Archives are also apparatuses which engage our experience
and perception of time. This is particularly true for archives of
images, since photography and cinema are also apparatuses
that alter our sense of time. The traditional understanding
of an archive as a space that collects lost time sees the
experience of time as somehow being external to the archive
itself. It loses sight of the fact that the archive is also where
objects acquire their historical value as a result of being
placed within an apparatus of time. The imagination of a
video archive then plays with multiple senses of the unfolding
of time.

1. Time is not Outside of the Archive: It is in it In his history of the book and print cultures, historian Adrian Johns argues against what has traditionally been seen as Autonomus Archiving the ‘typographical fixity’ which was established by the print revolution.[18] Earlier scholars had argued that scribal cultures were marked by all kinds of mistakes of the hand, and the book was therefore not a stable object of knowledge until the emergence of print technology. Adrian Johns demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption by looking at the various conflicts that erupted with print technology, and far from ensuring fixity or authority, the early history of printing was marked by uncertainty. For Johns, the authority of knowledge is not an inherent quality, but a transitive one. It is a question that cannot be divorced from the technologies that alter our senses, our perception and our experience of knowledge. Rather than speaking about ‘authority’ as something that is intrinsic to either a particular mode of production of ‘knowledge’ or to any technological form, John’s work demonstrates how it would be more useful to consider the range of knowledge apparatuses which come into play to establish authority. The preconditions of knowledge cannot easily be made the object of knowledge. It is a matter of making evident or making known the structures of knowledge itself, which emerge in ways that provide definitive proof of the imperfectability of knowledge. Archives are also apparatuses which engage our experience and perception of time. This is particularly true for archives of images, since photography and cinema are also apparatuses that alter our sense of time. The traditional understanding of an archive as a space that collects lost time sees the experience of time as somehow being external to the archive itself. It loses sight of the fact that the archive is also where objects acquire their historical value as a result of being placed within an apparatus of time. The imagination of a video archive then plays with multiple senses of the unfolding of time.