The Pararchive Project

Adam Curtis’ stylish and thrilling documentaries, The Power Of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace were early influences on the Pararchive project. His experimental works illustrated how the BBC’s archival footage could be remixed into radically new narratives, often challenging the original readings. His works do have a tendency to reframe history as a series of conspiratorial…

  Pararchive won a small grant to participate in this year’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science which took place from 1st – 8th November. The aim of the Festival was to showcase some of the “leading” social science research being undertaken across the country and to demonstrate how such work…

Andy, Fiona and Dean have been discussing the recent launch of the TV as Material series of works at the Tate Modern. The six pieces are the result of a residency giving artists access to BBC’s archives. The films are a great illustration of the potential to unlock archival material to create new perspectives and entirely new works; something that we’re…

For an unknown face, the system searches through a database of 146m images, culled from 50,000 BBC News programmes in around 30 seconds. Once a face has been learnt by the system future searches will only take a few seconds. Oxford’s research suggests that faster performance on much bigger databases would be straightforward, so we’re…

From the BBC’s Ian Forrester… As part of my investigations into Perceptive Media, myself and other colleagues are deconstructing storytelling down to its most logical parts. Part of this is understanding the history of storytelling and other aspects of storytelling which are outside the mainstream consciousness. Storytelling through different types of frames  

Cultural institutions such as museums, and even galleries, will have the opportunity to become platforms, co-existing in both the digital and physical realms. WIRED’s recent The Getty and Google Unleash Free Art — And Your Creative Potential touches on some issues we’re beginning to explore receso with Pararchive, notably the benefits of a culture of openness around art collections…