This paper claims that technology and institutions both epitomize the construction
of artificial orders through which a primary reality is shaped to something
other than it is by logical operations that share essential affinities. Drawing on this, we
work our way to showing how technology operates as governing regime and how
tasks and operations that are carried out by the human enactment of expert rules and
procedures can considerably be embodied onto technological sequences with which
human experts have limited and severely structured interaction. These ideas are illustrated
by reference to cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, museums)
and the ways the deepening infiltration of their operations by computing technologies
redefines their goals and the skills, practices and arrangements through
which these goals have traditionally been pursued
