With the advent of digital technology, society has entered a new phase of temporality. Speed, mobility and globalism are the hallmarks of this process. Forms of new media communication lay the foundations for a new memory culture in which the individual becomes a consumer of memory. The digital environment opens up new possibilities for the speed, mobility and accessibility of information, but raises fundamental questions about authorship, intellectual property rights, censorship and a democratic approach, without providing a finite guarantee for the preservation of collective memory. As the ways we store information evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to access memories that are immortalized in an outdated digital file format. Future generations may find it difficult or impossible to recover electronic documents and media recorded using an obsolete and obscure file format, or lost on a defunct physical data carrier. It is not yet possible to predict whether this era will lead us to "memory fever" or rather to "digital amnesia", given the material limitations and changing nature of digital platforms. Computer experts and data analysts claim that we are at risk of entering a "Digital Dark Age", a period of historical information shortages caused by outdated file formats, software, and hardware that over time becomes corrupt, inaccessible or full of memory failures. Other experts have called the 21st century a "black hole of information", because the digital information created today may not be readable in the future, and there is a serious risk that the entire digital history of this century may become illegible and irrecoverable.

Late 20th century shifts in digital technology raise concerns about the photographic image, which seems to have lost its material substance and become a body of information for a potential image. The effects of new media open up reflections on how we might experience, understand and preserve the materiality of photography. Advances in technology demonstrate our stubborn desire to consume and preserve photography through both sight and touch.

Participants: Kristīne Krauze-Slucka (LV), Aap Tepper (EE)
Curator: Anete Skuja (LV)
Organizer: Riga Photography Biennial in cooperation with Latvian Museum of Photography
Image: Kristīne Krauze-Slucka. ‘Obedient Touch’, 2019