What AI Cannot Archive: The Vibration of Absence and the Salt of Memory  

In Bogotá, my archive feeds on excesses and voids. But what is an archive when that which one seeks to preserve does not fit into stable categories? 

Traditionally, the archive is understood as a system of ordering: a set of practices that select, classify, and preserve traces of the world. As Derrida (2001) reminds us in Archive Fever, archiving is never a neutral gesture — it is always shot through with impulses of conservation and destruction, by what one decides to remember and, inevitably, to forget. The archive, in this sense, is not merely a repository of the past, but a technology of power that projects possible futures. 

Yet, my archive is not organized by dates, nor by fixed categories. It is made in the body, in experience, and, above all, in that which escapes. I have lived in Bogotá, Colombia, for six months, and the city presents itself as a labyrinth — a kind of space-time fold where I enter a street and emerge in a strange time. To walk here is to traverse altitudes, climates, and rhythms. However, it is within thermal contrast that my memory truly operates. 

Before I left, my mother handed me a blue jacket and said: “Take this to remember Ceará (Brazil).” Today, as Bogotá’s cold wind sweeps through the city, I try not to lose myself in this geography of cold. The map vanishes, and the chill becomes a measure of time — sensory evidence that I have not yet returned. For algorithmic systems, this jacket is data: an object classifiable by attributes such as color, texture, and function. Nonetheless, this description fails to capture that which insists within it. 

 

Blue jacket. Author's archive 2026 

In dialogue with the agential realism2 of Barad (2007), it becomes impossible to separate matter from meaning. For the author, there are no pre-existing objects that later acquire meaning; there are intra-actions in which matter and meaning emerge together. In this sense, the jacket does not represent Ceará as a distant sign. Within the intra-action between the Andean cold, the fabric, and my skin, the heat of Fortaleza (Brazil) materializes as a presence. The archive, here, is not a representation of the past, but a material update of it in the present. 

This perspective directly tensions the logic of artificial intelligence applied to archiving. By operating through classification and pattern recognition, AI3 presupposes a separation between subject and object, between data and interpretation. However, this separation dissolves when we consider that meaning is not contained within things but emerges within relations. 

Last Saturday, I descended into the depths of the salt mine in Zipaquirá, on the outskirts of Bogotá. There, the world seems to operate under a different regime: salt saturates the air, the body, and perception. It is not a passive setting, but an active materiality participating in the experience. This is what Barad calls the "worlding" of the world: a dynamic process where reality is not a finished product but is happening through us and through matter. 

The photograph I took in that space is a technical error: an excess of light that erases shapes and compromises the image's legibility. For computational systems, this is noise—a failure in capturing visual data. Upon looking at it, nevertheless, I am pierced by what Barthes (1984) defines as punctum—that detail which pricks me, escapes the studium (the rational and cultural analysis of the image), and which AI could never codify. Where the algorithm sees an exposure failure, I find what Azoulay (2012) describes as a continuous relational process: the archive does not end with the click; it continues to happen within me. 

Zipaquirá Salt Cathedral. Personal archive, 2026. 

Artificial intelligence, in its attempt to stabilize the world into categories, encounters a fundamental limit: the impossibility of archiving affect. I also carry with me an audio recording from my mother. In it, her voice traverses the distance and says: “don’t forget the way home… and don’t forget the heat and the sun of Ceará.” To the machine, this is an .mp3 file: 45 seconds of vocal frequency, subject to compression and spectral analysis—a set of organizable acoustic data. 

But this description does not sustain what happens when I listen. The voice does not merely communicate—it envelops. There is a texture that escapes analysis, a kind of thermal layer that settles over the body. In the cold of Bogotá, this audio functions as a blanket. Not as a metaphor, but as a material effect: something that alters breathing, slows down time, and reorganizes the sensation of distance. The audio is not a record of the past, but a practice that updates the bond. It does not represent care—it produces it, anew, with every listen. 

We can understand this experience as a material-discursive practice, in Barad’s terms, where sound, body, and memory are not separate but emerge together. Affect is not “contained” within the file; it happens within the relation. It is also at this point that Derrida’s (2001) reflection becomes even more acute: the archive carries within itself a paradoxical impulse—the desire to conserve and, simultaneously, the impossibility of fully retaining what matters. The audio keeps the voice but does not capture the gesture. It preserves the sound but does not contain the heat. 

Thus, what I hear is not merely a recording. It is a partial, insistent presence that never allows itself to be reduced to its technical medium. My archive, therefore, is not a set of organized data, but a field of forces in constant transformation. It is built within the intra-actions between matter, body, and time; in the flaws that insist on remaining and in the traces that cannot be fully translated. 

If the traditional archive intends to contain the world, mine accepts losing it—because it is precisely in the loss, in the detour, and in that which refuses to be fixed, that experience continues to happen. 

REFERENCES 

AZOULAY, Ariella. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. London: Verso, 2012. 

BARAD, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 

BARTHES, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. 

DERRIDA, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 

WOLANIUK, Lucía. "La realidad como intra-actividad: implicancias post-metafísicas del Realismo Agencial de Karen Barad." In: VII Jornadas de adscriptos y becarios, Departamento de Filosofía, FFyL-UBA, 2016.