Archive, visual music and place

Increasingly the past is understood through engagement with various forms of archive. Personal, collective, environmental and social histories are constructed through the close reading of the traces left behind in digital, material and intangible forms. In our current era these archives are growing at an exponential rate, daily additions to our digital archives far eclipse entire libraries and collections from previous points in history. This increasingly is creating widening problems both in our understandings of the present and in the creation of projections into the future that go beyond narrow historical interpretation. Engaging with the production of alternative nonlinear readings of these archives in-situ through an iterative practice-based series of audiovisual works is both the focus and method of this creative thesis. In essence this doctoral thesis asks how can an expanded model of the practice of visual music produce multivocal site specific understandings of located historical archives that enable new forms of knowledge to be both produced and understood? This overarching question brings up a series of sub enquires that form the shape of the proposed research narrative and its iterative practice-based nature. The thesis explores these ideas and outcomes using a hybrid approach that brings together long histories of visual music, film and video art, multiscreen installation and locative media. Alongside emergent ideas from cognitive and cultural historiography, the archive traditions of public history and the interplay of these with current trends in machine learning and the languages of cultural production and reception in the visual and media arts.