The archivist's blog
Loose notes on dream maintenance. This was a "weblog" before the word wore out: dates, paragraphs, and the feeling of reading the notebook of someone who didn't know you'd come.
Today was a photographic expedition, archivist edition: three hours on Wikimedia Commons searching "empty mall interior". The quarry is incredible — amateur photos uploaded by ordinary people, free-licensed and with zero pretension, which is exactly the texture the genre needs.
Five made it into the gallery: the Lorain high-school hallway (Ohio, a 2006 digital camera, a gem), the night platform at Vuosaari (Helsinki), two dying American malls — including the legendary Randall Park Mall, which was the biggest in the world and died slowly — and at last, AT LAST, the night mall that was missing: a Finnish one with half-lowered shutters and a white christmas tree planted in the middle of the walkway, alone, in a photo clearly taken outside December. I saw it and knew the search was over.
Curiosity of the day: American "dead malls" have a wiki, documentarians and pilgrims. There are people who travel to photograph dying malls the way others visit cathedrals. I understand them perfectly.
The archive has been rebuilt entirely from scratch. Again. The previous version got to twenty-seven rooms and one day it simply had to be torn down and dreamed again — anyone who's redone a website knows it's sometimes faster than remodelling it, and anyone who's had a recurring dream knows the places come back on their own if they mattered.
They came back: the twenty main rooms first, and today the seven that were missing — the music room, The Channel, resources, the icons, the board, the dream diary and this blog. The photos survived the demolition, which was the only thing that mattered: walls can be rebuilt, the collection can't.
Last night at dinner I had to explain, again, why I spend hours on a website about "photos of empty hallways". The short answer I left in about the archive. The long one is this: the internet forgets faster than any medium that has ever existed, and what it forgets first is precisely the small stuff — personal websites, authorless photos, aesthetics that don't make money. Archiving the small stuff is an act of stubbornness against that. Besides, empty hallways are objectively beautiful and I refuse to keep debating it during dinner hours.