Talk to The National Archives Big Idea Seminar, 20 February 2018

1. ARTISTIC PRACTICE AND THE
ARCHIVE
ANDREW PRESCOTT
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, BIG IDEA SEMINAR, 20
FEBRUARY 2018

2. The priest John Ball
addresses the insurgents
in 1381. A late fifteenth
century Flemish depiction
of the scene from a
manuscript of Froissart’s
Chronicles: British Library,
Royal MS 18 E.I f. 165v

3. Indictment concerning events at Rochester during the Rising of 1381, taken on 4-5 July 1381
by a commission under Thomas Holland, Earl of Kent. Note how the scribe gradually pieces
together the accusations as the interrogation proceeds: KB 9/43 m. 9

4. Petition by Margery
Tawney concerning
her attempts to
petition the King in the
Tower of London at
the height of the rising
in 1381:
SC 8/103/5111

5. The record as a complex craft object – a roll of the Court of Common Pleas (CP 40)

6. Medieval tally stick, notched and inscribed to record a debt
owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover, Hampshire, of a
tithe of 20d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2
13s. 4d

7. • Information theory since the pioneering work of Claude Shannon in
the 1940s assumes a distinction between information (eg morse
signals) and the medium carrying it (eg telegraph wires).
• Many current digital standards aim to ensure that the text is separate
from its format eg Text Encoding Initiative, XML
• But is the information on a tally stick or a plea roll really independent
from the medium which preserves it: isn’t a lot of what we study as
humanities scholars precisely that interaction?
• Like texts, archive objects come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes.
In using digital technologies to explore these objects, shouldn’t we be
presenting their variety of form?
• So, I became interested in developing a digital humanities which
would give us a stronger sense of the materiality of the historic record

8. Reading under ultra-violet light from folio
157 verso of the Beowulf manuscript,
British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, as
shown in Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic
Beowulf

9. Letters in the Beowulf
manuscript concealed by
Victorian conservation work,
revealed by fibre optic
backlighting and recorded with a
digital camera

11. Tanglebots workshop, part of the weavingcodes
project. Explores the relationship between code,
robotics and thread by building ‘tanglebots’:
http://kairotic.org/

12. Performances by Hester Reeve, Sheffield Hallam
University: The Cannonisation of HRH.the and The Critical
Girlfriend

13. The SelfReflector: an internet
connected mirror that is able to
calculate your age, play music
from when you were a teenager
and print out this image on a
TapWriter.
Jon Rogers, Jayne Wallace,
Michael Shorter and Pete Thomas
(2017).

14. Eduardo Kac, Re-abracadabra (1985, 2016)
Work for the French Videotext service, Minitel, now reconstructed
https://vimeo.com/189945892

15. https://vimeo.com/153848627
Eduardo Kac, Letter (1996)

16. •How does artistic practice of this kind affect my
interest in understanding, exploring and exemplifying
the archive?
•Long history of using the archives as an inspiration for
artistic practice, and digital technologies enhance this
•As our views of the archive change and we
incorporate new community generated components
including artefacts, sound, moving image, etc. artistic
practice also starting to become more prominent
•But I believe there is the potential for artistic practice
to make further more transformative contributions

17. • Potential contributions of artistic practice include:
• Altering the performativity of the archive and the way we present its
stories
• Changing the way we visualise the archive
• Different visions of the role of the archive in culture and society
• Engagement with artistic practice can help in coming to terms with
the impact of new technologies on the archive
• The nature of interdisciplinarity – the archive as a venue for
interdisciplinarity. How far can the archivist become an artistic
practitioner?
• My examples have arisen from conversations around the ‘Digital
Transformations’ theme and aren’t a representative survey

18. The archives as an inspiration for artistic and design
practice
design.nationalarchives.gov.uk

19. David Normal, Cabinets of Curiosity, lightbox murals using images from the Flickr public
domain collection released by the British Library. Exhibited at the Burning Man Festival,
2014, and at the British Library, 2015

20. Half Memory produced two DVDs and performances based on material in Tyne and Wear Archive
Richard Dawson: The Glass Trunk
Warm Digits: Interchange

21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A8mBIM8MwM
Warm Digits, Interchange (2012) experimental film and album
inspired by the holdings of the Tyne and Wear Archives relating
to the building of the Metro system

22. The changing nature of the archive blurs the
boundary with artistic practice
https://plymhearts.org/learning/communities/joyces-quilt/

23. http://www.meagreresource.com/radio/programmes/fvrh.html (start at 13:00)

24. Altering the performativity of the archive
Hester Reeve and Olivia Plender, The Re-inaugural meeting of the Emily Davison Lodge (2010)

25. The Marginalia Machine (2014) Tom Schofield
https://vimeo.com/101507221
https://vimeo.com/101507434

26. The Palimpsest Machine (2016) John Bowers and Tom Schofield
https://vimeo.com/138975354

27. New modes of visualisation
• One of the drivers of the archive is coping with mass and scale
• Even for my medieval legal records, The Anglo-American Legal
Tradition site contains over 9 million images – if accurate OCR for this
material was available it would be of limited value
• These problems are tiny compared with the issues posed by born-
digital records
• The e-mail archive for the White House under George W Bush
contains over 200 million messages comprising over 60 TB
• Wikileaks has published over 3 million diplomatic cables and US State
department records

28. Visible Archive Series Browser (2010) by Mitchell Whitelaw of University of Canberra
https://vimeo.com/6694353

29. https://vimeo.com/35972114
Michael Takeo Magruder, Insurance.AES256 (2012)

30. https://vimeo.com/50488232
Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, The Obelisk (2012)
By scanning online news websites in real-time, the artwork changes
from opaque to transparent, according to the amount of references to
the four main crimes against peace (genocide, crimes against
humanity, crimes of aggression and crimes of war), as they were
codified during the Nuremberg trials and which can still be found in
today’s online news.

31. https://vimeo.com/117366607
Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Dataflags (2014). Uses
conductive ink to enable visitor to hear representations
of financial data from Lehmann Brothers

32. Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Latency Docet (2016)
The data driven sculpture is connected to a database of
on-line available data derived from dark pools (source
Finra, the Financial Industry Regulator Authority). Dark
pools, or private financial forums of exchange for trading
securities, have been recently made object of large
criticism, especially in conjunction with illicit practices of
front running and accuses of price manipulation.
A code searches for patterns wihin the data and it fires a
blend of four accords of the +– perfume. The perfume,
crated in collaboration with perfume designer Sergey
Dziniruk, was designed to translate personality traits
common among traders into fragrances.

33. Data Bronze, Koutaro Sano and Ian Gwillt (2013)

34. Mitchell Whitelaw, Measuring Cup
This form presents 150 years of Sydney temperature data in a little cup-shaped object
about 6cm high. The data comes from the UK Met Office’s HadCRUT subset, released
earlier this year; for Sydney it contains monthly average temperatures back to 1859.

36. invisibleaustralians.org/faces

37. http://owebrowse.herokuapp.com/redactions/
Tim Sherratt, Redactions, 2016

38. Marcel Broodthaers, Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,
1969 (from a poem by Mallarmé)
A throw of the dice does not abolish chance.

39. This collection of creatures was discovered amidst
thousands of ASIO surveillance files held by the National
Archives of Australia. While the practice of redaction is
intended to withhold information from public view, an
unknown archivist has used redactions to add an artistic
flourish to the files. They are reminders that the
processes that limit our access to information are human
in their operation and design. There is nothing magical
about the ‘secrets’ preserved in government archives.
Exhibited as part of 'Beauties and Beasts', Belconnen
Arts Centre, 6-28 May 2017.
Tim Sherratt, The Redaction Zoo (2017)
https://vimeo.com/215976633

40. Issues of cooperation and interdisciplinarity
• The risks of instrumentalisation
• How do we develop joint work around the archive while
respecting our own different practices and their concerns?
• This offers wider lessons for interdisciplinarity: is using
science in art leading to amateurish science, or creating real
interdisciplinarity?
• What kind of dialogue best supports this form of
cooperation?

41. http://mtchl.net/drifter/