Bytes were never built to last. Hard-drives inevitably fail; links rot; web services fold. The legacy of our civilization, our shared history and culture, depends upon the endurance of digital collections.
Archive, a compendium of documentaries told from the perspective of archivists and cultural producers, looks at the history of the Internet and attempts to archive its contents on a massive scale: from Archive.org’s Wayback Machine to the Amazon Glacier.
The project takes the form of an archive of stories cached online, including a series of Wayback tours of the Internet through time and visits to the physical servers where collections are kept, woven together with information visualizations. The project explores questions of memory and posterity, how we choose what to preserve for future generations, and the risks of digital obsolescence from both a personal and global perspective.