“Planet Usher” is a new media project that tells the story of, and through, a twenty–year home video archive. Curiously, this audio–visual archive was produced by the artist’s brother, Peter, who was born deaf, and has slowly gone blind due to the effects of Usher syndrome. Patrick Tarrant constructs an interactive home movie by using these videos in an interface that operates at the intersection between database and narrative. The sequences of repeating images that emerge from the interface survive in that ambiguous zone between the instability of memory and the necessity of memory for navigating a world where things forever appear on the brink of vanishing.

The story that emerges in “Planet Usher” is not simply a story about Peter, nor is it a pitiful story. The stories being told here are very much stories told by Peter, about the family and his world, as seen through the video camera, and refracted through a new media lens. Hence there is an ongoing sense of the video archive’s productivity, rather than an absence or loss. The idea that the home video archive might persist as visual memory serves as a guiding principle for all the aesthetic choices made in “Planet Usher”. For instance, a Polyphoto is brought to life by arranging each image in a sequence and running them as a looping animation. This animation gestures towards movement that was never actually captured. Yet it also plays out a vision that not only recalls the chronophotographer’s particular ability to restore motion, but also speaks to the idea that the archive can be jogged back into action in the right circumstances.