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!
Here’s that correspondence with Raja.
HF1 Curham Appuswamy PDF of manual for DNA, here’s the bit where I talk about re-titling:
And here’s the bit where I spell out what’s going in the capsule.
HF1 Curham Appuswamy early 2023 preparing final files for DNA storage 10 Feb to 7 March
More info
Item 2 the video explainer – you can see a longer version of that here on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/774945752
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.