Chris Dorsett artist-curator

I am a retired professor of fine art whose career has been built on curatorial partnerships with collection-holding institutions. The best known of these is a sequence of exhibitions held at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum between 1985 and 1994.

This extended project anticipated many aspects of the current interface between experimental art practices and the museum sector and I have recently returned to Oxford to work on the accession of my slide archive to this museum. www.prm.ox.ac.uk/people/prof-chris-dorsett

trainslidingtalk (2013) curated conversation, Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

For many years I regularly met genomics experts Volker Straub and David Elliott (both of the Institute of Genetic Medicine, Newcastle University) on a commuter train. Across a moving carriage we swapped ideas about 'junk' DNA and institutionalised collection-holding. The motion of the train was part of our exchange. The stations we stopped at, a reminder that inactivity - rather than continual transition - can shape both evolution and history. My documentation of these journeys explored, in the format of short audio-visual pieces, the archival significance of non-coding DNA for artists working with reserve collections in museums. http://vimeo.com/75586281

Throughout my childhood there was a box of home-made gramophone records in my parents’ loft. The box had been in storage since the 1940s when my father, following demobilization from the army, earned extra cash during his first post-war summer recording messages for families with relatives still committed to military duties abroad. He had built the recording equipment himself and undertook many phonographic experiments using primitive acetate discs before launching his short-lived entrepreneurial venture. By the end of the decade magnetic tape had become commercially available and my father’s project lost viability. The test recordings were stored away and forgotten.

With my father's records rehoused in my studio I've had to confront a sound world beyond recovery - the acetate has disintegrated and the recordings are unplayable. Curiously, my attention is held precisely because I now have to look where I once listened. This unexpected encounter with the synaesthetic extends my exploration of the interface between contemporary art and collection-holding practices. For me, the sound objects and their visual images have the same status - both remain as silent as each other. Furthermore, all my drawings can be folded up and stored away just as the records are put back in their box.