Ghost Gardens: The Intersection between Electronic Archives and Artistic Research

Abstract

Drawing on the works of Jaques Derrida (1930–2004) – principally Archive Fever (1995) and Cinders (1987) – and Mark Fisher’s (1968–2017) Ghosts of My Life (2014) as interlocutors, I engage with concepts surrounding the electronic archive in artistic creation and research. I discuss my recent composition Ghost Gardens, a sixty-minute digital soundscape derived from the histories of Lascar sailors employed by the British East India Company during the 19th century, and current issues pertaining to climate change, habitat and species loss. I reflect upon the nature of the archive in a period of rapid environmental change, vanishing acoustic terrain and its preservation, through the lens of Ghost Gardens as a creative project which explores the intersection between sound, film, ecology and deconstruction in the digital domain. The creation of the soundscape has both utilised and generated digital film, audio and photographic archives, while the research process involved archival research pertaining to the East India Company. The sonic seascape forms part of a multi-layered, technologically enabled, interdisciplinary body of work; an ocean of sound that probes questions pertaining to the nature of recording and inscription of electronic documentation and retrieval.