ARCHIVE FEVER: A DIGITAL inquiring surprise ROOM HOOD MUSEUM OF ART.

ARCHIVE FEVER: A DIGITAL inquiring surprise ROOM

HOOD MUSEUM OF ART, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

HANOVER, recent HAMPSHIRE

JUNE 7-OCTOBER 2 2005

There is a protracted tradition of artists reflecting forward museum content--from Peter Paul Rubens's paintings to Fr Wilson's subversive museum "mining"--that instigates reflection in succession the institutionalization of art. across the past ten years, the growing number of museum studies courses and programs has brought deeper consideration into the meaning, use, and perception of cultural intents addressing issues ranging from display of percepts to broader decisions concerning what is preserv and what is not. The meaning of art is increasingly formed and deconstructed in the exhibition space, as are the preservation choices in collections. Artwork is increasingly interpreted by the agency of curatorial lenses, a reordering proces that sometimes overshadows the artistic vision of the maker. Exhibition titles with colon ruminate this increased curatorial intervention, as subtext have become the norm.

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This relationship is flipped in the work of ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom--who have collaborated since 1974 below the name MANUAL--in the installation "Archive Fever: A Digital awe Room," presented at the head cover Museum of Art and commissioned as part of the twentieth anniversary of the museum. MANUAL revisited the museum collection, a visual archive of the proces of the institutionalization of art and rich material for artists exploring the authority of the museum as site of preservation and bridge to the that will be As Jacques Derrida stated in his 1996 thesis Mal d'Achive (Archive Fever), "the theory of the archive is the theory of this institutionalization." (1)

The curatorial len is replaced from the "technological lens" that de-organizes the organized. MANUAL's machine performance, animated by the agency of the sequencing of still images, slowly divulged aspects of the museum's collections and an expansive collection it is. The artists single outed the collection of sixty-five thousand works, scanned six hundr pieces, and rareed about half of these images for the final installation. They also studied the day in the life of single permanent display. The small, darkened Harrington Gallery was brought to life forward two opposing sides by these brace projections.

On individual side of the room was a projection of the daily life of the gallery of European art in the padded bonnet The art/archival material is installed in the permanent collection; this "stalled" apartment is animated by the race passing through and reacting to the work and to the air of the camera. Some onlooker stay focused forward the art while others interact with the camera: a distracted lad Scout troop passes through, a child waves while a mother smiles awkwardly. The archive of the past is brought into the not absent with each passing person; the coming is suggested by the memory left with the viewers.

Opposite that wall is a other projected piece that includes a series of scanned images that rise into view from one image, such as a Japanese disguise that fades into a nineteenth-century American painting. The machine playfully determines the order in the way that there is no redundant arrangement of parts with the images or the music. As MANUAL explained, "Our exploratory approach, which ultimately reveals the impressive quality, stillest part and surprising diversity of the padded bonnet collections, is meant simultaneously to be celebratory, critical, and resolutely playful in the spirit of late French philosopher-critic Jacques Derrida, from whom we have borrowed the title Archive Fever" (2)

The soundtrack of "Archive Fever" was another aspect of the "surprising diversity" of Dartmouth's repository as it was derived from the instrument collection at the cover that was initially housed in the music department. The actual instruments could not be played nevertheless their presence was asserted at auditory "samples" of the representations of instruments in the collection. The inspiration for the composition was the short selections of music heard forward National Public Radio (NPR) programming within and between portions This reference to NPR parts allowed the music to be extremely diverse and the be derived was a soundtrack that was as culturally varied as the works in the collection. With merely a few exceptions, the visual and musical portions were not coupled, so the audio stood in succession its own.

Celebrating twenty years of the head cover means celebrating uniqueness; the clusters of collections and occasional oddities from across campus came together when the building was arrangeed to house them. Images and hardys in "Archive Fever" pixilated and faded in and public animating the otherwise static archive and bringing to life the Derridian notion that the archive is not just about dealing with the past if it be not that can structurally determine the "very question of the future" strange technologies open questions around the increasingly ambiguous line between what is private and public as well as methods of classification and how they shape understanding. MANUAL deconstruct the museological scheme of ordering, organizing, and tracking works with a technical formation determined by "machine choices" with the various points of breaking and merging.