| I built a digital agent to address problems of memory around digital archives and database culture. Using Python and open source libraries the program takes control of a digital archive on behalf of the user, remembering, forgetting, combining, and overwriting the archive's contents based on user interactions. It tackles the theoretical concerns about the archive as a matter of fact -- conditions that allow objects through their presence in the archive to generate objectivity -- by treating those concerns themselves as matters of fact. Each loop of user interactions and agent actions transforms the scale, permanence, and objectivity of archival objects as matters of fact into a matters of concern. The user, archive, and agent together ask about archive, "What is there?". |
