Ok, much thinking things over, struggling for variations and permutations of this idea that will satisfy the desire to somehow refer back to the original images, while further detaching from them – to fragment and abstract the obvious connections and “natural” groupings, rather than totally obliterate them. To evoke memory, if not meaning, from them.
In creating and merging these now almost purely aesthetic fragments, I am pointing to the lack of clarity and certainty that can be achieved by an archive, particularly in digital forms. While the intent is preservation and categorization, it must be recognized that original context is always fragmentary at best, and end uses may be anything, to anyone, in any context. One word, one sentence, sliced from a document and saved in my wallet, carried like a talisman for years, may be all that remains of a vast text. The fragment may be meaningless to anyone else, a mantra to myself. The original context or experience is lost. A new one carries on.
Yesterday’s class made this idea clear. No ammount of documenting a complex experience like an installation, or really ANY experience, can fill in the gaps between the experience and the re-presentation of it. Years working with these images will still reveal nothing more of the experience of making them. Archives are fragments by their very nature. I am merely pushing this into the visual representation of what is already inherently there, or perhaps rather NOT there in the first place.
By keeping the original file names, these detail fragments, not unlike archaeology, will invoke the remembered ghost of the complete images, to those already familiar with them. However, even these people will all have varying experiences, engagement and memories of these images, with nothing of their original context. For us, the frond of this archive leads only to Vid. All tracks beyond him are mute.
It is particularly interesting to note how we are all now locked-in to them, connecting us, through these images, to Vid. They live, in some way, within us, cut off from their origins, yet with each of us trying to breath some new life, interpretation or meaning into them. They have become our own Frankensteins, appropriately noted, though not intentional to begin with, on Halloween. BOOO!
