Virtual Fracking from Grayson Cooke on Vimeo.
The Image in Ruins: Materiality and the Archive
In one way or another, all my work, as both a scholar and a media artist, is concerned with archives; the archive as a repository for individual and collective memory, and for the accumulation of time more broadly; the archive as a touchstone for thinking the past and its relation to the future; and the archive as a material thing, the thing by which we can state that history and temporality have a medium.
One of the defining factors of media art is this concern with the medium, with the imbrication of content and form. In my work I explore our relation to the content of archives in terms of how this affects our identity, but I am also concerned with how the materiality of archives can be interrogated to change the way we think about ourselves individually and collectively, as citizens and nations. Specifically, I am interested in the affective and intellectual experience of the dissolution of the archival object; in how archival disappearance – Eduardo Cadava’s “image in ruins” – can release new perspectives on how archives are created, accessed and valued.
My work involves time-lapse photography of photographic media subjected to chemical dissolution. In this talk I will discuss a recent work “Frack” which involves dissolving photographs of sedimentary rock with chemicals used in hydraulic fracking. The project proposes a kind of chemical or material allegory, wherein images and film media are subjected to a chemical process undertaken in the world at large, a kind of “scientific visualization” that is material, not generative.
Biography
Born in New Zealand and based in Australia, Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist, Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Grayson has exhibited and performed in major international festivals such as the Japan Media Arts Festival, NeMaf in Seoul, VIDEOFORMES in France, TIVA in Taipei, and the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo. As a scholar he has published 20+ articles in academic journals. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montreal.
Email: grayson.cooke@scu.edu.au. Phone: +61 2 6620 3839.
