Title: Meeting the Archive Through an Interdisciplinary Artistic Practice.
My practice research – which includes both exhibition and a written element – reveals how artists can draw attention to the instability and heterogeneity of archives. The research is made up of moving image and performed work created through seeking and responding to instructive footage in institutionalized physical collections and their digital counterparts.
The work deliberates on the destabilising effect where the archivist, librarian or physical artefact are not present and how as an artist protocols can be re-negotiated. It takes a playful approach to the performing body and re-enactment strategies to test archival authority, allowing my preoccupations with instruction, betterment, humour and identity to be artistically explored. Utilising a performative approach to seek experiential relations between the found archival film and video and myself, the work is both active and subjectively realised.
This project is a starting point to think through the shifting conventions brought about by the increasing digitising of historic records and how we decipher and understand the distinction between what an archive is, what is archival or archive like, and how creative practices can be part of understanding the increasingly dematerialised differences.
Dr Steven Paige steven.paige@plymouth.ac.uk www.stevenpaige.com
University of Plymouth, Completed: 2014 – 2019.
Supervision Team: Director of Studies – Professor Roberta Mock, Supervisor -Dr Anya Lewin
