Performing archival remix in Outback and Beyond

Outback and Beyond is a live audio-visual performance and collaboration between myself and Rome-based sound-artist Mike Cooper. It is a live remix of films and images from the National Film and Sound Archive and the State Library of South Australia, accompanied by Mike Cooper's live soundtrack of lap-steel guitar and deconstructed Blues, and a libretto recounting the adventures and misadventures of Charles Todd, the engineer who built the Overland Telegraph from Darwin to Adelaide in the 1870s. It is a meditation on the images and myths that form Australia's national identity, and on methods of contesting the formation of that identity. In this paper, I explore the implications of the live archival remix that underpins the project; implications in terms of how the project works with archival materials in a performance context, but also in terms of the enquiry the project conducts into archival practice itself.