of c
 lassification\, the poetics of the universal\, the ideology of surveillanc
 e and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social struc
 tures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives\, and what
  are the temporalities implied by such projects?\n\nIn order to confront t
 he ideology and increasing reality of interconnected data-sets and communi
 cation technologies we need a robust conceptual framework – one that doe
 s not sacrifice historical nuance for the ability to speculate. This confe
 rence brings together scholars from a wide range of fields to discuss the 
 aesthetics and political reality of the total archive.
LOCATION:CRASSH\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge\, CB3 
 9DP
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