The John Latham Archive is the backbone of FTHo and provides a starting point for many of our exhibitions and events, as well acting as a fertile resource for artists, researchers and art historians. This engagement with the archive keeps it vital and dynamic. The cataloguing and digitising of the archive was being overseen by the Ligatus Research Unit at the University of the Arts, London.
The John Latham archive is hosted online at: www.ligatus.org.uk/aae (aae stands for Archive As Event). The online archive holds a description of every item in Latham's archive accompanied by a photograph of the item. The descriptions include project-specific fields, which are inspired by Latham's theories and practice (such as time-base and minit), as well as standard fields for archival description.
The online archive is organised in three parallel sections. All documents are accessible from every section, so choosing a section will not affect the content. However, each section offers different search tools to retrieve content. These tools are inspired by the characters of the Karamazov Brothers: Mitya, Ivan and Alyosha. Latham has made references to the three brothers in his work and writings.
• Mitya (MA) appears to offer a random selection of documents in the form of a slideshow.
• Ivan (IA) is a highly structured index of terms from controlled vocabularies allowing faceted searching.
• Alyosha (AA) is an intuitive search tool which is based on Latham's time-bases as described using sound by David Toop.
The John Latham Archive is available to view at Flat Time House by appointment. Please email [email protected] or telephone 0207 207 4845 to make an enquiry.
Art360 film on the archive and legacy of John Latham by David Bickerstaff. Images © John Latham Estate, 2021