The digital age has witnessed the development of a new kind of archive: immaterial, “living and moving,” largely user-generated, and conceived for managing a wide variety of audio-visual materials, besides traditional films and videos. The first part of this anthology investigates the ways in which media forms like web-documentaries, video art and digital art, web series, amateur productions, and also mobile films can be stored and preserved within the new digital repositories. The second part focuses on archival and preservation practices of the video game. This approach understands the archive not simply as a “memory box,” but as a fully contemporary practice that locates new media objects in the present and acknowledges their changing cultural and social configurations. The democratic, often immaterial, living, mobile nature of contemporary archives forces us to question whether or not the traditional notion of “the archive” still has a heuristic value. Or if it would be perhaps better to reject any “conventional” idea of archive and embrace the notion of anarchive.
Federico Giordano teaches cinema and new media at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. He is founder and editor of G|A|M|E – Game as Art, Media, Entertainment. He is coordinator of the “Postcinema section” of Udine Filmforum-Magis Film Studies Spring School. Among his publications: Le parole di Tornatore (2007), Giro d’orizzonte. Cinema, spazi e paesaggi dal sud e oltre (2010), Filming the Game/Playing the Film, edited with P. Coppock and M. Rosi (2010), L’immagine videoludica. Gamification, cinema e videogioco, edited with A. Catolfi (2014).
Bernard Perron is Full Professor of Cinema at the University of Montreal. Among his publications there are: The Video Game Theory Reader 1 (2003, edited with Mark J.P. Wolf), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2009, edited with Mark J.P. Wolf), Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (2009, editor), The Routledge Companion to Video Games Studies (2014, edited with Mark J.P. Wolf). He is also the author of Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (2012).