HANOVER, NH.- As part of its twentieth anniversary celebration, the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College commissioned husband and wife multimedia artists Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, known collectively as MANUAL, to create a site-specific work derived entirely from the museum's collection. On view in the museum's Harrington Gallery through October 2, Archive Fever: A Digital Wonder Room reconsiders the intersections between art history, culture, and technology by exploring the museum's vast collections in playful and unexpected ways.

The artist will discuss their thirty years of collaborative work and the Hood's commission Archive Fever on Friday, July 15, at 4:30 p.m. in the Arthur M. Loew Auditorium. A reception will follow in Kim Gallery.

Over the past six months, the team culled a wide sampling of the 65,000 works contained within the museum's permanent collections. The result is a complex array of animated images, sound, and textual material that the artists have programmed to take full advantage of the computer's capacity to store a massive amount of information and to access a database both systematically and randomly. Archive Fever unfolds at a protracted, remarkably slow, but constantly changing pace, producing a perpetual state of metamorphosis in which dissolving still images and gyrating 3D animations provide contrasting reflective and dynamic moments and sequences. Because of the deep database that MANUAL has generated and the discursive nature of the programming, it is unlikely that visitors will ever see the same event twice or in exactly the same form. "At the heart of the program's image manipulation is our firm reverence for the works of art being transformed through the technological language of the twenty-first century," notes MANUAL. At the same time, the program provides opportunities for spontaneous, imaginative interaction between the works of art and the audience. MANUAL adds, "Our exploratory approach, which ultimately reveals the impressive quality, depth, and surprising diversity of the Hood collections, is meant simultaneously to be celebratory, critical, and resolutely playful in the spirit of late French philosopher-critic Jacques Derrida, from whom we have borrowed the title Archive Fever."

Members of the greater Hanover and Dartmouth communities are featured in a special component in the installation that speaks to the artists' statement on the permanence of art and the transience of the museum visitor.

MANUAL is based in Vermont and Texas, where Hill and Bloom have collaborated since 1974. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally in over two hundred group and forty solo exhibitions, most recently with the large retrospective MANUAL: Two Worlds—The Collaboration of Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom, organized in 2002 by the International Center of Photography, New York, and at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia. Visit www.manualart.net for more information about the artists.