Untitled 2016
Film, 2016, 4 minutes



For decades, major libraries and institutions have invested heavily into the conversion of analogue materials into digital format. Digitisation is both a means of making materials more widely accessible and a means of preserving them.

Untitled 2016 questions what forgetting might mean in the digital age which promises to remember everything.
Festivals, presentations and exhibitions

CINECITY Film Festival, November 2016 
Archive as a Play to Play group exhibition, EYE Filmmuseum, June 2017 



Sophie Dixon’s work contemplates the challenges for archival storage and archiving itself. In the contemporary moment of the digital age when there is an overproduction of images, knowledge is being collapsed or conflated with information or knowledge is being seen as information. Dixon’s reflective account, installed as a desktop interface with multiple layers of screen searches, interrogates what digital technology implies for forgetting, for digital amnesia, or what some theorists have termed ‘the coming of a digital dark age’.

The work raised a number of questions regarding the worth of mass accumulations of data as archive. What might be of value? What is worthy of archiving in a time of information overload? Her piece invited reflection on the following questions: What Constitutes meaningful value on the layers upon layers of immediate information? How is information distinct from knowledge? Does Information enable the pursuit of knowledge?
This is measured against the impermanence of the materiality of the medium of digital files and codes. How might the shift in the materiality of the medium from celluloid to digital files implicate or influence knowledge production? How does a digital mode of storing film images outside its historical provenance change their meaning if they are shown across different media and platforms?

If the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan insisted in his seminal 1967 text, then platforms are not equivalent and the experience of the medium itself is implicated, at least in part, in the production of meaning.

An extract from Archive as a Place to Play group exhibition at the EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.

Written by Jyoti Mistry, 2016.



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Mark
© Sophie Dixon 2023