The South Sydney project: interaction and archive aesthetics

Abstract

This practice-based thesis questions how interactive media artworks affect the way audiences engage with the past. It considers contemporary art’s ‘impulse’ towards archives within the context of the age of Big Data. At a time when society is generating more information than ever before, this thesis explores how artists working with interactive databases can contribute novel systems and aesthetic experiences in order to carve new ways into and through archives. This thesis brings into dialogue practical and theoretical discoveries made along the journey of reimagining an oral history archive through the system of an immersive responsive installation. It argues that interactive artworks can allow for an embodied, exploratory and generative engagement with archival material. Further, it suggests that such processual and emergent accounts of the past are appropriate ways of modelling the world and its archived traces in a digital era characterised by swathes of stored data and fluctuating information flows. As critically interdisciplinary work across the fields of new media art and history, this research also suggests the value of such experimental methodologies for rethinking traditional approaches to archives with a view to generating aesthetic and affective, rather than factual and textual, engagements with the past.