The Practice of Microtopia: Microfiche Archives of Troubled Places

Griffiths, D (2020) The Practice of Microtopia: Microfiche Archives of Troubled Places. Doctoral thesis (PhD by Published Works), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This PhD by publication (route 1) concerns narratives of contemporary troubled places that involve the memory and repair of events of hazard, trauma and conflict arising from contested matter. The three artworks published in 2013-16, together with a written exegesis, explore the intersection of troubled places with the miniature medium of microfiche, a cultural practice of transmitting knowledge through time as tiny celluloid, photo-chemical artefacts. A genealogy of microfiche’s twentieth-century function in library, military and state epistemes, in real and speculative applications, reveals its entanglement with human desire for a compact, resilient remembrance that will survive crisis. Artistic deployment of obscure microfiche apparatus comments on wider society’s incomplete, unclear, forgotten or concealed remembrance, in both physical and virtual media. The research considers the material and memorial challenges of three troubled places, including a gamma-ray burst in the early Universe, a site of genocide legacy, and infrastructure for toxic nuclear waste containment. Through the interface of troubled places and microfiche the research arrives at ‘microtopia’, a new creative method for the remembrance, archiving, and recall of memories, things, and places. Microtopia is a knowledge practice involving the witnessing of complex sites of remembrance through its production of multiple narratives. Microtopia method gathers evidence of contentious material and technologies, as observed and recorded in conversations, numerical data and photographs. Factual accounts are interwoven with situated micropolitical memories, producing traces of speculative-fabulation. In microtopia artworks, these different narrative modes are expanded and combined through studio editorial collage, poetry and comics illustration, to differently imagine the unclear past, burdened contemporary, and inconceivable futures in troubled places. ii The Practice of Microtopia The resulting publications/artworks offer methods for the management and remembrance of the material remains of an event, and affective encounters of those acting in the sites. The research is situated within the field of contemporary archival-art research, which samples and counter-witnesses official bodies of evidence to insert antagonistic or fictional strata into production of place. The use of microfiche contributes to this research by signalling the continuing need for archives to occupy plural forms of remembrance to counter inevitable medial ruination. Microtopia joins monuments, artefacts, and digital records in support of future re-telling of troubled places.