The CryptArk is a single channel video based on an interactive web-player made by artist Jarkko Räsänen. It uses clips of animals filmed by Ulster Television during the 1960s. This was shown as a 4 channel video installation in Tilt [at windmills] exhibition, taking place at CCA Derry~Londonderry in 2nd October-18th December 2021. Both versions were and curated by Mirjami Schuppert.
“The UTV collection contains a variety of material, bringing us back in time to revisit significant historical moment or re-watch our favourite TV-shows. TV once entered people's homes and brought in the outside world to inform, entertain and educate the viewers. Although the broadcasted material was mediated, motivated and at times biased, it also preserves more mundane aspects of everyday life that might seem quite insignificant. One of these arbitrarily recorded, catalogued and preserved phenomena are the presence of animals in the collection. The clips in this collection have been selected by Jarkko Räsänen, a Finnish artist working and living in Berlin, Germany. In his practice, he examines archival footage with the help of technology, stepping away from the content-focused approach that historians mostly use when researching archives. Every clip in this collection contains the presence - even if very fleeting - of an animal. In essence, the collection is like a zoo or Noah’s Ark, bringing together a menagerie of animals. The sections with animals was exported into CryptArk, an audiovisual composition, through which the audience were given an opportunity to try different algorithms on the animals "saved" from the past. CryptArk allowed the user to select animals into the digital ark: these animals found from UTV's archives were crypted with one of the four algorithms the artist created. Algorithms were based on processes of slicing the image file into thin strips and reorganising them according to simple mathematical rules. CryptArk was an interactive audiovisual composition with the artist's own ambient music that turns black & white videos (originally in 16mm film) into a metaphysical journey through video files' structures.”
Text by Mirjami Schuppert 2021