The commercial film archive's implicit bias towards images of tragedy, disaster and violence stems from a historic desire for the referent, exotic and horrific¹ as a basis for what we as a society deem significant or fascinating and therefore newsworthy. Furthermore, with the advent of the internet and the subsequent process of selective digitization of archival film content, what is present and made available online within commercial film archives represents only what the archive deems to be of commercially viable interest to the archive-consumer.

Given the nature of tragic and disastrous events, such as murders and terrorist attacks, there is often very little, if any, moving imagery of the 'actual' event, produced at the moment it occurred. Within the conventions of contemporary television news, 'secondary' footage is often used as a cutaway to provide context and visual interest to a news story. This project focuses on the large volumes and ubiquitous presence of conventionally (and subjectively) banal footage, often referred to as 'B-roll', that is recorded in connection with a newsworthy event. Such imagery is often labelled and therefore valued by the archive only by its perceived relevance to the event around which it is produced - rather than by what is contained or can be interpreted from the imagery itself.

My intention to use moving imagery produced in connection with news coverage of the 1993 Warrington IRA bombings (that are found and labelled as such within online commercial archives, primarily Getty Images) reflects a condition of image saturation. In response to the overwhelming unnavigable volume of online archive media available to me to produce my project, my exploration is inevitably narrow; in this case - footage that is digitally tagged within the archive's meta-data with the term 'Warrington', the town in which I grew up. My lack of surprise at the almost sole presence of clips pertaining to this single event, when searching for 'Warrington' in online archives, provided the catalyst for my broader observations about the archive's relationship toward tragic events.

Through the act of selection and activation I seek to alienate this imagery from its archival definitions and value system, to create opportunities for new meanings and interpretations to be drawn. Influenced by aspects of Teshome Gabriel's theory of 'living amidst the ruins of cultural memory'², which suggests that narrativization of any kind is a form of preservation and therefore inhibits discourse, my intention is to explore how changes to the formal characteristics of the imagery can further de-narrativize and 'fragment' them as raw documents, and to avoid guiding interpretation and meaning-production on the part of the viewer.

Similarly, to avoid an imposed structure or sequence to the imagery, I each resulting moving image fragment is looped to take the form of a grid of looping tiles on a single screen. The varying lengths of each fragment and varying features such as absence or presence of audio will combine to produce a constantly changing and uncontrolled experience of the work.