In today’s abundance of media technological devices we engage in capturing ever more detailed aspects of everyday lives. Due to the constant state of connectivity with human and non-human actors of the network society, the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary capture and archiving become ever more blurred. In the context of ubiquitous technologies we have become at once micro-archivists and micro-archives, or, differently put, subjects and objects of pervasively radiating micro-temporal of the arts in relation to Bernard of capture, mediation and storage of our digitized life-bits. In this chapter, the author problematizes this state of the arts in relation to Bernard Stiegler’s concepts of mnemotechniques and mnemotechnologies. The transition from one to the other can be seen as a mutation from low-tech manual techniques of handling one’s memory to large-scale, automated mnemonic industries which, while providing immediate solutions for capturing and organizing the flows of memories, simultaneously benefit from them economically. The author argues that mnemotechnologies concerned with capturing have been eroding the use and significance of the term “recording”. He demonstrates this erosion along the trajectory from amateur practices of snap-shooting (enabled first by mass-produced cameras such as the Brownie) to ubiquitous computing of digital snapshots such as Facebook. What follows this discussion is a brief turn toward counter-practices that attempt to disrupt this current techno-political condition. Drawing on the concept of the post-digital, which through its call for a return to craft seems to correspond with the notion of mnemotechnique, as an epilogue to this chapter, the author speculates on alternative itineraries for how capturing and archiving practices can be re-invented today. 

This study explores possibilities for alternate modes of personal archiving in the context of contemporary techno-culture and dominant practices of personal data capture. An intensified proliferation of various capturing technologies concerned with collecting, storing and analyzing personal data allows to problematize personal archiving as one of the most prevalent everyday media practices that people engage in today, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The main point of departure for this thesis is a recognition of a certain polarization of perspectives and debates prompted by this new techno-cultural condition defined in this research as capture culture. If on hand we are presented with an enthusiastic scenario of a certain infallibility of digital memory and possibility to fully control the way one construct's his/her digital archive, the opposite view confronts us with a pessimistic vision of a full penetrability of our digital repositories (and hence everyday lives), ever more tightly dependent on the imperceptible dynamics of network technologies. In this thesis I investigate a possibility to move beyond these ramifications and seek for alternate techniques for personal archiving by engaging in a practice-based research and media archaeological inquiry into (archival) media histories. The practice-based case study unfolds as an auto-ethnography of the author’s personal recording techniques over the last decade. It traces the trajectory from a paper notebook, through a series of digital recording techniques excerpting various subsets of the surrounding world, to the post-digital, archival cabinet organizing analog and digital traces from these practices. As a result, this thesis puts forward a concept of para-archiving, a creative media practice presenting alternate ways of configuring a subjective position in capture culture, a departure from the dominant motivations for engaging with it. As part of an experimental methodological assemblage defined as media practice approach, the author also uses his practice as a vehicle enabling a critical reflection on the implications of today's pervasive technologies on, for example, material, performative and agential aspects of personal memory and archiving. While located within the field of media and communications the thesis borrows from such fields and debates as philosophy of technology, media archaeology, cultural studies and (media) arts.

Today’s media-scape presents recording and archiving as one of the major media practices performed by an increasingly growing number of people. Practically every personal digital device is equipped with some recording function allowing to capture and categorize texts, sound clips, images, video sequences, geographical location and increasingly bio-physiological processes. On the other hand, often without us being aware, the same technology passively tracks and records ever more detailed information about our behaviours, movements and decisions. As some scholars suggest, latest advancements in technology made the dreams of recording one’s whole life come true. This total capture becomes a condition that calls for reaction. In this paper I interrogate the idea of a passive and automatized capturing by confronting it with a concept of a reflective and proactive recording practice. As an exemplification of the latter I introduce a set of artistic practices I have been performing regularly since 2009. These practices aim at constructing a record of my life and the space I find myself in. Contesting the enthusiasm around the technologically enabled possibility of recording entirety of one’s life I argue that recording and archiving are generative and active processes requiring reflective and critical approach to media technologies that they inherently rely on.