untitled (archive)
16mm, color, 3’, 2024, United Kingdom
created by Douglas Dixon-Barker
untitled (archive) is a machinima sui generis that transposes the residual memory of a videogame into the granular materiality of 16mm film. Framed as “an imperfect archive”, the work embraces degradation not as failure but as structure, treating loss as a generative condition. In collapsing the multitelic potential of the digital into the fixed duration of celluloid, Douglas Dixon-Barker offers a quietly radical proposition: that the act of translation itself might constitute a viable archival gesture, even — especially? — when it fails to preserve the full breadth of experience.
Douglas Dixon-Barker is an artist and filmmaker currently living between Leeds and Barcelona. Drawing on the history of avant-garde and structuralist filmmaking, their work reframes genre and digital environments through unstable formats, hybrid temporalities, and the material conditions of visual systems. Their filmography includes In Your Arms (2020), Ultimate Crush (2019), untitled (camera roll) (2017), Summer (2014) (2016), For Life (2015), and 「 A M V 」 (2014–2015). They also directed In a Hopeless Place (2013) and contributed to s01e03 (2020). Dixon-Barker is affiliated with Kinet, a virtual studio dedicated to avant-garde cinema.