ABSTRACT
For Sarah Craske, it is not their textual content but their support of microbial life that opens up new ways to read an archive. In this interview, Sarah asks how microbial life challenges our understanding of archival practice and the institutions that keep it in place. The premise of Biological Hermeneutics is that the physical archive is not merely made up of written or printed text; it also contains data embedded within its biological forms that reflect its usage and those who use them, books as centres of microbial data and data transfer that forces artists to question how they interpret texts and the means by which we interpret them. A wonderful twist in the method is that not only microorganisms but the paper indentations arising from the original letterpress printing some 300 years earlier were captured on the agar’s surface, maintaining something of the relationship between a text’s biological and symbolic content.
