Six artists were commissioned by curators Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker to produce collaborative video works which would be shown in Gateshead, Manchester Nottingham, and Bristol during the British Art Show tour. The artist realised that the host cities were also home to regional film and media archives and decided to use these collection to develop new works.  The artist worked with the archives to find out-of-copyright material in their collections to create a new film for each city. The soundtracks were also sources from copyright expired music in the British Library and the Library of Congress sound archives. 

The DVD includes the works:

• Screen Tests (12 mins 36s): created with footage from the North West film archive, featured a series of Andy Warhol-list screen tests, slowly revealing the location and occupation of the people in the films who were students and models from the Manchester School of Art in the 1930s.
• Dragline (6 mins 57s): created with footage from the Media Archive for Central England, features clips of an autonomous machine (c.1950s) and a 1970s structuralist film to explore the logic of digital practice (find, copy, paste, repeat ) to its industrial roots.
• Broadcast Times (12mins 29s), created with footage from the South West Film & Television Archive, featured an exhibition train taking viewer on a documentary journey of  "A happy hunting ground for tycoons" and the birth of commercial television broadcasting.

Our archival collections have been catalogued following the International Standard of Archival Description (ISAD(G)) and principles of Records in Context (RiC). The library collection has been documented following the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) standard and the International Standard for Bibliographic Description (ISBD).

Subject terms for the collections have been taken from the Resource Description Access (RDA) values which are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; the National Archives’ PRONOM online registry of technical information; IANA media types. MIME types; Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® and Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)® which are made available under the ODC Attribution License.