All forms of archiving involve a process of cultural instability - creating a narrative of acts, memories, textures, experience and projecting these into contexts which will yet again alter the work's unique time and space. How to capture not only the physical presence of a giving work but its cultural essence within which the work was created?

Whether this is a social/political moment of intersection in the work's reception or the structural and technical fabric of the art work, archiving - particularly for process, non-linear code-based and interactive works - methodologies vary enormously, there is no universal consensus, no cultural operating system to read the archive. Festivals, for example, act to delineate cultural trajectories often leaving cacophonic archival trajectories behind them that represent yet another fusion of space/time functions with artistic expression. Within the examples to be presented: Transitland, Ostranenie and Transmediale unique cultural, societal and artistic trajectories will be discussed - as a starting point which may lead to more comprehensive meaning relative and relevant to the individual works themselves.