The George Archive

This archive is only part of the journey of finding George’s story within the Xenotone. In the Xenotone stories emerge through connection, convolution, iteration, feedback and inference.

This archive came about through one of my usual processes of walking and collecting images. The majority of the images taken by the iPhone camera and its untrustworthy pipeline of unseen filters, manipulations and enhancements. They collect on the cloud as Google Photos where further manipulated to enhance their file size for storage optimisation takes place, alongside of being analysed by googles image recognition systems. These processes are not incidental; they are active participants, but for the moment will be glossed over.

In this moment I'm interested in what remains, not visually, but via direct metadata and also via implication of that metadata—via network traversing. As we know, each image has embedded within it a large amount of metadata (EXIF), timestamps, coordinates, camera orientation, device identifiers—information that is usually invisible but easily accessed. On its own, this data appears dry and technical but when placed into relation with wider digital ecologies, it begins to imply much more. What is interesting here is what can be implied via this metadata and a wider network traversal: tide information, weather information, direction of view, phase of the moon, what the camera is looking at, and ultimately relationships between each of the images within a wider network.

The metadata was embedded into the image as pixels, creating an archive of potential and actual connections, with each image a container for this potential.  

This archive became the dominant visual language of the “George of the River” performance lecture and drove the narrative forward via a constant revealing at a consistent pace. Sitting alongside the spoken word, the narrative of which was uncovered, in part, through active participating in the creation of this archive. 

The George Archive is a proof of concept for wider possibilities, which will be expanded into more poetic and abstract entries into the metadata scheme for the ongoing Xenotone project and its evolving world.