Extinction Event by Dave Griffiths
Fri, 12 Apr 2013
Extinction Event by Dave Griffiths opened at Phoenix in Leicester last night. The exhibition features a video and microfiche/microfilm works from the artist's Babel Fiche project in the Cube Gallery and film (quite literally) and video materials in the Cafe Bar.
The Babel Fiche video is the centrepiece of the exhibition and imagines a future world where the only surviving information about our present time is in the form of analogue data and images on microfiche. The video is accompanied by the actual microfiche slides that were used by the protagonists in the video. You can explore these using a collection of original microfiche readers.
The film is a powerful piece of work and asks questions about the permanence of our information-rich, but largely digital, age. I have personally wondered if future historians might see the twentieth century as the start of a new 'dark age'. One in which historical records are rare - not in this case because of the fall of the Western Roman Empire - but because the digital records that were kept are not longer readable with future technology, or have simply decayed beyond use.
The other work on display continues the 'film' theme. With looping clips of 'cue dots' from old movies running on the matrix screen (that provide an alternative take on the history of cinema) and film frames on the Cafe Bar window that must be viewed through a magnifying class.
The exhibition runs up until 24th May and is definitely worth visiting. My pictures from the show can be found on my Flickr page as per usual.
