Archive: Towards an Imagination of Traceology

This study was commissioned by TPadd assoc. and undertaken by video artist Chun-Yi Hsu︎︎︎. It explores “material traces as symbols”, considering the medium as the ontology itself to re-understand the complexity of two-dimensional information. The study further engages in a dialectical analysis of anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic signs and their transformative impacts on the meanings of documents, deconstructing the “content” carried by graphic design and non-design in the post-industrial era.

From the 15th to the 20th century, the dissemination of knowledge in Western societies primarily relied on lead-type printing. Advertisements were nearly devoid of imagery, political debates predominantly verbal, and pamphlets served as leisure entertainment for farmers. The resource-intensive nature of printing mandated a “necessarily serious” language, representing strict logic, rhetoric, linear thinking, and writing—potentially a cultural phenomenon specific to certain human epochs. This paper uses this premise to conceptually question how media constitute human thought, linking content and carrier from a microphysical perspective to explore the overlapping and contradictory relationships at the final stages of media evolution, carefully remembering how we romantically coexist with history.

Author: Chun-Yi Hsu︎︎︎
Video artist, PhD Candidate in the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts

---

Trace is not a part of being, yet it always delineates the existence of something like a boundary.

From natural glacial marks on rock layers to man-made archival document collections, they all bear the characteristics of traces, forging passages that can lead back to the past, pointing to certain events or substances. “Trace” in English also encompasses meanings such as pursuit, investigation, and journeying along a path. Through the indentations caused on rock surfaces and the degree of weathering, one can estimate the geological time of glacier movements; similarly, in a library’s archival storage, documents filled with date encodings and arranged in classified order are like numerous time slices attempting to preserve an unexperienced past. Regardless, traces always gain their uniqueness on the premise that the objects they belong to are destined to pass away or disappear.

Traces are not merely spatial drags or imprints; more complexly, all traces extend over time, becoming corridors facing the past but situated in the present, ambiguously or clearly marking a specific moment, creating situations that necessitate contemplation of intangible issues like time, memory, and existence through physical materials and space. Moreover, various residual records of being are not entirely like rubbings that directly and faithfully preserve the entity of an object; they could also be contingent fragments or deliberately manufactured artifacts. Thus, from physical indentations to a photograph produced by photochemical reactions, even to meticulously stored archives, we must ponder the challenges of recording, tracing, and memo-making, clarifying the relationship of traces from material to concept.

From sign to trace itself

A trace is often regarded as a sign, not because it directly produces a visual resemblance, but because a trace is inherently connected to the subject that leaves it. Just as ashes link to flames and footprints reflect the feet that walked on sand, Charles Sanders Pierce once used traces to discuss the indexicality between linguistic signs and meanings. However, since traces always encompass non-verbal expressions, they cannot be reduced to signs. They lack the associative substitutions of language and do not possess the characteristic of coded interpretations; a trace is not just a physical imprint but also related to subtle changes in time or material.


In cultural researcher Aleida Assmann’s focus on memory, traces play a role starkly different from written words: “The concept of trace extends the scope of ‘inscription’ beyond the text, enlarging it to include photographs and the effects of forces on or through objects.” ¹ The ‘reading’ of traces is no longer a linguistic decoding but an understanding of the relationship between traces and their material carriers outside the recording function of writing.

From a micro-perspective, traces themselves embody a form of memory. Any indentation left on a material surface, for example, the first inscriptions on sand or parchment, rock and metal engravings—the solidity of the material and the force required to leave a trace both became conditions of ‘memory’. This involves different energy transfers for ‘inscribing’ across various densities, from the permeation of ink to the damage inflicted on material surfaces by carving. These subtleties, created by forces, reflect how events occur, also implying the necessity of storing memory.

As Plato likened memory to impressions on a wax tablet, clear or vague, deep or shallow; or as humans chose to inscribe important documents on durable hard materials, these processes possess a temporal logic distinct from writing, along with attempts to resist temporal erosion. Sigmund Freud’s ‘magic slate︎︎︎’—a writing toy featuring a replaceable surface paper or celluloid sheet over a wax tablet—serves as an analogy for the incompatible operations of consciousness and the unconscious. He compared consciousness to a blank surface that can continuously be wiped clean to receive fresh impressions, while the underlying wax tablet belonged to the realm of the unconscious, retaining all inscriptions and ancient traumas. Thus, between the reception and retention of events, the object bearing the imprint paradoxically presents the original experience, memory, and trauma’s discontinuity, along with other irreproducible and qualitative transformations, not always clearly revealing the causal connections. ²

Based on this perspective, can we delve further into the ‘state of the trace itself’ and extend it to its relationship with the ‘archive’? In other words, rather than directly equating traces with signs bearing explicit exchangeable meanings, we should consider the trace—no matter how minute—in terms of the creative possibilities it opens up in the dimensions of time and material, such as ancient rock depressions or blurred, hard-to-identify photographs, unclearly linked to being itself, yet displaying the span of history or the moment of an event’s occurrence. For this, we need to establish an imagination of traceology: treating all practices as a form of counter-writing, disturbing or suspending the chronological time logic, and tracing traces to think existence, history, experience, and memorial transformations.

Chance and archive

When a trace provides a passage pointing to something, or potentially returning to the past, what then solidifies and supports the indexical relationship between the trace and the one who leaves it? If an archive is a highly constructed, preserved non-natural trace stored on diverse material carriers like paper, glass plates, and film, how does it differ from original natural traces? As Jacques Derrida spoke of ‘archive fever︎︎︎,’ it stems from human awareness of their own finitude ³ —— the limitation of life, thus prompting an entire civilization to preserve various proofs of its existence and imbue them with clear meanings to shape history. However, this reveals the contradiction between ‘archiving’ and ‘archives’, as in the classification and sorting process in libraries, the recognition and exclusion of facts, all archived spaces operate under specific orders that determine the directional references of the stored traces, making them clear and interpretable—as Michel Foucault would say—thus forming the ‘positive matters’ of knowledge. In other words, the archive serves to anchor all past entities, striving to eliminate all ambiguities and uncertainties.

On the other hand, after the occurrence of an event, the absence of the being, a trace itself is not like an eternal mold, explicitly copying a precise past moment; instead, it continues to change in ‘aftermath’, constantly renewing the bygone past in the present. Like the yellowing stains on the edges of a painting or the scratches and dust on a photograph’s surface, the subtle genesis between materials embodies the trace’s own existence, also opening up to the chance occurrences in time. When we understand various images and visuals as proofs of fact, we often overlook the subtle and obscure details surrounding them. Reflecting on archives through traces, on the one hand, reveals how power within archival mechanisms can compile and even eliminate certain serendipitous remnants; on the other hand, it displays the fundamental, continuously changing nature of traces, constantly disrupting the archive’s attempts to fix the past, opening up possibilities for loosening established history.

The Time Difference within Objects

Like the collaborative work ‘Dust Breeding︎︎︎’ by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, this photograph, taken by Man Ray with a slow shutter, captures a part of Duchamp’s installation ‘The Large Glass︎︎︎’ used to collect dust at home. After opening the shutter, the two went out for lunch and returned an hour later to close it. This image, visually resembling a bird’s-eye view of an urban ruin in its microscopic landscape, precisely forms a dual trace: first, the dust accumulated on the surface of Duchamp’s work, the chaotic and arbitrary stack of debris and waste referencing human activity; secondly, the photographic film under long exposure becomes a collector of any light changes that fall upon it. This image signifies the state where traces permeate each other, the gathering and dispersing of dust, and the exposure of film, where the time difference between nature and machinery meets, emphasizing the dynamism of time and the process of existence amidst seemingly only residual, settled stillness.

Photographer Thomas Ruff’s work ‘press ++︎︎︎’ appropriates photos stored in various news archives, transferring the notes, stamps, scratches, or stains originally imprinted or transcribed on the backs of the photos to the same side through post-processing, making the image abruptly overlape various collecting and usage records. Thus, the original news images pointing to historical moments, through the intervention of traces, reveal the lengthy transition of this medium becoming an archive, filled with classification, interpretation, and collection, suspending the event between the past and the present.

Conversely, experimental filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa’s ultra-short film ‘Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars’ poetically opens up the organic imagination of traces in its two-minute display of faint blue images resembling stains or rust spots. He buried a 100-foot roll of 35mm film around the Fukushima nuclear disaster area and retrieved it after one night. This roll of film, exposed without a camera, approaches a medium inscribed with natural calligraphy, with all appearing abrasions possibly caused by falling leaves rubbing or insects crawling—yet we can never clearly identify what once existed there. Amidst the interplay of traces, the work seemingly records a realm constructed of remnants, reflecting that unrepeatable accidental event. In areas uninhabitable by humans, the film roll as a ‘trace-object’ gradually becomes a living image , experiencing the night’s insect sounds and starlight.

Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars (2 min., 35mm, sound, Japan, 2014)︎︎︎ from Tomonari Nishikawa︎︎︎.

The creation of traceology attempts to enter the unkown time zone. All remnants inevitably relate to the disappearance and absence occurring there, built into the time difference within traces, always pointing to a ‘there’ state, but also marking the perpetual absence of reaching that place, and the passage of time that cannot be detailedly reproduced. At times, traces gradually detach from being adjunct to something, beginning to autonomously grow around the absence of objects.

Each trace, like a monument, preserves the passage of time in spatial form, with traces akin to the time difference of objects, always virtually projecting and overlapping non-present tenses in the current. Thus, in the time difference connecting ‘here’ and ‘there’, creativity and imagination are allowed to occur, enabling us to clarify the state of time inscribed on materials through the conceptualization of materials, thereby embodying the external meaning, the indescribable writing of materials on themselves. From the composition of materials and traces to the re-use and re-editing of archival images, these paths enable us to return to the uncertain state of existence, on the edge of death and disappearance, feeling the most vital flow of time. Following traces, we are led to a narrative filled with change and continuous difference, as materials continue to bear time forward, also inversely heading toward an otherness.

Text Chun-Yi Hsu；Editor Hsing-Kai Peng
Published: January 7, 2024. Last Updated: December 5, 2024.