As a hegemonic process of production, semio-capitalism is predicated on the redesign of processes of relation, such as cooperation.

when they become obsolete or broken. Once the input–output or desiredfunctionality of the device stops working, it is often unfixable and inac-cessible for modification for most individuals. Unlike a household lamp,which can be fitted with replacement lightbulbs, many consumer elec-tronic devices have no user-serviceable parts, and the technology is dis-carded after it breaks. The depunctualization, or breaking apart thedevice into its components, is difficult because of the highly specializedengineering and manufacturing processes used in the design of the arti-fact: contemporary electronic devices are intentionally built to be dis-carded, and their obsolescence is clearly planned.Within the framework of media archaeology, it is important to notethat there is not only one box. Instead, one box hides a multitude of otherblack boxes that have been working in interaction, in various roles, indiffering durations. As Bruno Latour notes, its often when things breakdown that a seemingly inert system opens up to reveal that objects con-tain more objects, and actually those numerous objects are composed ofrelations, histories, and contingencies.Consider Latour’s methodological exercise as an art methodologyfor media archaeology:Look around the room. . . . Consider how many black boxes thereare in the room. Open the black boxes; examine the assembliesinside. Each of the parts inside the black box is itself a black box fullof parts. If any part were to break, how many humans would imme-diately materialize around each. How far back in time, away in space,should we retrace our steps to follow all those silent entities thatcontribute peacefully to your reading this chapter at your desk?Return each of these entities to step 1; imagine the time when eachwas disinterested and going its own way, without being bent, en-rolled, enlisted, mobilized, folded in any of the others’ plots. Fromwhich forest should we take our wood. In which quarry should welet the stones quietly rest.21For the arts, objects are never inert but consist of various temporal-ities, relations, and potentials that can be brought together and brokenapart. Things break apart every day anyhow—especially high technology—and end up as seemingly inert objects, dead media, discarded technology.

can be used as a single object. We refer to the disassembly of these singleobjects as “depunctualization”—which shows a circuit of dependenciesthat ties the owner to the corporation that manufactured the device 19(see Figure 16).Black boxing, or the development of technological objects to a pointwhere they are simply used and not understood as technical objects, is arequirement of infrastructure and technological development. A com-puter system, for example, is almost incomprehensible if thought of interms of its millions of transistors, circuits, mathematical calculations,and technical components. Black boxes are the punctualized buildingblocks from which new technologies and infrastructures are built. 20A black box, however, is a system that is not technically understood oraccessed, and as a result, these technologies are often completely unusableFigure 16. A black-boxed system processes input into output without the user’s knowledgeof the interior functionality of the system. When a black-boxed system is broken, outputstops. At this point, the black box becomes depunctualized. The interior of a black-boxedsystem is expert territory and tends not to be user serviceable. Despite being expertterritory, portions of the non-user-serviceable interior of the black box system can bemanipulated and bent by nonexperts. We propose that both computer hardware andhistorical archives can be bent. Image by Garnet Hertz.

Once developed and deployed widely, technical components areunderstood by users as objects that serve a particular function: an elec-tronic toy makes a sound when a button is pressed, a telephone makesa telephone call, and a computer printer outputs a document when re-quested. The inner workings of the device are unknown to the user, withthe circuitry of the device like a mysterious “black box” that is largelyirrelevant to using it. It is only an object with a particular input that resultsin a specific output; its mechanism is invisible. From a design perspective,the technology is intentionally created to render the mechanism invisibleand usable as a single punctualized object.Punctualization refers to a concept in actor-network theory to describewhen components are brought together into a single complex system that

The virtuality of the diagram is also explored in Logic of Sensation,where the approach, in John Mullarkey’s description, ‘is taken up withprolonged reflections on rhythm, in art – the co-existence of all move-ments on canvas. Subtending the concrete machines of each canvas, theabstract machine is a diagram of spots, lines and zones . . . haptic, ratherthan optical, tactile, rather than visual’. ‘The diagram is not just anoutline, but involves the fullness of colour – as sensation . . . [the haptic]is a part-icipation rather than a representation, a material belongingand becoming of one part in another rather than by one specular wholeof another’ (Mullarkey 2006: 176, 159). As I explore in Deleuze andCinema, ‘this hapticity is simultaneously optic and tactile. The visualbecomes “felt”. The felt connection between eye and hand is felt, incoagulation, an evolution of hand into eye’ (Kennedy 2000: 117)

The Deleuzian event repatternsa system’ (Protevi 2006: 6). Diachronic emergence is premised on unpre-dictability and novelty; a creative production of new patterns. Accordingto Protevi, this type of emergence ‘leaps’ and ‘evolves’. Emergence thenis like a ‘two-sided coin’: one side in the virtual, the other in the actual(Massumi, 2002: 35).

it explores the working of move-ments in/through and beyond the texts/bodies/vectors of the operaticperformance of Madama Butterfly through resource to the concept ofthe biogram. The biogram is that which advances us from the diagram,through synaesthesia, in a cyborgian collusion with bio-aesthetics andtheories of proprioceptivity and viscerality. Sounds, movements, bodiesand brains are affective ‘modulators’ through which we experience themoves of the butterfl y . . . the entraining of the brain.

Current debates within Deleuzian-Bergsonian film studies are takingsome new directions in an imbrication of the technoscientific andbio-aesthetic through philosophic engagement with brain/bodyworldrelationals (Pisters 2002; Manning 2006; Powell 2006; Kennedy 2007,2009). Dance and performance, whether live or filmic, effectuate a widerange of physical, emotional and aesthetic traces. Where do these sensa-tions reside? How can we explore the temporalities of moving bodies(sonic, visual, haptic) both in real time and in recorded time beyondthe more formal debates of aesthetics? What and how we know, whatand how we feel are part of a mobile, multi-directional, distributed andindeterminate interrelation between non-human and human actants inan emergent dynamic set of ecologies

It seems that adiscourse of dissonant but convergent cognitions has provided us witha rich palette of modulations through which to explore the concept ofthe ‘performative’.

Katherine Hayles, inHow We Became Posthuman, argues thatdistributed cognition replaces autonomous will, embodiment replaces abody seen as a support system for the mind, and a dynamic partnershipbetween humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist

In a book collection concernedwith Performance Studies, then, I was intrigued to consider how it mightbe possible to meld together some transversal processes of thought initi-ated by my engagement with Deleuze to offer a posthuman theory ofemergent aesthetics which embraces the scintillation, the electricity andthe passion of much performative art, in this case of a filmed operaticperformance

Chapter 10. . . of butterflies, bodies and biograms. . . Affective Spaces in Performativities inthe Performance of Madama ButterflyBarbara Kennedy

For Cache, this ontology of space initiates a Bergsonian image ofthoughr. Restated in the terms of Leibniz, this ontology implies that,'[wJe will then certainly not acquire the soul or the body that we are atsuch pains to secure by better enclosing our subject zones; we must ratherdelve down into texture or go back up into envelopes by grafting ourselves onto the world that surrounds us and by opening this world withinus' (Cache 1995: 124). In his investigation of time, Bergson sought toreach back to the 'critical turn' where duration surges forth as a continuous multiplicity. The corresponding spatial substrate in Cache, taken upby Deleuze in The Fo/d, is inflection. Just as for Bergson duration maybe apprehended only through a mental effort of intuition, for Cache adynamic conception entails a reaching back behind the fixity of rigidbodies in three-dimensional space: 'Take any surface. Generally, wedescribe its relief in terms of summits and crests, basins and valleys. Butif we can manage to erase our coordinate axes, then we will only seeinflections, or other intrinsic singularities that describe the surface precisely' (Cache 1995: 36). Once we sense images in terms of their qualitative uniqueness, rather than according to an external metric, Cacheposits that 'we accede to another regime of images thar we will callprimary ones' (Cache 1995: 36). For Cache, the primary image is not anur-image or the first stage in a series; it is rather space in its sheer virtuality, what Deleuze, citing Cache, called 'not yet in the world: it is theWorld itself . . .' (Deleuze 1992: 15). Just as fOf Bergson duration wouldDeleuze, Folding Architecture 43constitute the surging forth of time as a continuous multiplicity, primaryimages ttace the welling up of space. They precede distinctions betweeninside and outside, before and after. Cache takes the Mobius strip as anexample of how a primary image 'allows us to see, if only for an instant,a universe with no top or bottom, right or left, inside or outside' (Cache1995, 37)

This blank surface/legible depth dualism is reproduced in the various theories of travel and travelling that try to distinguish between travellers andtourists, the latter oeing portrayed by the former as the poor unenlightened souls unable to detect the deeper meaning of things.16 But evidentlyit is becoming more and more difficult to sustain: postmodern space doesnot seem to yield the depth of meaning its classical and modern antecedents did.

In the previous chapter I described the interface as a generalmode of mediation. While readily evident in things like screensand surfaces, the interface is ultimately something beyondthe screen. It has only a superficial relationship to the surfacesof digital devices, those skins that beg to be touched. Rather,the interface is a general technique of mediation evident atall levels; indeed it facilitates the way of thinking that tendsto pitch things in terms of “levels” or “layers” in the firstplace. These levels, these many interfaces, are the subject ofanalysis not so much to explain what they are, but to showthat the social field itself constitutes a grand interface, aninterface between subject and world, between surface andsource, and between critique and the objects of criticism.Hence the interface is above all an allegorical device thatwill help us gain some perspective on culture in the age ofinformation. For this reason, we look now to the “deeper”realm of software, the realm below the screen, with an eye tothe possible ideological construction of this hidden electronickingdom.

New media foreground the interface like never before. Screensof all shapes and sizes tend to come to mind: computer screens,ATM kiosks, phone keypads, and so on. This is what Vilé mFlusser called simply a “significant surface,” meaning a two-dimensional plane with meaning embedded in it or deliveredthrough it. There is even a particular vernacular adopted todescribe or evaluate such significant surfaces. We say “theyare user-friendly,” or “they are not user-friendly.” “They areintuitive” or “they are not intuitive.”

circumstances of creation, to records’ ongoing affect in human activity. Conse-quently, records cannot not be considered solely as relics; end-products that exist inspace and endure through time. Rather, they are representations of time-boundphenomena (Lemieux 2014; Upward 2009; Yeo 2007) and recordkeeping modellingneeds to transcend the static classification of artefacts, to encompass treatments oftheir movement through spacetime.

Conceived in the 1990s,these models continue to be actively explored, for example the amalgamation of theRecords Continuum and Cultural Heritage Continuum Models as a means ofexplaining emergent memory-making phenomena such as YouTube (Gibbons2015).

Similarly, generalised platforms do not provide for negotiation of competing rightsand are generally more concerned with providing repositories for communityarchives than infrastructure for pluralistic participatory recordkeeping

However, community archiving projects, while empowering for their targetparticipants, tend not to be arbitrarily broad and deep. This is due to two reasons.The first is that, as reactions to the policies and practices of inhospitable record-holding organisations, such initiatives aim to create distinct and safe spaces forcommunity recordkeeping (Flinn 2011). They are not necessarily designed as part ofnetworked infrastructure nor do they necessarily aspire to encompass a widercatchment beyond the immediate community. In particular, such narrowness doesnot admit space for the negotiation or resolution of conflicting rights in contestedrecords, as it is generally assumed that the serviced communities, or communitysegments are sufficiently homogeneous in their requirements.

Farrington and Bebbington (1993, p. 105) propose a simple typology ofparticipation in terms of breadth and depth—breadth being an assessment ofinclusiveness or hospitality, and depth corresponding to the degree of empowermentenjoyed by stakeholders. Accordingly, participatory recordkeeping can be expressedin these terms and the sources examined in this study may be categorised as shownin Fig. 1. In the recordkeeping context, the depth of empowerment concerns thedegree to which stakeholders may possess and exercise agency in relation torecordkeeping activities defined above. In other words, the ability of participants toact effectively (Giddens 1984, p. 9) in relation to in the appraisal, creation,documentation, preservation, access control, and disposal of records.

It has given rise to anumber of typologies of participation beginning with Arnstein’s ‘Ladder of participa-tion’ (1969) and continued by Deshler and Sock (1985), Biggs et al. (1989), Farringtonand Bebbington (1993), White (1996), and the Organisations for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Nuclear Energy Agency 2004). The commonmetaphor of these typologies is a graduated, cumulative scale of behaviours that rangesfrom disengagement to comprehensive sharing of power between stakeholders, witheach graduation on the scale encompassing the activities of any lower levels.

The language employed by participatory archiving and recordkeeping literature isdrawn from discourses of participation that emerged from studies of developmentinterventions in western urban contexts or non-government organisation (NGO)initiatives within developing nations. Such discourses are generally couched in terms ofthe ceding of power and acknowledgement of rights from the top-down andempowerment and the exercise of rights from the bottom-up; ‘‘a shift from control byauthorities to control by the people or citizens’’ (Cornwall 2008).

that information systems may be analysed independently of their setting of use(Wand and Weber 1995), many researchers now acknowledge that IS investigationonly has meaning in the context of social setting (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014).This indivisibility of material artefacts and their social embeddedness, termedsociomateriality, leads to entanglements over time in a non-deterministic manner(Svahn et al. 2009).

Archival Multiverse is a termcoined by the Pluralising the Archival Continuum group that refers to arecordkeeping landscape that embraces ‘‘the pluralism of evidentiary texts,memory-keeping practices and institutions, bureaucratic and personal motivations,community perspectives and needs, and cultural and legal constructs’’ (PACG 2011,p. 73).

The term recordkeeping informatics refers to the technological and social aspects ofinformation systems involved in recordkeeping (Oliver et al. 2009a, b).

Participation inrecordkeeping, therefore, may need to begin with the creation and purposefulness ofrecords and may continue for the remainder of their lifespans (and indeed beyond).

However, the term recordkeeping has a different meaning in the continuum sense(Reed 2005a): as an all-encompassing description of activities germane to the recordlifespan. From a records continuum perspective, recordkeeping encompasses thedecision to create records; their management throughout the multiple contexts ofcreation and use; and their preservation or destruction based on ongoing needs. It isthis meaning of recordkeeping that will be used throughout this essay. Record-keeping activities include appraisal (defining which records should be created orbrought under control and identifying those that have enduring value), documen-tation of records and recordkeeping activities in the form of metadata, preservationof records for as long as they are needed, enabling access to records and performingdisposal according to negotiated appraisal agreements. In general, these are not‘once-off’ activities but may occur repeatedly through the lifespan of records.Records may, at any time, be re-appraised; have their documentation corrected oraugmented; or have their preservation or access regimes changed.

To start with, record may be defined as a trace or representation of activity wheresuch traces have value to individuals, organisations, and/or societies—‘‘whether thatbe for a nanosecond or millennia’’ (McKemmish 2001, p. 336). A record alsocomprises metadata that documents the ‘‘transactionality associated with theoriginal creating intent[s]’’ (Reed 2005b, p. 6) and provides for its evidentiarynature—even if such notions of evidence turn out to be contingent, contested andelusive (Yeo 2007).

literary warrant for participatory engagement with records wasdeveloped to determine a typology of potential participants and the sorts ofactivities in which they may wish to engage. This typology is useful from twoperspectives. Firstly, it may be used to understand the participants themselves,together with their characteristics and needs. Secondly, such a typology can providethe foundation for the design of services and systems that satisfy such needs. To thisend, this essay concludes with a discussion about the nature of systems forparticipatory engagement with records that may be used to understand thelimitations of existing recordkeeping systems and projects as well as to support thedesign of future recordkeeping systems.

This suggests that participatory engagement with records needs to be consideredin terms of networked and interoperable recordkeeping infrastructure. In otherwords a conceptualisation based on the archival commons (Anderson and Allen2009), the Archiving System (Reed 2005a), and the public information service(McCarthy and Evans 2012) needs to be employed in order to embrace both themultiverse of records and metadata as well as the pluralities of participatory archivalpractice. What are the system requirements for networked participatory engagementwith records?

However, in the face of this collection-oriented view, records and contextualmetadata elements are actually distributed across a plurality of systems (PACG 2011).An orientation around rigidly delimited sets of material (i.e. ‘collections’) may not bean appropriate paradigm in the context of networked access, however necessary, itmay be to identify administrative jurisdiction. Thus, from a systems perspective,rather than limiting ourselves to discrete, bounded sets of records, should we not bedesigning for a single, global, highly interlinked network of records and contextualmetadata elements? The role of an archival system from this perspective is to facilitatethe stewardship of part of this network (Caswell 2014), while interoperating withother systems to provide consistent, controlled, and accountable access to records.

Additionally, community archiving endeavours have often focussed on thedevelopment of technical solutions that support project-specific requirements forcommunity collections (for example: Huvila 2008). The resulting archives (and inparticular, the archival control systems) enable the participant communities tomanage records as stand-alone sets of material. Similarly, generalised communityarchiving applications have been developed as platforms with support forcollection-oriented requirements, (for example The Mukurtu team 2015).

Despite, or perhaps, because of this broad-based activity, definitions ofparticipatory archiving or participatory recordkeeping have been elusive. Never-theless, such definitions appear to encompass the management of records undercommunity control (Flinn 2011); consideration of community or crowd-sourcedsubmission and annotation of content (Haythornthwaite 2009); and the acknowl-edgement of the rights of multiple stakeholders in records—irrespective of therecords’ physical location or custodial arrangement (Gilliland 2014a)

Availability[edit] The initiative was well received by fans as it had made it possible for viewers to experience older Eurovision finals, and also allowed fans access to higher quality copies of older finals than what was previously available.[11] Due to copyright agreements, the EBU only has ownership of contests aired since 2004, with individual host broadcasters owning the rights to those before that.[12] A large majority of the existing finals, especially those in the former half of the contest's history, had previously only been available as video tape recordings, often with generational loss, especially those from the 1950s and 60s

The Eurovision Song Contest, of all EBU activities, has also generated by far the largest amount of scholarly attention. See: “Bibliography of ESC Research,” ESC in Context (blog), May 28, 2021, https://escincontext.com/resources/bibliography-of-esc-research/, which currently has over 100 titles. The archives of Eurovision were held separately beneath the Eurovision building. I have not received any specific confirmation of this, but I presume these archives have also been removed into storage. 

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this historical archive hit a curious impasse: just as historians began increasingly to see it as a rich source for uncovering transnational histories of broadcasting in Europe, the organisation itself became increasingly unsure of the value of the papers taking up valuable space in its basement in Geneva.4 This tension is encapsulated in the fact that the publication of one of the first scholarly monographs based on material from the archive coincided more or less with the retirement of the organisation’s last fulltime archivist, Jean Cerantola, at the end of 1999.5 Perhaps more crucially, this will have also coincided with an increased digitisation of office communication and record-keeping. After this, the archive remained in the basement of the EBU in the care of the communication department, where its status became increasingly unclear. Particularly in the dawning digital age it was difficult to justify housing that bulk of paper in the expensive real estate of Geneva’s international Grand-Saconnex district. The archive was moved to an external storage facility in 2012 – which coincided ironically with the publication of Suzanne Lommers’ seminal monograph on the IBU based on its content.6 It remains there as of this writing, inaccessible to researchers, but occasionally accessed internally by the EBU itself.

In 1946, the Eastern bloc founded a separate organisation, the Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et Television (OIRT), with which the EBU formally unified on January 1, 1993.3 Some of the OIRT’s archive is now also housed in Geneva, while the rest remains in Prague, where the OIRT had been headquartered after 1950. Within its organisational archive, then, the EBU holds records of transnational broadcasting in Europe from the point of view of three different international broadcasting organisations (hereafter collectively ‘the organisations’), covering nearly a century.

The EBU is the federation of public service broadcasters in the European broadcasting area. It is best known publicly as the organiser of the Eurovision Song Contest but its activities stretch far beyond this into everything from contract law, to technical standards, and even to audiovisual archive preservation.2 Founded in 1950 and headquartered in Geneva, the organisation is the successor to a pre-Second World War institution, the International Broadcasting Union (IBU), which was founded in 1925. Upon the dissolution of the former, the EBU both adopted a similar structure and mode of working from its predecessor and also took over its archive.