Archives, more than ever, are a key component of the cultural landscape. In the context of individualized access and on-demand cultures, the live aspect of digital production has grown comparatively less important. The fact that more is being produced than anyone of us can access in real-time puts emphasis on ways to store, archive and retrieve cultural production after the fact. Last, but not least, in age where sampling and editing have become basic operations of cultural production, archives and open access to their treasures are central to cultural evolution. Commercially, the heightened value of archives has been recognized for a long time, and corporations like Corbis and GettyImages? have already privatized and commodified large parts of our (digitized) pictorial heritage. But what we need are archives that make their contents available freely and promiscuously, otherwise, experimental culture cannot flourish.

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