Alice Duncan-Gardiner
regular/irregular
“[The drawings] serve as found arks of lost moments in which the here-and-now of the work functions as a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future.”
The art historian, writer and curator Charles Merewether says that the archive, unlike history, shows and records itself through traces. This work represents a year of education within Python and OpenCV. With help from Max Lay, a computer software engineer, we have built a program that takes a photograph on a set loop either of someone watching the program or of the program itself, in such a memory of this person or persons: a self referential mnemonic directory talking between past and present. My research initially took the archive as the beginning point of exploration and arrived at the archive as the end point of the artwork. How do we capture the fear of loss, forgetting or deletion, both memorially and digitally while addressing the abundance of the archive in the digital realm, through the medium of the internet? The archive is no longer confined to institutions; we carry them now in our bags, pockets and hands.
““The archive isn’t merely available to us [anymore]; it actively pursues us.””
