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 Editorial | Photographic/Post-Photographic | Artistic Concept | Instant Images | Archive—post/photographic | Lecture series |
buildings. Moreover, with regard to the ability to locate image information in the chaotically rampant Internet, such processes would be important. However, even today there is a lack of automatic search engines for images that operate satisfactorily. It should also not go unmentioned that Hartmut Winkler has pointed out the danger of companies (such as Corbis, see below) possibly one day not only gaining control of just the images, but also the incomparably more important image patterns, which are traceable using corresponding digital analysis methods. [60]
Finally, the permanence of the archive is changing. Compared with high-quality black-and-white prints, the durability of digitalized photographs, or more precisely: of the data carriers onto which they are stored, is low although the data can be preserved by copying it onto new data carriers. There is the risk that digitally stored image data may relatively suddenly no longer be usable—in contrast to analog media, whose recordings deteriorate slowly and remain readable for a long time.
Moreover, in view of frequently changing data and software formats, the rereadability of data carriers is itself a problem. [61] In this respect, preservation in digital(ized) archives relies on permanent transformation—a principal difference to analog archives. While the photographic reproduction of images in photo archives in order to ensure their continued existence is only carried out in exceptional cases, the process of the permanent reformatting of new data and storage formats is normal for digital media. In a strict realization of Holmes' vision, image information can only survive through the permanent migration of form from one matter to the other. One of the ways in which digital(ized) image information continues to exist is precisely its constant (even if poor) reproduction and transmission through networks.
By scrutinizing relevant texts written by Horst Herold, former director of the Bundeskriminalamt (the German equivalent of the FBI), Leander Scholz worked out some of the changes which the introduction of
