Mirror: Time will darken paper, a picture essay examining mimesis through autographic practice as a way to transform our understanding of digital material.

A picture essay examining mimesis through autographic practice as a way to transform our understanding of digital material. This research makes links between specific techniques of restoration and images derived from new technologies. The project is presented as a montage of drawn images that resituates material from digital archives as components of an aesthetic puzzle. Drawing on a range of source material including political memos, fictional texts and historical images the work considers the way narratives are constructed as events that depict people in time and place like shapes on a canvas. I am intrigued by texts and images that can be read as notes from the future about fate, as if they are trying to warn of dangers we must soon face. In A Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin wrote: the images, severed from earlier associations, that stand–like precious fragments or torsos in a collectors gallery–in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. History happens but only just. There is a whole history on the other side of time that nearly happened. In that parallel world Kennedy might have averted or at least ameliorated the worst, but may well have been drawn into something else. These are the hypotheses that justify more ink. My research uses drawing as a close reading of texts to examine the dream of the past and engage in a mock-predictive historicisation in order to reflect on the dream logic of these fragments of the past.