Output details

Babel Fiche

Babel Fiche adopts a new position in contemporary film and photography, using microfilm to examine the archival urge to produce, collect and remix visual media. It questions the future survival and value of photographic images, and critically re-imagines redundant analogue microfilm images as a sustainable media for translating knowledge in a future post-digital information Dark Age. Two theoretical contexts frame the inquiry: media archaeology, typified by Zielinski and Kittler, traces cultural technologies to reveal our universal desire to generate, organise and communicate knowledge through time. While Flusser's philosophy of photography foregrounds the role of 'technical images' in scopic regimes that subvert writing as our primary means of remembering and speaking.

Applying Web 2.0 logic to microfilm, further approaches were rooted in notions of participation and translation. The aim was to challenge individual authorship and create a collective voice for the work. Using social media, video fragments were crowd-sourced internationally, and their individual frames compressed onto microfiche – a photographic medium capable of lasting 500 years. I invited a poet and a philosopher of religion to write voiceovers in response to this image catalogue from a fictional future. In reply I deployed a new stop-motion technique to re-animate the fiches, as if post-human observers could navigate a historical 'reading' of our contemporary behaviours. The characters were then located in a near-future setting, and a film editor and composer further remixed the production materials. The installation included a film projection and three microfiche readers, through which gallery visitors investigated the Babel Fiche image catalogue in gestures mimicking those of the on-screen fictional researchers. It generated a web and microfiche print archive, an installation exhibited at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; Phoenix Art Centre, Leicester and Chinese European Art Center, Xiamen, a screening at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, two international conference presentations and panel discussions.