Our users manual for Horror Film 1 was encoded on synthetic DNA in collaboration with Associate Professor Raja Appuswamy of Eurecom. The DNA was enclosed in a stainless steel capsule.
This was displayed in the exhibition on a small velour cushion under a perspex box, together with the media release. (Click on the image below to see larger size):
This DNA capsule was displayed upon a plinth, with the Horror Film 1 timeline poster print mounted on the side:
building trust through socialising with the artist
oral history interviews
explicit learning about choreography and technical things
research on / with the artist in archives if available
trying out the re-enactment for ourselves
checking back with the artist to fill in gaps
writing a manual FOR OURSELVES so we remember what we did (make it easier next time)
writing a manual with the view to pass it on to someone else (technical stuff, contextual stuff, and stuff about the ‘spirit of the work’
trying the draft manual out with someone else
noting what needs changing based on that
make the changes that need to be made
when another person tries it out, documenting their attempt and including it in the next iteration of the user manual
etc (ad infinitum, never finished…)
you need to observe yourself making the work and keep notes about that. That’s what becomes the manual.
You need to try to be ‘true’ to the work, that’s your job.
You need to find your way to capture your observations that make sense to you as a record of that experience.
As Lucas says ‘writing a manual FOR OURSELVES so we remember what we did (make it easier next time)’.
For me, the letter (or some communication) to a future user from the original artist is crucial, a key finding in my PhD is that without that permission, people feel awkward to just go ahead and use the manual.
We’re still working on a way to really make it do the ‘ad infinitum’ bit, ie to get users to make a contribution back to the manual, that’s what really strengthens it.
Raja and I met back in 2021 when I chaired a panel he was in at iPRES. Our session was online and we had time to chat beforehand. I’d read up about his paper on DNA storage. I knew something about this because I saw a great presentation about it from former National Film and Sound Archive director Jan Muller. Muller loved DNA storage and he organised for Cathy Freeman’s Olympic win to be stored on DNA and then decoded from that source for display on the Opera House sails in Sydney. I don’t have specific dates for this work but it was in the period around 2016. Somehow I discovered Raja was looking for a case from cultural heritage to show the potential of DNA storage and that’s how we began a dialogue about the work Lucas and I have been doing with Malcolm to make a user’s manual for Horror Film 1 (building on our project Wo(Man) with Mirror with Guy Sherwin and lessons from work with Lynn Loo on Autumn Fog).
Fast forward to Feb 2023 and Raja was ready to actually encode some content on DNA. What went in there? Here’s a screenshot from the Dropbox that Raja used to store all the final content
The document ‘Abstract’ explains more. Here’s what it says:
What’s contained in this DNA archive is a test of the capabilities of DNA storage focusing on the transmission of an artwork from the 1970s to future audiences. This artwork involves some moving image and a performer. It is considered a landmark of this kind of practice, known as expanded cinema. The work, Horror Film 1, was made by a leading artist of the London Film Makers’ Co-op Malcolm Le Grice in 1971. What’s in this package is
1. a text document, background and instructions to make a performance of Horror Film 1
2. a video explaining the work of Australian artists Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein who have carried out this work with Malcolm’s blessing to find a way to transmit Malcolm’s artwork to future performers.
3. a video documenting performances by Lucas, artist Nicci Haynes using the instructions; a performance by Louise from 2014 and a performance by Malcolm.
4. a video transfer of the 16mm film loos, crucial for the re-staging of Horror Film 1.
This experiment was ideated when researcher Raja Appuswamy and archivist, artist, researcher Louise Curham met at the International Conference for Digital Preservation (iPRES) in 2019. This work was finalized as a pilot experiment in Horison Europe FET project Oligoarchive.
Funds from project OligoArchive, the Canberra Art Biennial and the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra made this work possible.
How does this connect to the items in Raja’s file:
I did try to update that title of that last file – that is an example of what not to do in digital preservation!
Item 3 performance documentation – you can see some of Lucas’s performance here (CBR 2022, in the Canberra Art Biennial) https://vimeo.com/775641088 and some of Nicci’s performance here (2022, Canberra Art Biennial) https://vimeo.com/775994398
Re Item 4, I have very high res DPX files made from loops that Lucas and I had. They were quite scratched. I felt it was super important to do that transfer as that’s a bit that could potentially confuse future users. It’s important to check in the manual (item 1) about the source for the loops, Love Story another of Malcolm’s films.
I’m Thinking about the provocation of sending info 1000 years into the future in the synthetic DNA capsule.
This provocation emerges from our collaboration with Raja Appuswamy, a data scientist at Eurecom in France, who is storing our Horror Film 1 Users Manual and associated documentation materials on synthetic DNA.
Raja is working with our project as a demonstration of a ‘use case’ for synthetic DNA storage – the idea is that items of intangible cultural heritage (like Horror Film 1) can be sent into the future as an act of preservation, or archiving. Continue reading “The Provocation of Synthetic DNA”
It’s called “Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: methods for media art preservation”, co-authored by Louise Curham, Lucas Ihlein, Raja Appuswamy.
About the authors:
Louise and Lucas are Teaching and Learning Cinema (TLC), and Raja is a data scientist in France at Eurecom.
The paper is really just a brief intro to the project we’re working on at the moment.
Abstract
This paper discusses a novel approach to media art preservation led by Australian artist-archivist group Teaching and Learning Cinema, using the field of expanded cinema as a case study.Works of 1970s expanded cinema (which combine celluloid film projection with live performance) are typical of the inherent “lossiness” of much 20th and 21st century media art. While offering richly embodied experiences in their moment of enactment, expanded cinema’s ephemerality means that it risks falling out of circulation and thus becoming unavailable for future experience. Teaching and Learning Cinema, over the past 20 years, has evolved a methodology for preserving works of expanded cinema, featuring three overlapping approaches. First, intergenerational transfer is attempted: in this phase, younger artists learn about the work from its originators, and produce live re-enactments. During the second phase, a users manual is assembled, encoding the artwork as a set of instructions with the intention of making it available for future generations of performers and audiences. Thirdly, the archived material from phases one and two is stored on synthetic DNA, with a view to transmission into the deep future (perhaps 1000 years). While the first two phases are urgent, preventing the work’s immediate extinction, the third phase is speculative, broadening the enquiry to explore the question of cultural heritage across much longer
timeframes.
Keywords
Media art preservation; time-based art preservation; archival practice; preservation; DNA storage; manual making; expanded cinema; re-enactment; media art history.
This week we lost a VIP in the experimental cinema community. Peter Mudie was a teacher at University of Western Australia, where I studied fine arts in the mid-1990s. Shortly after he arrived in Perth (from Canada via London) he set up a Super-VHS editing suite, and began teaching the history and practice of experimental film and video. It was a revelation.
Each week we would watch films from the canon, dating back 100 years, right up to the present. Often Peter had obtained celluloid prints on 16mm, and he would lace the projector up in front of us, cigarette dangling from his lips. His drawling, chuckling style of teaching, infused with marxist politics, was infectious. Continue reading “Farewell Peter Mudie”
As we finalise an article about the manual for Horror Film 1 and the potential to use DNA as a storage medium for the manual versions and additional components, we have gone looking for literature about manuals.
I’ve learnt that making procedures is called ‘procedural discourse’. David Farkas writes about this back in 1999. It is about ‘written and spoken discourse that guides people in performing a task-in other words, it is “how to” communication.’ His article aims to set out what makes a procedure a procedure, he sets out the relationships, and persistent logic in making procedures, as he describes it. Here’s a short summary – we’re in the territory of purposeful human behaviour – people wanting to get stuff done, usually around a quite clearly defined goal. He defines getting stuff done more eloquently – he calls it accomplishing tasks and he clarifies that actually means changing things. Continue reading “What scholars of manuals have to say”
Louise and Lucas from TLC have been working towards various versions of a users manual for Horror Film 1 (1971). In this blog post, we’ll share a few versions of the manual, which are still at an early stage. Continue reading “Horror Film 1 – Users Manual (version 1.0)”
Dr Louise Curham from Curtin University’s iSchool starts a dialogue with audiovisual archivists of South East Asia about expanded cinema.
Here’s the recording of this talk:
And here’s what I say (not quite identical but pretty close)
Hi everyone. Thanks very much for inviting me to be part of SEAPAVAA 2023. I want to begin by acknowledging I’m joining you from the lands of the Ngunawal people, the Aboriginal traditional owners of this land I’m on in Canberra.
Join us for an evening of recent and brand new work by the Artists Film Workshop, all on 16mm.
Lab members Sebastian Vaccaris and Paddy Hay have programmed a stellar line-up, it’s a first for Canberra to see works from AFW, Australia’s most prolific contemporary artist-run film lab.
The line-up includes Anybody Coming to Dinner byAudrey Lam (2022) and Fade by Callum Ross-Thomson (2017).
I did try to update that title of that last file – that is an example of what not to do in digital preservation!
