CONCEALED IN THE HALF LIGHT

An identity featuring animated abstract patterns created by interpolating between printed ephemera from the Catalyst Arts extensive archive.

Concealed in the half-light disrupts the idea of the archive as a collection of ‘inanimate fossils’, where even in its entirety is only an illusion of history and presents just traces of reality. By looking at the Catalyst Arts archive and its unruly nature, there is potential to challenge the politics and power dynamics of the traditional archive which rigidly depends on data organisation such as standardisation and categorisation. These are systems put in place to streamline the varied and eradicate difference, which ultimately erases the value of difference. So when there are multiple histories and no agreed narratives, there is a possibility to offer archive alternatives, by acknowledging the subjective, intimate and personal, essentially the ‘unarchivable’. We were interested in exploring archives as a ‘whole’ made up from a series of fragments. Our identity attempted to visualise the space between these fragments. Using post-production software, we created an digital animation consisting of morphing transitions between crops of printed ephemera from the Catalyst archive. The technique we used marged the nearest similar pixel with its nearest neighbour. We distilled down the vast majority of the archive into minute elements of each. We then produced a hand animated variation of the video to introduce the hidden, subjective human hand that is behind the curation of archives. Usually something which there is a strong attempt to entirely remove from the archival and restoration process. Finally, we designed a custom drawn typeface based on the monospaced typefaces used on archive index cards This is an exhibition of many voices with invited artists Alice Rekab, artist-in-residence Nollaig Molloy, Matthew Wilson, the Department of Ultimology, the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (DAAP) with Frances Whorrall-Campbell and the Artist-Led Archive. This work was produced under Models and Constructs with the designer Jamie Smyth.

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