The post-archival constellation: the archive under the technical conditions of computational media

In the present age, the archive is no longer hidden away in national librar- ies, museums, and darkened rooms, restricted in access and guarded by the modern-day equivalents of Jacques Derrida’s archons – the guardians of the archive.1 Indeed, researchers and archivists’ hermeneutic right and competence – and the power to interpret the archives – have been transformed with digitalization and the new technics of computational surfaces. Through computation, access to archives is made possible and often welcomed ? through rectangular screens that mediate the archives contents or through interfaces and visualizations that reanimate a previ- ously inert collection