Light as Record

The Ontology of the Trace

Where does a record begin?

Conventional archival theory locates the origin of documentation in a human act: the deliberate inscription of evidence. In this framework, records emerge when an individual or institution decides to fix an event or transaction in material form. The creation of a document is, therefore, a juridical decision — an assertion of authority over what is to be remembered and what will be allowed to vanish.

Such a definition presupposes that memory begins with recognition and that only human mediation grants meaning to inscription. It excludes the material world as an agent of recordkeeping. Against this anthropocentric model, what I call ecosemiotic archivistics proposes a different ontology: records precede recordkeepers.

Before writing, before metadata, before the documentary impulse itself, the world was already recording. Every energetic encounter that leaves a physical consequence — a trace, a modification, a pattern — constitutes a proto-document. Light, in this sense, is not metaphor but mechanism. It is the first inscription process: a mode of information transfer that translates energy into matter, ans presence into form.

Photosynthesis as Archival Process

From a biological standpoint, photosynthesis is the conversion of radiant energy into biochemical structure. From an archival standpoint, it is the first act of record creation on Earth: the translation of exposure into enduring form.

Each leaf becomes a responsive surface upon which light inscribes its passage. Spectral quality, intensity, humidity, and atmospheric composition are embedded in morphology — in pigment ratios, vein density, stomatal patterns, and tissue thickness. These features are not metaphors of documentation; they are documentation: contextual data encoded materially rather than symbolically.

In human archives, record creation depends on conscious agency; in the forest, it is the result of continuous interaction. The ecological record is not designed, curated, or supervised — it is co-produced by energy and matter. Light is both author and archivist.

Understanding this mechanism helps us rethink human record creation. It suggests that archives could be conceived less as deliberate acts of inscription and more as exposure systems: open frameworks designed to register change through interaction, not through control. The goal is not to produce definitive representations but to enable ongoing, adaptive inscription — to make our repositories more "photosynthetic": sensitive, porous, and responsive to their environments.

In practice, such openness already appears — although timidly — in participatory archives and sensor-linked repositories, where records evolve through their encounters. A field photograph gains new context as others annotate, reuse, or re-situate it; a specimen's metadata expands as environmental sensors log its changing conditions. In each case, the archive records transformation through relation rather than design.

Distributed Authorship and the End of Control

In human practice, the record's validity depends on its creator. Provenance, authorship, and authenticity are central principles of archival science. But in ecological systems, authorship is always plural and provisional.

The record of the forest — the sum of its material inscriptions — is written by many hands and continuously rewritten. Fungi trade nutrients through mycorrhizal threads, insects mark leaves with patterns of consumption, rainwater leaches pigments, and microbial colonies digest residues. Each participant edits the record; none owns it.

This distributed authorship challenges the central logic of the archive as a site of control. The forest's recordkeeping is participatory, cumulative, and revisable — more akin to a versioned ecosystem than a closed repository.

Translating this into archival design would mean moving from custodianship to co-authorship: archives that grow through contribution, annotation, and mutual transformation rather than through centralized authority. Provenance, instead of asserting origin, would describe relation and participation — a shift from who made it to how it is entangled.

A concrete way to realize that principle would be a collaborative, versioned archival network — an infrastructure where records evolve through collective interaction rather than being fixed by an originating authority. The result is an archive that "grows" in the way a forest does: through overlap, mutual influence, and regeneration.

Metadata as Matter

In human systems, metadata is external and abstract: descriptive information added after creation to contextualize a record. The forest, however, embodies a material metadata model. Every leaf carries within its structure the environmental data of its own making. Its "catalogue" — light exposure, water stress, atmospheric composition — is inseparable from its material being. The record is self-descriptive.

This biological insight offers a powerful model for rethinking digital and physical archives. Imagine a future, potential sensorial archive incorporating environmental sensing into its own operation. Context would no longer be imposed through description; it'd emerge through the continuous, measurable relationship between object and environment. In this model, preservation and documentation would converge. The archive would become a living interface — responsive, self-aware, and co-evolving with the conditions that sustain it.

Already, experimental approaches such as embedded provenance, self-describing datasets, and autonomous metadata protocols echo this natural logic. But ecology teaches that such integration is not merely technical — it is ethical. The forest maintains contextual coherence not through external supervision but through relational stability: each element's integrity depends on its participation in the whole. For archives, this implies that preservation cannot be guaranteed by isolation; it must be achieved through interdependence.

An Ecological Theory of Documentation

If light is indeed the first archivist, then documentation must be recognized as an ecological function: an intrinsic capacity of matter to remember transformation. To think ecologically about documentation is to accept that the basic operations we attribute to archives — creation, appraisal, preservation, and access — already occur, in elemental form, within the living systems of the planet. Plants, soils, and atmospheres register, filter, and transmit traces long before human mediation appears. What we call "archival practice" is, in that sense, only a late specialization of a much older metabolic intelligence.

In the biological realm, the act of creation does not arise from authorship or intention but from exposure. A leaf records not because it wishes to, but because the encounter between light and tissue necessarily leaves a mark. The process is generative but not self-conscious: an inscription emerging from interaction. Likewise, appraisal in the forest does not proceed through deliberate selection but through decay — a form of continuous editing in which certain traces persist by becoming part of something else. Decomposition, in this context, is not loss but transformation, the mechanism by which the archive maintains relevance through renewal. Preservation, too, acquires a new meaning: it is not achieved by immobilizing a record, but by sustaining the metabolic exchanges that allow it to circulate, recombine, and endure through adaptation. Access, finally, ceases to be retrieval from a fixed repository; it becomes participation in a dynamic system, an interpretive act that takes place within the same processes that produce the record.

To approach human documentation through these biological logics is not to indulge in metaphor, but to derive methodological guidance from natural systems that have achieved stability through complexity rather than through control. Forest ecosystems endure precisely because their informational processes are decentralized, redundant, and adaptive. By contrast, human archives, organized around hierarchy, exclusivity, and permanence, often collapse under their own rigidity. The challenge, then, is to design archival infrastructures that behave less like mausoleums and more like forests: repositories that metabolize rather than store, that evolve through use, and that integrate disappearance as part of their continuity.

Such an ecological theory of documentation requires a shift in professional ethics as well as in technical design. It suggests that the archive should be understood as a living medium: a set of relationships through which information circulates, transforms, and survives. To document, under this paradigm, is not to immobilize knowledge but to participate in its metabolism. The archive, thus reimagined, ceases to be a static monument to the past and becomes an ecology of correspondences between matter and meaning — a dynamic landscape where memory is sustained by change itself.

The Leaf as Manifesto

Every photosynthetic surface is a declaration of archival autonomy. It shows that the act of recording does not depend on human decision, language, or authority, but on the universe's ability to transform energy into structure and structure into memory.

To read a leaf is to read the planet's first archival protocol. It stores not words but wavelengths, not signatures but relations. Its fragility is not a weakness but a strategy: it endures precisely because it changes.

The ethical consequence for human archives is profound. To preserve is not to freeze information in perpetuity, but to sustain the conditions under which traces can continue to form, degrade, and regenerate. The task of the archivist, then, is not the conservation of artifacts but the cultivation of environments where memory remains alive — porous, interdependent, and capable of transformation.

The first archive was not a shelf, a scroll, or a server. It was — and remains — a leaf catching light.

  This chronicle is echoed in the blog post "Documentation Beyond Control," where the same topic is explored from a librarian's point of view.