The instability of the digital archive: How to deal with pixels by hand

Abstract

This essay presents the work of the Brèches artist collective and research questioning the ‘becoming-archive’ and the instability of vernacular digital images. With this investigation, the collective seeks a way to reverse the quality and hierarchy usually attributed to high and low resolution, and to reverse the established order between archives and family footage. Their practice deals with three types of images: photographic archives of the 19th century, digitised at a very high resolution; very low resolution images produced through entry-level DV cameras and first generation mobile phones; inflation of the latter through an algorithmic process inspired by GAME OF LIFE (Conway, 1970). The collective experiments with hand-crafted digital images, understood as a way of working with visual texture and materiality – rather than figures and mimicry – and as a way of editing a film frame by frame.