Silke Arnold-de Simine has observed a tendency in ‘modes of performing and communicating the past [to] also create and shape memories’ (Silke Arnold-de Simine, ‘Memory Cultures: The Imperial War Museum North and W.G. Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction’, in Bombs Away!: Representing the Air War Over Europe and Japan, Volume 60, ed. by Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 296).
What could be called the digital mode of communication has, on one model, likewise been conceived as a performance. For example, Andrew Wilson in 'Significant Properties Report' (http://www.significantproperties.org.uk/wp22_significant_properties.pdf), writes:
‘The ‘performance model’ characterises a digital record as the result of a mediation of technology and data. The data source (record, object, etc) needs to interact with a process in order to be understood by a user. That process is a combination of hardware (computer) and software (application + operating system). Without this mediation the digital object is meaningless since the data that makes it up exists independently only as a stream of bits, completely incomprehensible to the majority of humans. The NAA conceptualisation views the result of the combination of source and process as a performance, since it is created anew every time the record (or object) is viewed by a user. As the NAA document says, “A source may be mediated by many different software platforms, and each combination of source and specific process platform may produce a slightly different performance”. What is rendered to a screen or printer, or any other output device, is the performance created when data and process interact. What this conceptualisation of digital object shows is that “neither the source nor the process need be retained in their original state for a future performance to be considered authentic. As long as the essential parts of the performance can be replicated over time, the source and process can be replaced”’.
See also: Euan Cochrane - 'Rendering Matters: Report on the results of research into digital object rendering':
http://archives.govt.nz/sites/default/files/Rendering_Matters.pdf
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