Caroline Black

Artist Statement

THE (CON)TEMPORALITY OF THE ARCHIVE AND THE ABSTRACT OF ITS FAILURE (2020)

Family albums were once filled with photos of memorable moments, images of weddings, new babies, graduations, holidays, new cars and our beloved pets. Social media has increasingly replaced the physical album with the switch from analogue to digital photography. Our culture dictates we capture the mundane and banal alongside the significant milestones in life. Indeed, we can tell a lot about a society from the imagery it archives. But only if it survives.

Appropriating other people’s images using Creative Commons, I have interfered with the coding of the digital files, forcing them into a state of destruction. This body of work is a theoretical consideration, or abstract if you will, of the fragility of digital files.