CHArt TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Digital Archive Fever
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Doireann Wallace, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Designing the Electronic Archive: Archive Fever and the Archival Economy of ‘Getty Images Online’ Operations
The emergence and consolidation in the past decade or so of giant electronic stock image banks such as Getty Images and Corbis, trading in the reproduction rights of ‘visual content’ of all kinds, has radically affected the global circulation of images, yet there has been practically no exploration to date of the enormous changes and the diversification of image banks’ field of practice due to electronic and network circulation via the Internet.
This paper provides a theoretical perspective on the impact of digital technologies on the practices of stock image banks. Archive fever is a desire for context and law engendered by the archive’s inherent reproducibility. This is greatly exacerbated by digital circulation—deterritorialisations at the level of technology and interpretation that have increased the desire for immediacy, familiarity and context. On a practical level, archival economy, or the institution of laws and limits, seeks to both capitalise on and compensate for these deterritorialisations, in other words, to reterritorialise for profit. Stock image agencies have built or expanded their current enterprises on the basis of deterritorialisations at the level of archival substrate. At the most basic level, electronic storage and circulation have sped up and automated transactions, allowing consumers to conduct their own image searches and to download images instantly. Image banks also take advantage of the reproducibility of the digital image file, which need not be degraded through multiple use, and of new possibilities in the design of image search engines. Through their websites, which interface between agencies and users, they negotiate the ‘territory’ of the Internet: treading a path between the Utopian appeal of its potential for open access and democratisation, the communicative and marketing opportunities engendered by a fluid multi- or meta-media substrate, the desire for context and familiarity that the proliferation of technology engenders, and the need to provide simple, user-friendly search engines and information and limit appropriation and abuse of their economic resources. All of this amounts to the capitalisation of the possibilities of electronic circulation and distribution, to reterritorialisations both at the level of law and of user interface. This paper examines these issues with reference to the archival and design practices of Getty Images’ web interface.