The Provocation of Synthetic DNA

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 …

Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: methods for media art preservation

Here’s a paper that we recently presented in Meanjin Brisbane for the 2024 ISEA conference (International Symposium on Electronic Art). We presented as part of the 4th Summit on Media Art Archiving. 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 …

What scholars of manuals have to say

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 …

Performance Matters Journal: Re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice’s “Horror Film 1”

Performance Matters is a new journal published by the Simon Fraser University (Canada). The journal is especially interested in: work that focuses on the materiality and the consequentiality of performance: the objects that comprise it, the labour that goes into it, the physical sites that give shape to it, as well as the effects it …

Horror Film 1 – Re-enactment in Progress at CCAS, Canberra

Oliver Thomas practicing Horror Film 1 at CCAS Between 23-28 June, the Teaching and Learning Cinema (Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein) is in residence at Canberra Contemporary Artspace. We’re continuing on with the research we began last year in the UK, towards a re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1 (1971). We’re not sure …

After meeting Malcolm – top of mind

Notes in response to specific questions have been started by Lucas and we will continue them but it seems important to capture what’s stayed at the top of the mind after visiting Malcolm: – we covered a lot of ground! – Malcolm says that when he made these performance film works (eg Horror Film, Gross …