A major showcase for contemporary art opens across the West Midlands this week, wirth Birmingham Conservatoire alumnus Matt Parker the only artist exhibiting across all four participating venues.
Matt’s audio-visual installation, ‘The Imitation Archive’, traces the history of digital technology from the early computer Colossus at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park to the Cloud technology of today.
‘The Imitation Archive’ is 34 minutes of computer glitch, crunch, hiss and whir that commemorates 70 years of computing, produced at its birthplace – Bletchley Park, here in Milton Keynes.
The specially made audio-visual edition of the work - on display at the West Midlands showcase - takes a forensic approach to understanding the mechanics, history and analysis of computers in the UK, visualising the audible properties of The National Museum of Computing’s collection.
A significant feature within Matt’s work is the sound of the WITCH computer, the world’s oldest working digital computer and named after it being located in Wolverhampton for many years, (WITCH: Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell).
The WITCH is today housed in The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, home to the World War II code breakers, where Matt was recently artist-in-residence.
As an audio-visual composer and sound designer, Matt finds inspiration in creating revealing and amplifying hidden connections between everyday technology and our environment.
“I think the biggest challenge for me was to make something that I enjoyed listening to, that I felt carried some of the emotions of the history of certain objects, particularly those that reflected the intensity and stifling conditions of working in Block H with Colossus or in a room where 20 bombes were in constant operation by the women engineers (WRENS) who worked there,” Matt said.
“The support in kind I received from Birmingham Conservatoire allowed me to have the best microphones to capture the space and a great environment in the mastering studio to finish off my work.”
Matt’s next major project will see him survey the physical locations of ‘the Cloud’ and how our digital data is stored.
He will be capturing the unique acoustic footprint of the internet as part of a feature-length documentary.
