The John Latham Foundation and Archive is known as Flat Time House, after the artist’s theory of flat time. The house is structured as a body – the archive being the mind, the garden the hand, the gallery space (the head)? It was a literal description of the etymological reading of Archive by Derrida at the start of Archive Fever- Arkhe – the house within which information is stored, and those within it, literal guardians of the archived life of another.

The house itself – the place where the artist lived and worked, had become a “living” archive, as such – in the following ways:

1.     turning into a foundation and museum and thus transforming the contents into archival objects

2.     activating the archive through exhibitions, happenings in and out of the space etc..

3.     the digital archive now being created with a team at Camberwell who are organising information the way Latham had organised it

Latham had organised the Archive himself, in a very particular way that not even the curator and director could understand. He had taken great pains in separating the Latham archive with his work for APG (Artist Placement Group). In this sense, this is a genuine archive, in that all material came from one person, about one person (see SCAM). This recalls the notion of subjectivity within the archive on two levels – one the fact that archivists are often known to deal with information subjectively, and in this case, this is a quintessentially subjective archive (at first glance) and two, it recalls the editing of the archive as “future history” – Latham organised things before his death – just as people have been invited to archive their lives on Facebook.

History and memory have a profound affect on our immediate existence and situation. Issues that surround the problematic of history and the day-to-day troubles of memory are extensive. Often, such issues are reflected in the archive, which has to deal with not only a multitude of potential information, but also the thorny matters of truth and knowledge production;

(Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 237-238)

Much like our awareness of memory, Carolyn Steedman recognizes the ways in which the archive works, more often than not. She recognizes that the archive is not so much an obvious gold mine of information; rather, it consists of a great accumulation of seemingly mundane information. The presence of this information is regularly informed by the characteristics of the archivist. While the archive itself is often unclear in its production of a narrative (although I would not deny its existence), it is even more noticeable after selected material is used. Often the archive is utilized as a great library of information from which particular documents, objects etc. are selected and used in order to establish a narrative of one sort or another. It is at this point that the archive leaves it static position and becomes fluid, through engagement from an outside body. However, there is then a point through which the archived material becomes embedded in a narrative and this narrative is arguably even more static than its original components. The second hand nature of such a narrative makes dangerous gestures towards an intrinsic ‘truth’. 

Listening Session II

An overloaded transmission from a quasi-personal stellar source
A live, long form radio broadcast from Flat Time House in collaboration with Resonance 104.4fm

Adam and Jonathan Bohman, Daniela Cascella, William Furlong, Ken Hollings, Elisa Kay, Roberta Kravitz, Noa Latham, Richard Thomas, Athanasios Velios, Patrick Wildgust, Mark Peter Wright (UK)

Curated by Lucia Farinati and Richard Thomas with the assistance of Gareth Bell-Jones

Flat Time House, London, 29 July - 1 August 2010

"This project is about organising the documents of the late artist John Latham: a vast amount of unpublished and disorganised correspondence, writings, video, audio tapes and other material found at his house in South London. The research will produce detailed descriptions of the archive contents and a newly designed database and classification system that will mirror Latham's theories on 'Events and Event Structures'. Without the presence of John Latham, this research will allow his material to be presented to a new generation of artists and academics in a manner consistent with his way of thinking, promoting new work and disseminating his thinking to a much wider audience. This classification system will rely on the content management tools offered by the open source system Drupal. Choosing suitable models for classifying the archive documents within Drupal will be a large part of the proposed work. This research takes place inside a larger project to create a John Latham Centre at which exhibitions, artist residencies, screenings and other events will take place, all informed by the work and ideas of John Latham. The archive's presence at the centre of this will help reanimate John Latham within his own home. The digitised archive will be available on-line, encouraging wider research into Latham as well as visits to the house itself." -- http://www.arts-humanities.net/projects/reanimating_john_latham_through_archive_event

Project Website: http://www.ligatus.org.uk/jla/

Exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, Anarchive, [2 April - 5 September 2010], exploring John Latham's archive through a selection of works and papers co-curated by Antony Hudek, Athanasios Velios, Research Fellows at Ligatus, University of the Arts, London, and Nayia Yiakoumaki, Archive Curator, Whitechapel Gallery.: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/john-latham-anarchive

During the exhibition other related events took place in the Gallery:

• A performance by David Toop entitled FLAT TIME/sounding, supported by the PRS Foundation, which produced material for the Alyosha section of the online archive
• The launch of the book The Portable John Latham
• The launch of a DVD with John Latham's films
• A gallery talk by Nayia Yiakoymaki
• A film screening entitled The Films of John Latham: EXPRMNTL followed by a discussion between Antony Hudek and Athanasios Velios about the online John Latham Archive

courtesy of Ligatus.org