User:Solarcher
2014-01-16
this is going to be a description of work underway.
and as such it is to a greater extent unknown, but by describing it in miniature i hope to reduce a metastatic mess into some sort of sense, something which, by giving to you, i can give to myself.
What this is so far is around 6 hours of filmed interviews with three people, the widow of a farmer, a farm foreman and a RAF pilot, footage of the interior of a victor nuclear bomber cockpit, footage of the area surrounding these peoples homes; this land is extremely flat, filmed in winter and framed in a generally symmetrical way, dominated by large expanses of sky, and photographs of a military record, declassified in 1993 regarding a fatal crash of an experimental handley paige victor bomber. In March 1962, in a small faming village in Lincolnshire, England, a region notable largely for its low population density and eastern position in England, and as a result of these, a high concentration of Air Force bases, just after lunch an experimental nuclear bomber jet plane crash landed into a farmhouse. In the crash landing the farmer and his wife were blown clear enough to survive, though broken, and their farm foreman dragged them clear of the wreckage. I have so far produced video interviews with these two subject/witnesses and a (slightly later) pilot who flew these jets for the RAF throughout the cold war and the Falkans conflict. The interviews with the witnesses tend to focus largely on their own farming history, the history of their families on the land and sudden breaks into global narratives, such as their farm being staffed during and just after WWII by German prisoners of war. And, of course, the sudden break into the scene of a cold war experimental bomber into their bucolic rural lives. The Pilot goes into much greater detail about the spaces of the plane, the position of it within the british defence force, function as a part of the development of nuclear arms and its role during the Falklands conflict. The overall sense of this is vague and being worked through. it will structurally form scenarios which wander around the threshold of the particular or local and the global sublime, as their lives are fragmented by a body of the military industrial global machine.
I am looking to establish a structure for these weavings. I have conduced the interviews quite casually, by leaving the camera rolling and allowing the conversation to flow where it will, this obviously necessitates a great deal of editing, and it is through the edit process that structure, tone, and the stories themselves with emerge. After contacting the first source, the woman, Mrs Burtt, who survived the crash itself, there has been a steady and serendipitous spread of contacts and sources which took place over a very short period; an old friends father flew these planes, the farm foreman who saved them was across the street when I was interviewing the Mrs Burtt, the local air museum had just taken delivery of a cockpit from one of the planes. Many of these serendipitous links have led back to myself; my grandfather worked on the victor engine design team, I grew up in the same house as the farmer, an old school friends father is the pilot I interviewed, the uncle of the farmer started a radio play with my family name. I am unsure at the moment how integrated I want my own subjectivity to be writ large through it. Though, this could give me an avenue to interrogate the documentary form.
I’m currently working my way through the content to establish links of tone, subject and points in the story, to link together the wider context with the particular events and personal story. I am trying to establish an overall structure that these can drop into, or refresh points which will return it to a basic ground, most likely this will be in images from the military investigation.
I am interested in working on this for a range of reasons; As an exercise into documentary form, creating sense and a contextualised story from a set of subjective stories. and in creating something utilising documentary forms and techniques which operates as an exhibitive object. From this position, my understanding of documentary form is something which develops a non-fictional edifice using material gathered from sources external to the documentary maker, addressing formations of information allowing sets of subjectivities to address a wider context. I want to develop my techniques for wandering around the threshold where these global meta-narrative, e.g. the cold war, the european wars, mechanisation of the countryside and automation of the military, can be read in the particular. I have a general interest in events as ruptures and in the particular tones of voice characteristic of statements borne from being witness to ones own story. I’m also, as an aside, sorta into creating an archive method for recording these stories which are at the end of their availability, as the generation who lived any particular time period die, and their subjectivities which oppose official methods of archiving the history, particularly, now, of cold war era stories of scale and nationality become exclusive purely by persistence.
The Earth Is Not At Rest
This is an HD video lasting 13 minutes 13 seconds. There is no sound and it is shown on a large wallmounted flatscreen monitor. It is broken down into 5 chapters, released one chapter per week throughout the exhibition period. Each opens with a title page featuring the names of paired planetary bodies and ends with astrological transits for the week following the chapters release. Throughout there are italicised subtitles.
It opens with a handheld shot of the moon, out of focus, roaming through dark leaves over this, in white text reads "I Sun & Moon".
The majority of the shots are slow, dark tracking shots of spaces in a park heavily featuring dark dense foliage. It appears to be around dusk. the figures of 2 caryatids recur sporadically throughout. In the second segment, after a long slow out of focus shot which resolves to be the back of a head with red hair surrounded by a nimbus of brightly lit greenery, a woman with short red hair dressed in jogging clothes stretches in poses similar to those of the statues. the shots of generally depopulated, except for a child on a bike who cycles across in section 4 and a group of men dressed in white, in the middle distance and out of focus. playing boules. The final chapter ends with a handheld shot attempting to follow a swiftly moving flying object among dark leaves and with a shallow depth of field, then cuts to the opening shot of the moon.
This work was made in collaboration with another artist, Frances Scott. We met through the exhibition it was created for, which featured a lengthy discursive process involving around 20 artists. Frances and I wrote, shot, and edited together, at the same time on the same machines or through shared script files.
The curators who invited us into the show proposed a Neil Gaiman comic as the starting point for the groups discussions: In the comic the Sandman commissions Shakespeare to write and perform a Midsummer Nights Dream to the characters it features. Titania, Oberon and their courts are brought through from an alternative universe to watch and provide commentary on their depictions and the fictionalisation of their lives. I initially started to work on text performances to be recited (or not) by members of a running forum which used the park, onto which i uploaded mp3s of horoscopes provided by an astrologer. These texts treat the exhibition as a person with its birth date the opening night. Frances started to think about making trailers for the show to be sited in public spaces satellite to the exhibition. Our ideas began to overlap and so we started working together. The spaces and statues featured in the video are performance spaces or otherwise activated objects and spaces which other works in the show occupy.
The subtitle text is aggregated from 'Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead', a Tom Stoppard play, 'A midsummer nights dream' (Shakespeare), and interviews with an astrologer, who also provided the transcripts which bookend each segment. We manually went through the texts and extracted lines which suggested a relation to astrology in general, games, chance and predetermination, the subjects each planetary body governs within standard astrological readings, incursions of the fantastic or magical into the mundane and sometimes just lines we liked the flavour of. We then started to structure them into a kind of dialogue between the astrologer and the texts.
Each week we would shoot, edit and 'release' a new instalment, by adding it to the file playing on the flatscreen in the gallery and by uploading it to the exhibition website where it auto-plays at the top of the page. In the initial week the video lasted 3 minutes 7 seconds and by the end of the month 13 minutes 13 seconds.
the texts we chose primarily for the following reasons
midsummer nights dream, obviously was the origin of the shows origin.
rosencrantz and gildenstern are dead, partly as its an extrapolation of Hamlet, so as a model for extracting a new sense from a shakespeare, but also for 3 primary points: It is known from the outset what happens to them, in Hamlet they are executed, so anyone who knows this knows the end of the story and its a matter of playing out predetermination and we enjoyed a number of points which act as games throughout the play and toy with this idea. There is a group of players/rude mechanicals who pop up now and then to interrogate and provide alternatives to the predetermination, and the events of Hamlet itself weave through the spaces that R&G negotiate and converse in.
The astrologers conversations grew out of my visiting him to commission horoscopes and he proved to be a very strange guy with a lot to say, all of which followed its own causal magical logic.
Crust
This is an HD video. in this instance it is projected in a gallery space containing sculptural installations by other artists. It opens with a road. at high speed and shaky and through strong dappled light, it is summer in the countryside. there is a slightly syncopated rhythmic pulse and a smear or imperfection on the lens. As the camera approaches a village and slows down a female pitched computer voice begins to speak. the screen cuts to black. the camera moves among pale leafy shapes in the dark. The narration tells a story about a deep sea experimental mission to drill to the core of the earth, lists creatures which live around volcanic vents. In the process of the mission something goes wrong and something escapes from beneath the crust. The percussive drum beat comes and goes throughout. The pale leaves cut to a roaming shot, dominated by red, with a shallow depth of field of some non-specified organic objects. The images flashes and phases through colours in time with the percussion. Around 2 two thirds of the way through the shot cuts to a sea at sunset. the horizon bisects the screen. the sea is moving sluggishly. The narration continues and describes its becoming aware as the mind of the drilling submarine and continues to describe the rising awareness of the world of objects now autonomous and carrying out their functions without the input of humans and cuts to black.
There are four shots in this film. The opening shot of a road is taken from a motorcycle side car, hence its shakeyness and speed. The second shot, of plants in low light was taken at night in a garden under a halogen lamp, the third, of organic forms taken hand-held through a crystal ball was, again, plants but under available incandescent light indoors and the final shot of the sea shot static in slow-motion. Its all on a DSLR. It was not shot to a plan. I film widely and drew from my archive to assemble this piece.
The voice is from a text-to-speech program reading a piece aggregated from numerous sources on the internet, including the Plymouth University Marine Geology unit. It was reworked and fictionalised quite heavily.
The drum beat was sequenced in Logic, based on the opening track of Scott Walkers Bisch-Bosch
Throughout the edit is heavily colour graded in final cut. All the colour pulses and the dominant red through the third shot are done in post production. Following a visit to the Marine Geology unit of the University of Plymouth, I was reading about an expedition they are launching to drill through to and sample from the magma under the earths crust. I wanted to work in the boundary layer between empirical and rational descriptions of the behaviour of things, and to do so by semi-fictionalising the line between them or providing a fictional narrative to link them together and to play with the barrier between the narration as a sense form and the image as a sense form almost empty of meaning and variable with the interpolation of narrative.
Grendel.
A video displayed on a 21 inch sony PMV Display Monitor sat on a table. There are Headphones.
Fading in from black the video opens with a shakey low resolution shot moving through dense forest, the colours of the shot lean heavily towards purple and green and it is quite dark. It smears and shakes and is generally indistinct. There is the sound of a stream. A robotic voice starts to speak with a heavy northern european accent and pitched masculine. Much of what it says is mispronounced; Lakes, for example, becomes Larkez.
It begins with the description of journey on foot into the wilderness. The narrator mentions astral projections, the broken spectre, describes being a disorientated, and describes dawn in the forest
The shot cuts to black followed by static shots of water vapour rising off a lake, each lasting around 30 seconds, the banks of which are lined, down to the water, with trees. The light is strong, close to horizontal and brightly illuminates the mist. In one shot, on the opposite side of the lake a figure with a dog appears and walks down to the water. Other than this there is no on-camera life.
The narration continues, it lists water dwelling fairy tale creatures talks about changelings and alternative life processes/forms, then goes on to describe abiogenesis, the process of living matter arising from non-living. It ends with a description of lake outside L.A. which has been made so poisonous that only by restructuring its DNA can anything survive there.
The final two shots show, in centre frame, a wooden hut on the bank. There are no doors or windows, the mist continues to rise around it. The first of these two shots ends with the narration and cuts to a closer shot of the same hut from the same angle, just above centre. the mist flows rapidly, there is only the sound of trickling water, ambient birdsong, the sounds of the waking forest and occasional grunts and throat clearing off camera. This continues for about 40 seconds then fades to black.
The video was shot in the Hartz mountains, It was apparently a favoured haunt of Goethe and features, with the atmospheric phenomenon; the Brocken spectre, in Faust.
The text was composed out of interest in modes of description or modes of belief/'truth', and wanting to mix scientific/meteorological descriptions of phenomena with fairy tales, religious texts and the interference of these structuring systems into the experiential visual interface.
The voice generator I like to use because it can be very plastic and allows for rewriting during the edit process, and because of its inability to interpret. It just translates one form of a code into another without understanding. The German voice i used partly for the location of the video and the associated history of the german romantics/nature relationship and partly just because i find the particularity of regional or gendered voices in synthesised 'humans' weird.