The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive

The Future of Memory documents the development and adoption of JPEG 2000, FFV1, MXF and Matroska, video standards that promise the lossless storage of digital objects for future generations. This book investigates the social and material aspects of the design of these standards as well as the sociotechnical forces that drive their journeys from niche to ubiquity. Over the past decade, these standards got embroiled in a heated clash between opposing visions of video preservation: a belief in rigorous, industry-supported standardization versus do-it-yourself, open-source experimentation. The Future of Memory explores how archivists work with and against the production industries in order to do the work of preserving the moving image.

Drawing on interviews with archivists and standards developers, The Future of Memory portrays the archive as a dynamic space filled with disagreements and technical failures, but also resourceful collaboration. This book unveils archiving as a deeply social practice, yet also captures wider reconfigurations in media culture: The unprecedented rise of archivist-driven standardization efforts and controversies surrounding non-standard technology against the historical dominance of the film and broadcast industries. It also makes visible new players whose role in the process is poorly understood: tech companies, software developers, film pirates, hackers.

This is both a history of an important decade in audiovisual preservation, as well as a snapshot of a field undergoing a tremendous transition.