Drawing Archives
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Art and Narrative
Presentation Title:
- Drawing Archives
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
“Drawing archives” is an interactive installation of 1 to 6 panels, 42x 58″ each, made from steel, graphite, blueprints that fade, audio, sensors, and a computer. Voiceover anecdotes have been collected for this digital audio archive of Berliners remembering their East Berlin past. All stories began with memories of the historically fluctuating Friedrichstrae which once paralleled the Berlin Wall to the east. In the final installation a viewer approaches a large blueprinted portrait and is invited to draw on it. Like the magnetic head of a tape recorder reading a cassette tape, the viewer will enable the voice of the person whose image they are drawing on. The voice is difficult to hear clearly, therefore the viewer will either be content with random ‘voicelike’ sounds, or they will draw more consciously to hear what the portrait is saying clearly. However, the more the viewer draws audio from the portrait, the more they destroy the image of the person. Eventually the blueprinted portraits will completely fade, leaving only an archive documenting the listeners.
Full text (PDF) p. 192-193
