Analog to Digital
Mungo Thomson has work at Karma Karma showing now. His high frame rate stop motion animations exhibit the Time Life encyclopedias that he grew up with.Encyclopedias have no real-world use today. Except perhaps to explain why the internet was so revolutionary, and how it renders so many obsolete creations completely useless.
In an interview with Bomb Magazine in 2023 he said, “This project is very much a half-analog, half-digital project; and it talks specifically about the moment of digitization as the juncture between these worlds. And there’s a seam in the middle where these films are getting made.”
The machine he uses to produce these films scans books at a rate of eight pages a second, but in doing so it destroys the book.
I think it’s valuable to take stock of this feeling. There is loss, there is something about this project that feels bad, especially from a classic archivists position. But the internet is perceived as a permenant refuge, in ways, Thomson’s project makes these images more accesible, breathes new life into them, allows them to exist not just as reference but as art. But what does that first impression have to do with things.
How does conservation of an archive exist online, and what does the handmade web have to do with it?
Curation and the public- the death of the hyperlink, who exposes you to what, how do you use the internet, and how do you document that use?
cont. “Maybe it’s the idea that you could learn everything from this—you know, here’s a resource that contains all knowledge. But it’s also a data dump. Like even if Leavin’s Rolodexes were lost, you still have my film. And that’s true with the *Time Life* films as well. If the body of Rodin’s work goes away, and books go away, you still have my film. They’re aggregates for some future where maybe we don’t live in an analog world anymore. Maybe it is just an entirely screen-based world or a Neuralink world. And in that case, the Rodin film can be a substitute for Rodin’s work in that world.”
Thomson is very much thinking about these ideas, and is consious of a future where these films are a resource very much like the Time Life books themselves.
He sees these works as bridging a gap, and I’d like to examine what goes on when an archive crosses that bridge, the history of that bridge, and a couple examples that help me to envision the future of that bridge.