Archive Surface

Birkin, Jane (2020) Archive Surface. In, Lee, Yeseung (ed.) Surface and Apparition: The Immateriality of Modern Surface. London/New York. Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 145-162.

Abstract

This chapter frames the physical archive as a place of textural as well as textual information, and this is through the investigation into the surface of a particularly degraded archive object. The object in question is a bundle of letters from the Wellington Archive at the University of Southampton, dated 1832, and rendered entirely unreadable by time and poor storage. It is therefore placed outside of the standard information and evidence-based epistemic framework—the paper trail—of the archive, yet it is of particular interest because of its overt materiality and uniqueness of surface. The enquiry into the bundle is instigated and informed by a project to document the object by scanning it and printing a 3D surrogate. New surfaces—and interfaces—are encountered through the technical process: the digital image of the object on screen, and the surface of the 3D print itself. Importantly though, the scanning project also offers a fresh way of looking at the surface of the archive object itself, what it reveals as well as what it conceals. Each of these surfaces demands consideration as artefact and as document.

The Wellington bundle is degraded to such an extent that the letters inside it are fused together; they are rendered not only unreadable but also untouchable. The object might be viewed as superficial, yet it is dense and complex; it possesses what Tim Ingold (2017) identifies as ‘complexion’. Shaped by time and the elements, the evidence of the passage of time that is implicit in this object presents an understanding and a documentation of time in an overtly material and media-archaeological way. The object is in part made up of dust, a material that is often associated with the archive. But dust does not just lay on its surface, it is its surface—and this is demonstrated by the fact that dust is measured and recorded in the 3D scan as systematically as any more stable part. The letters inside this bundle are undisclosed, their contents unknown. Secrecy and concealment, together with dust, are identified here as recurrent archival themes. The digital surrogate, although hollow and truly superficial, has a robust surface: it is out in the world, it can be handled and it has nothing to hide.

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Contributors

Author: Jane Birkin

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