Olga Goriunova presents Runme.org as a resource, reference point, entry point to a variety of software art practices.
What are our plans for archiving? In the past we were considering to let to die. It was never conceived as an archive, it adopted the form of a database and it was a living response to practice. The archive is perceived as dry and something controlled which does not have qualities of liveliness and humor Runme identifies with.
Goriunova once showed projects to students and noticed that there were categories in the database that contained nothing. Runme was not built with a CMS but it was designed from scratch, written in Perl with non standard libraries. The empty categories were a sign: something has to happen.
Our problems are not technical but of ethical consideration. Do we make a new version of Runme? Software art has moved to new platforms such as the iPhone which does not fit the current state of Runme. Or do we just stop and kill the dynamism and make it a static site? Runme was a continuous response to practice and as such it lacks the context of an archive, it does not tend to cover a field.
For Foucault an archive is a collection of artifacts of something that cannot be said or is unsaid. There is a gap between the unsaid and the statement that includes references to the unsaid. Runme is in that sense the same: it consists of ecologies of networks and we don’t have an understanding of its map.
Is an archive always dead? An archive has a dynamism to it. Runme is a living practice as it was always archiving itself.
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