Dust to Data, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2021

Dust to Data tracks through the colonial history of archaeology, to current parallels in the data mining of DNA and social media image banks. Working with the Department of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy interrogate the construction of a ‘civilisation’ and its racist ‘origin’ stories that define people into categories: some as human and neutral, others as non-human and/or abnormal.

Stills from Dust to Data, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2021 Commissioned by FACT, Liverpool, Curated by Annie Jael Kwan.

In the film, Achiampong and Blandy employ motifs, such as the recurring gleaming pyramid as an image of order and hard simplicity, and 3D models of Australopithecine skulls (extinct close relatives of humans who lived around two million years ago). The film also features a fragment of a letter from William Du Bois, author of the seminal book about race and society The Souls of Black Folk, rebuking one of the pioneers of modern archaeology, William Petrie.

Dust to Data explores how science has been used to justify prejudice. This can be found in the origins of archeology, exposing the archaic mathematical tactics employed by Petrie to justify his own assertions about white supremacy. Although debunked by his contemporaries, Petrie embraced eugenics - the practice of altering or ‘improving’ the human species through selective breeding - as a tool for social control. This view was integral to the birth of archaeology, and its pseudo-scientific legacy still permeates fractious assumptions within the field and in wider culture today.

Installation view, FACT, Liverpool: Dust to Data, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2021

Directed by Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
CGI & Editing: David Blandy / Soundtrack: Larry Achiampong
Voiceover: Professor Larry Barnham, (Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool,) Larry Achiampong and David Blandy. 
Sound recording: Michael Bayliss, University of Liverpool
Photogrammetry: Ardern Hulme-Beaman, Hannah Crosby, JR Peterson, Christopher Scott & Charlotte Sargent: Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool & & Amy Scott-Murray: Imaging and Analysis Centre, The Natural History Museum, London
With thanks to Claire Barrett, Professor Larry Barnham, Subhadra Das, Miranda Lowe & Adam Rutherford

Curated by Annie Jael Kwan & Producers: Charlotte Horn, Maitreyi Maheshwari & Lesley Taker, FACT, Liverpool

Commissioned by FACT, Liverpool for the exhibition Future Ages will Wonder, 28 October 2021 - 20 February 2022

Shown as part of Genetic Automata- Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Wellcome Collection, London, 2023-2024

Interview in Mubi Notebook
ArtForum
Double Negative
Museum of Truth & Lies: Haunted Library Podcast
Art Review
Artnet
Frieze
Art Newspaper
Moving Image Art London
Evening Standard

Reflections on the collaborative process with Professor Larry Barnham, (Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool