The Old Arxiviste

For the attention of @malafoostress

[[[Archive, Old Arxiviste, Confederation, tech level; divergent ideas]]]

gosh there are lotta run-on sentences! Additions as of 26 Oct. '22 in rust

Archive and Archaism — the Archive is an integrated, self-referential and functionally complete explanatory system of knowledge; to call it science or art or cosmology is inadequate. Sustained by sophisticated information systems (often roughly stove-sized fixtures with a long-standardized interface and display arrangement, decorated and extremely durable, built to last millennia if not actively thrown in a star or such!)  Among other aspects it contains enormous long records of thousands if not millions of worlds throughout the Diaspora and integrates any number of xenosophont (aliens, all long extinct or reclusive by the time of the human galactic expansion), the thoroughly patahuman or posthuman (short-lived) civilizations, and similar exotic knowledge bases. But using the Archive bends your mind to its bizarre internal logic and dictates.

The Archive is Alive, a post-AI god, a Hive of mad titans, a self-revealing mass of evolution-driving imperatives: or is the Archive... 

[[this was from a loose sheet, and sounds more like gaming thoughts toward the Little Black Body Books or Bloody Navy; an Encyclopaedia Galactica meets Nyarlathotep...]]

19.3.18 خرطوم Arxive that the Confederation so relied upon was a product of the first and only Terhumene polity of 50,000+ systems [[deprecated — current setting posits the Old Arxiviste as several hundred star systems, couple thousand settled planets, moons, megastructure vacuum habitats...]], spread along a fat arc of the galaxy via the oldest form of slipstream connections. (first discovered and longest, most widely used form of hyperspace access, stars linked by common origin in the same dust cloud. Since lanes only go between a finite number of stars, clusters are isolated in the slip and new clusters must be reached STL). The Confederation, an association of about 300 star systems and 800-odd major worlds, was the predecessor and originating civilization of Khartoum, my most developed society. The Confederation expanded the sciences in Arxival maths (extremely dedicated, quasi monastic institution), a cultural institution that contributed to the longevity and stability of so many diverse worlds; the self-knowledge and self directed social adjustment sciences known as the Hygienes (likewise part of Old Arxival 

"Polity" is a misnomer; like the Lacemakers, this was a metacivilization between II and III on the Kardashev scale, call it II.5 — significant exploitation / "domestication" of galaxy-scale energies. Khartoum follows Confederation historiography in calling it the Archive Akaśa (Sanskrit ākāśa आकाश sky, heaven, aethyr; appropriated by european occultists), or the Auld Archyver (archaic orthography), since its Arxive legacy is not one of biographies and CVs of anyone in its own civ, who are theorized to've been employing T4/5 human sciences across their worlds, + augmentations \ genomic changes, neurocognitive changes — a posthuman species civilization, modes of consciousness and social\mental interaction unknown, ditto institutions, organization of Civ, etc.

The Old Arxiviste's project was encapsulating very,, very advanced science, math, and like disciplines; theoretical biology and geology independent of any one planet or biosphere (though Arx does have many attics and garrets with records of millions of worlds' rocks and biota, xeno or terhume heritage); integration of animal and human senses, embodiment, consciousness into general theory — understood from molecules up to Selfhood.

Selfhood, memory and mind with information theory, theory of civilization, and connections between these and the continuum, nature of light, vacuum flux...

The higher integrations (and promise of, e.g., interstellar telepathy and much besides) are deep down; Arx does not let you cheat, you have to work its program.

[[ later note: ]] This all needs another few goings-over, and thinking through this cyber biz.

Anyhoo, that galactic post-human mega-polity spanned the region the Confederation developed in, many chiliads later. The Old Arxiviste did not talk about non-Arxive biz; the Arxive was a gift for later sophonts, terhume and otherwise; and did not transmit its own history. Studying them was a quest for the Conf. As well as other civs in the Arxiviste Succession. (Conf. Used hyperdrives that access Slip between stars of several ranges of spectral class likeness, emphatically not linking only stars of common origin, making vastly more stars slip accessible — Arx. Region much larger than Conf., which had about 18 systems of the galactic cluster > much archaeology and deep scanning — puzzling relics and ruins abound, but they or some agency thoroughly removed, e.g., any ancient super-weapons lying around.

Verdance [[ what about it? The Verdance was another galactic civilization of great sophistication, some fifty thousand years gone from the galactic scene. Notable for seeding long term terraformation projects of hundreds (thousands?) of planets not amenable to domestication of rocky ball to shirtsleeve planet within time scales feasible for most civilizations; many of the Verdance planets have become habitable and colonized within the last eight chiliads.

[[ math: not mathematics but Stephenson's sense, monastic universities on steroids 

[[ so, the vast size of the Old Arxiviste civ.; what happened to it, how the later interstellar society the Confederation/ Res Fédéré connects to it: open questions, of not much importance....... ]]

N.15

[[ 20 Tammouz 2022 addenda

c. 1600, "records or documents preserved as evidence," from French archif (16c., Modern French archives), from Late Latin archivum (plural archiva) "written records," also the place where they are kept, from Greek ta arkheia "public records," plural of arkheion "town hall, public building," from arkhē "government," literally "beginning, origin, first place" (verbal noun of arkhein "to be the first;" see archon). The sense of "place where public records and historical documents are kept" in English is from 1640s.

3ecologies.com

1 The anarchive is best defined for the purposes of the Immediations project as a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.

2 Thus the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.

3 The anarchive needs documentation – the archive – from which to depart and through which to pass. It is an excess energy of the archive: a kind of supplement or surplus-value of the archive.

4 Its supplemental, excessive nature means that it is never contained in any particular archive or documentation element contained in an archive. It is never contained in an object. The anarchive is made of the formative movements going into and coming out of the archive, for which the objects contained in the archive serve as springboards. The anarchive as such is made of formative tendencies; compositional forces seeking a new taking-form; lures for further process. Archives are their waystations.

5 Since it exceeds the archive and is uncontainable in any single object or collection of objects, the anarchive is by nature a cross-platform phenomenon. It is activated in the relays: between media, between verbal and material expressions, between digital and off-line archivings, and most of all between all of the various archival forms it may take and the live, collaborative interactions that reactivate the anarchival traces, and in turn create new ones.

6 The anarchive pertains to the event. It is a kind of event derivative, or surplus-value of the event. This makes it an essential element of the Immediations project, whose stated aim has been to develop an approach to research-creation as a practice of interdisciplinary event design, or to quote the original application, as the practice of creating innovative “platforms for organizing and orienting live, collaborative encounters.”

7 Approached anarchivally, the product of research-creation is process. The anarchive is a technique for making research-creation a process-making engine. Many products are produced, but they are not the product. They are the visible indexing of the process’s repeated taking-effect: they embody its traces (thus bringing us full circle to point 1).