ARKIVES: Analog memories. Artistic experience, archives. Modulations.

In 2011, the DJ Richie Hawtin released a series of remixes for the “Arkives Project”. For this project, Richie Hawtin uses softwares dedicated to music production. With these digital tools, he did a remix of some of his past songs from the 90’s that used to be produced mainly on analog technologies (analog sequencer, analog drum machines). This activity of reproduction of content through digging into a personal archive is for Hawtin “going back to the past and go dark and explore things that I wanted to explore back then in a new way” (Plastikman Arkives interview Richie Hawtin, 2010). For this project Hawtin travelled back to Canada and Detroit to get a hand on physical artefact (old instruments, promotional flyers) gathered in the carefully crafted Arkives box sold in limited edition. With an attention to the tools used in his process of production on the Arkives project as compared to the tools in his process of production in the 90's, we want to explore how Hawtin's musical memory is iterated through different stages of media and equipment (floppy - DAT - RAM – Vinyl, rhythm boxes, analog sequencer, software, plug ins) (MacKenzie, 2006, p. 16). How by connecting differently to different technological tools he revisits the past. We will try to analyze how the kind of data storage for his music, linked to different regimes of performance, can be linked to the ways in which Arkives as a performance includes the affective dimension of past performances as partly recorded through the data storage, but also accumulated in the bodies of Hawtin and other artists in discrete forms through continuous remapping of the body-technologies relationship. This view contrasts with the traditional conceptions of the user and leads to conceive interaction more like an assemblage where agency is shared among its many parts” (Barker, 2012, p. 15), a complex, iterative and temporal ecology of musical tools.