What is the meaning of an archive? Archives are to be regarded as beyond a collection of elements. Archives have existed long before the advent of computational technologies. However, in an era of an exploding amount of digital content through automation, artificial intelligence and the accumulation of data, there exists a paradox regarding the quality of such information. Quantity often seems to be preferred over quality, as data can be processed through increasedcomputing power. Yet, archiving is not just about analytics and probabilities.
Along with new content comes the growing number of data centers that, together with the infrastructure of energy and information that supports them, expand the impact we have on the land and the atmosphere. This is the environmental cost of the global digital infrastructure. In the current paradigm, numbers are considered more effective than century-long cultural and ecological practices regarding climate. Archives should, however, be understood as more than a compilation of quantitative and qualitative data, as they support the transmission of sensitive knowledge as well. As information remains concentrated within very few infrastructures, archives must exist through alternative means, as Michel Foucault suggests with the concept of Anarchaeology in a lecture series at Collège de France in Paris entitled Du gouvernement des vivants (1980) – an approach to what resists blackboxing.