At the end of the hallway in my childhood home was a linen closet with a white louver door. The afternoon sun sliced through its wooden slats, illuminating the bath towels and bedsheets stacked on its shelves. I’m familiar with the intimate ambience of this space because I spent a good bit of time there, in what I called my “poetry office.” I would kick out the vacuum and open the case of my grandfather’s Smith Corona typewriter, releasing the preserved smells of his basement study: mildew and sawdust and cigar smoke. In an afternoon shift amidst the linens, I wrote dozens of poems.
I still have some of that juvenilia, mixed up with decades of birthday cards and tax returns and handwritten letters, in the closet of my current home. On the shelf above: a shoebox of 3.5? floppy disks, mixtapes, and DVDs (which I no longer own the equipment to access). Nearby: cameras and audio recorders, external hard drives and Time Capsules, assorted devices and cables obsolesced by Apple’s ever-evolving ports and plugs.
Maybe you have a closet like this, or an inconvenient drawer. Think of all the corporations and universities and municipal offices, the billions of closets hiding secret inventories. Old media accumulate for all kinds of reasons — nostalgia, ambivalence, data security, paranoia — and all of us, eventually, become the managers of our own distributed personal archives. We never know when we might need to access that data again. Meanwhile, the detritus that Lisa Parks and Charles Aclund call “residual media” piles up in garages, thrift stores, and neighborhood electronics repair shops (themselves a “residual” enterprise), until some of it winds up in recycling and salvaging facilities. Those spaces, too, are extensions of our closets. They move off-site and out of sight the abject and often hazardous labor of disposal and destruction.