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| 2014-01-16
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| this is going to be a description of work underway.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| SO – –
| | In this text I will briefly detail the research and production trajectories of three video works made over the last year. Two of these are complete and one is in archiving and research stages. The aim being the identification of similarities in approach and the success of particular strategies. Identifying research as an open process, with goals nascent in its unfurling, and articulating the value of its internal processes, rather than research being a justification process for a predesignated project outcome. |
| some of this -
| | This is a quick critical look at methods as they have emerged with a view to assessing how appropriate they are and accelerating by simplification future research processes. |
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| introduce the subjectivity, how I am trying to work out my position as the creator and the axle for all these links to revolve around.
| | I try to look at the consistencies in approach to the creation of an archive and the production of research tactics which can pull in material from diverse and fragmentary sources. |
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| Linking it with some contemporary space and some contemporary creative/destructive process.... I think this will enact with diagrammatic imagery, some possibly sculptural, footage introducing me as the editing mind. Some on destruction and building in rotterdam. Maybe introducing the destructive potential of the firebombing and the ongoing process which lisbeth considers to be anti gentrification within the city.
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| I think I have to introduce a curatorial voice which ties these intrerests together, somethng with which to storify the issue of global narratives, and to abbreviate the mechanisation of the countryside and the military going foot in mouth,
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| | == '''The Earth is not at rest, 2013''' == |
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| reworking and repurposing of existing text, rosencrantz, etc. camer and embodied description being counter to one another, in bearing the burden of proof.
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| Research as a means of forming a perspective. As a means of going through material and describing how I am doing this at present.
| | This is an HD video without audio, 13 minutes 13 seconds long, produced in collaboration with another video artist; Frances Scott. It consists of 5 chapters, released one chapter per week over the period of its original exhibition. Each opens with a title leader featuring the names of paired planetary bodies and each ends with astrological transits for the following week, specifying the dates on which events within the show were scheduled to occur. |
| Eg cctv, record wihout memory, meteorite crashes etc. and the counter to peoples accounts being wrapped in biography. And its equal veracity but other.
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| Its ok to be confused with particular aims
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| | [[File:Earth1.jpg]] |
| | [[File:Earth4.jpg]] |
| | [[File:Earth 2.jpg]] |
| | [[File:Earth 3.jpg]] |
| | [[File:Earth5.jpg]] |
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| write in an abstract of the purpose of the text.
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| Research can just be a means of establishing a perspective.
| | The Woodmill curators, who invited our participation proposed a Sandman comic, (Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, A midsummer Nights Dream, 1991) as the genesis point for a group discussion: 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. |
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| What, why what the context is within which im operating. Contextualise practise and identify what im doing. Understanding what I am in, and what the aggeregation and collection of stuff is and what its for. Identifying and creating narratives from within one set of material.
| | Throughout, subtitles follow a narrative aggregated from disparate sources; primarily 'Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead' (Tom Stoppard, 1966), 'A Midsummer Nights Dream' (William Shakespeare 1590-1596), interviews with an astrologer (who also provided transit bookends to each segment), and information from various websites and books on astronomy and astrology. |
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| [edit]The Earth Is Not At Rest
| | Frances and I wrote, shot, and edited together, at the same time, and on the same machines or through shared script files. We read through the texts and extracted lines which suggested a general relation to astrology, games, chance and predetermination, the governing of subjects by planetary bodies, 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 fictional dialogue between the astrologer and the texts. |
| 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.
| | This formed a very large archive of quotes, fragments and lines, much greater than we could have included in a single work, or from which we could have produced a consistent tone and the writing process was one dominated by excision. We processed this both together and apart. The headers for each chapter and the events of the week following its release dictate a particular tone or set of astrological relations which produced the first organising method, we then deleted within each subsection to reduce and even out a tone. This was primarily carried out independently and then charted the overlaps, talked through disagreements and developed a consensus. We aimed for a rough length for each chapter and then for a rough number of possible lines based on the speed of reading them aloud and our internal editing clocks, which happen to be very closely aligned. |
| 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".
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| the texts we chose primarily for the following reasons
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| midsummer nights dream, obviously was the origin of the shows origin.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| [edit]Crust
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| The drum beat was sequenced in Logic, based on the opening track of Scott Walkers Bisch-Bosch
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| 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.
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| [edit]Grendel.
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| A video displayed on a 21 inch sony PMV Display Monitor sat on a table. There are Headphones.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
| | We shot a lot of footage throughout the spaces of the show, which took place in a public park in London, with particular focus on the objects and spaces to be activated by other exhibitors in performance or other work and with a focus on behaviours which related to some of our interests in the source text and its relation to change, chance, gaming, prediction and predetermination. We filmed mostly around twilight on midsummers day. This produced another large archive of footage from which to proceed. We followed a similar process of arranging into groups and matching tones, text fragments and abutment of clips. Except for the jogger, a child on a bike who briefly passes in chapter 4 and a group of men dressed in white, in the middle distance and out of focus there are no living human figures. |
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| | This at the time felt like quite a natural process of coalescing and constructing, but that might just be that we have similar collection and arrangement (over strict archiving) methods. |
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| | Each week we would shoot, edit and 'release' a new instalment, added on to the first to form a 5 chapter single length linear video. |
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| INTERVIEW
| | == '''BLACK SUN 2014''' == |
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| three works
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| black sun ctrl ecs cmd civil engineer
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| [Steve with editor's hat on says: can we have something informing us about THE WORK people are coming to see right up front- 1 sentence description will do it.]
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| i think i need to introduce the incommensurable amount of data with the incommensurable experience of describing being alive.
| | Black Sun follows a slightly more linear narrative loosely based on Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899). A trading algorithm going in search of a missing data scraping algorithm, lost in streams of data. |
| V: I was wondering if it is your first time visiting our city and what do you think of the museum?
| | Using the first off-screen (disembodied/acousmatic) narrator, voiced by computer text-to-speech software, as a device to assimilate an information aggregate primarily about the physical effects on the world resulting from the infrastructure of high speed stock trading. |
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| S:Actually I came a few years before and I visited the museum when it was an festival of an experimental animated films I came to see. I liked the museum a lot. I really excited about the museum the way it -----connects its fun program with its artistic program. Having this film program it means that it makes it accessible to more people that wouldn’t necessarily have access to it.
| | [[File:Black sun.jpg]] |
| V: I understand you are now based in Rotterdam or in London?
| | [[File:Black sun 2.jpg]] |
| | [[File:Black sun 01 small.jpg]] |
| | [[File:Black sun 3.jpg]] |
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| S: I shuffle between the both I am living in Rotterdam and have my studio there, but I am still exhibit in London.
| | The script was produced through a lengthy aggregation and editing process where the processes of gathering and assimilating sources ran concurrently and was performed in quite a physical manner. Across multiple text files and print outs it is essentially a process of deletion and partial rewriting, editing into the film format/sequence, reassessment and rewriting (primarily deletion) resulting in a process which sort of mirrors the initial gathering process as one of selection and reduction. |
| V: Both cities seem to embrace the concept that our museum has I was wondering if this is a part of your work or your practice, research? It seems like your choices of the cities seem to be really close to the concept of the museum. How do you engage with the concept of the museum?
| | This is quite a lengthy process and one which I think could benefit from identifying clear parameters for the successful inclusion of new material, rather than the possibly blunt tool of inserting material and gradually wrangling a structure out of it as I go along. The construction of an armature for the text to hang off is something which I persistently desire, but which persistently evades the process. Recognising the essential writing characteristics of this and developing it as a structural essayist exercise is probably a wise move. |
| S: well I guess… I didn’t grow up in London, but I spend most f my artistic life there so I guess living in London has formed more my artistic sensibilities, rather than moving there for that, each being the other way around, I grow up in a very small town and I moved to London. And Rotterdam I moved there for pragmatic reason, I moved there to do a master, though they do have a very strong support to public art and museum do have a very strong support.
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| V: from what I understand we asked to choose three works could you please talk a bit more about why you choose these three works? You could you maybe one word for each one? and then describe them more extensively. Or what ever make you feel more comfortable.
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| S: Primarily I think I choose this works because they engage the moving image in a way that has a relation to cinematic but doesn’t necessarily is connected with cinematic representation moving image. I thought it might be quite nice if the audience is coming through this particular way, a time based image practice, art cinema, I thought it would be quite nice addressing this type of product, have thing that are expanded cinema, moving image installation or moving work that doesn’t work in the same way as cinema.
| | The unseen narrator is a device, particularly one using a synthetic voice, if one I have used repeatedly, primarily to allow for this plastic editing process as without the need for rerecording a script partially or entirely rewrites can be incorporated swiftly and without altering already edited sequences I might like (though its unusual for much of a previous sequence to survive a re-edit) but also as it allows for the production of a character of unclear provenance. I enjoy the ambiguity of geographical origin, the weirdness of gender or dialect specificity in an artificially produced voice and the simple reflexivity of using a computer to describe a computer. |
| V: Could you talk a bit more from your perceptive about the concept of moving image how do you understand it? If I remember well one of your works had to do with an archive, which was a rather still representation. It was moving but not really moving. Also another piece was about a research for the News, and another that had to do a lot with a experimentation work that connect more with the test.
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| S: I came to moving image through painting and then sculpture and ended up working with more classical durational practices. I think I am still attracted to this sort of status that is native to painting and sculpture but isn’t quite as native to the moving image. In the installations I try to present information s not in a narrative way but in way that is linear, one thing after another but it doesn’t take you away is static, in a sculptural way, it creates a place. And in research elements, and I am looking of telling the stories at the moment I work in a rather historical research is things that are rather cemented, by repetition, try telling the same story to construct minor changes to the understanding what could be understand really quickly and easily, using durational methods kind of grow it in one place rather than using a film a tell in a hour, but kind of telling the story in two minutes.
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| V: I am pretty sure that what we discussed so far it would caver most of the aspects in your work. I was wondering if you could speak about each work independently?
| | HFT takes place at incredibly fast rates and channels which are being cut around the world. Now trade signals can transmit through mountains, as the time difference produced by curving around means loosing millions of dollars a day. A flash economic collapse can happen in minutes, chain reactions escalate too quickly for a regulator to understand. |
| | Black Sun is effectively an attempt to humanise a global data set on a sublime scale into a group of small scale units within a short story. To humanise a global situation which, while created by humans, lacks human qualities, while having a real effect on us; austerity politics as a result of financial breakdowns. |
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| S: I would like to show three works that I finished quite recently. I think you may have seen all of them, but I am sure you defiantly saw the one I finished last December, which is a five channel video installation. Could you repeat the question?
| | The gathering of text information and the gathering of visual information run concurrently and continue through the editing process. Both text and image go through a similar process of being collected together and assembled as discrete units within a timeline and proceeding by deletion, aiming for a position where the two streams run together, but maintaining a dual position where each acts as both open and shut gate to the other in order to enact the symptoms of knowing empirically and rationally when mediated by the screen and the technologies like the internet. |
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| And I in away is the same, is linear but it doesn’t necessarily has a linear
| | A great deal of the source material comes from Dark Pools (Scott Patterson, 2012), a biographical history of the origns of high speed trading, Gaming the plumbing: High frequency trading and the spaces of capital (Alberto Toscano, Mute Magazine, 2013), Destructive or destruction? An ecological study of high frequency trading (Inigo Wilkins & Bogdan Dragos, mute magazine, 2013), Pythagoras by way of Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, 1759), BBC natural history documentaries (Planet Earth, 2006), De vita libri tres (Marsilio Ficino, 1489) |
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| v just to give a more detailed description of each work individually and to describe, the narrative or the style, somethings that have to do with your ideas and why. i would be also interested to know which parts of the description you would prefer to emphasise on the work. so you could tell us why you did one and then, the durations and the timelines for the others. for me its important to know how you engage with these artworks
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| s well i think that the three operate specially in quite different ways but they present a similar kind of sculptural stasis on different sides of the screen. ill start with one, which i think you have seems which is called ‘ a civil engineer’ which is like a medium sized sculptural installation with four screens and one projection screen. on projection. which i finished at the end of last year, and the aim was to create this sense of a latent stasis, that there is possibly a character who imagination is made inadequate by his living condition, and his living conditions are made inadequate by his imagination. there is a divide between his working environment which is empty and his imaginative environment which is also empty, and it maybe forcedly non-functional, there is not chair, etc. but there are kind of visual links between the the con tent on the screens in the working environment which is kind of more functional and the imaginative environment which is material from third, second life or imaginary interview, or from computer games.
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| | == '''HOME FARM it sounds like a love story (WORKING TITLE) ''' == |
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| V before you go on could i ask something, you often use the word sculptural, and i understand that in the past you came from a sculptural background, and even painting, i wonder, how do you include or how do you determine this in terms of installation, as you often use the words installation and sculptural, but also the 2d image and so on, but nevertheless its like a still moving, or no senses moving image,
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| | Stubton, a small faming village in Lincolnshire, England. A region notable largely for being of little note, its low population density, its easterly location in England, its flat horizons, and its high concentration of Air Force bases. |
| you mean, there is a sense of motion without progress? it doesn’t change state, its static?
| | Just after lunch on March 23rd 1962 a Handley Page Victor, an experimental nuclear bomber jet, crash landed into a farmhouse. In the crash two women in the house and 2 passengers on the plane died. The farmer and his wife were blown clear and survived, though severely injured, thanks to their foreman dragging them them clear of the explosion. |
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| v and also, its not just something you can actually engage with it directly, you can just see it, in a way, it includes a part of an engaging with it, but its a more passive engagement, like a cinematic audience in a way, you go to the cinema, you choose the film, but in another way, you are just watching the film, you don’t, you cannot interact with it, no matter how strong or powerful it can be.
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| s i think thats something about the possibilities outside cinema, you have an emotional engagement with it but no interaction, and i think thats something about why i like to use animals, because its clear that any emotional engagement with that is a projection, and it is quite static and their motives are quite veiled to us, trying to understand them as humans, their drive. but in terms of the sculptural and installational, i think, i think as an editing practise that i operate in way which i relate to my sculptural practise which i see as being quite aggregator, and being made up of quite discrete units which operate together, and the same for an installation, i don’t, it rarely operates clearly as a story, one of the pieces I’m showing, Black Sun, is more of a narrative story situation but its also a very loose story, which just acts as cement for sets of information building blocks, and its kind of like a text installation almost. with the text its just a way of arranging these pieces of stuff, which i see as quite a sculptural practise, as editing. which
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| v using the word editing brought me back to something i really admire in your work, which is the concept of poetry, could you talk a bit about that, because for me, its very obvious in some pieces, I can see it even in words, even though i know they are coming from, maybe news, but even with the piece with three monitors, which i have seen in your previous show, it iwas also very poetic view of the situation, or the voice of the woman is amazing, and her figure, and also in that piece there is a part where she is moving through an apartment, and some of the things are from news, and so how do you engage the poetic. or do you even acknowledge this as poetic, or just a way of writing, because you can also deny =, not accept this as a poetic gesture?
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| s yeah, i agree with you. and i think i conform to what is maybe quite an english tradition of romanticising poetry where it doesnt exist purely as poetry, where perhaps the language that is used to come to terms with, say, a cataclysmic event. by necessity almost its too much for an everyday discourse and so it becomes poetic, even in the newsreader, and when an interaction with space or an inability to conform a disappointment or depression with a reality that you have to come to terms with, by necessity become quite poetic and i think there is something in that place where the everyday can’t come to terms with itself or an event that you experience can’t come to terms with itself that becomes quite poetic.
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| | I am in the process at the moment of winnowing sense out of a collection of quite disparate materials, but for the first time this isn't proceeding from a collection of text, but from a collection of filmed interviews. |
| i think we have come to and end. thank you very much. I’m looking forward to working with you
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| oh we have more time, the monitor has just let me know that we have another 5 minutes,
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| so could you tell me a bit more about the third piece? because so far we have not really had much about it.
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| s yeah, so there is a three screen piece, which is three synched channels, called ctrl esc cmd, which talks about human interactions with animals as controlling, escaping and the failure to command, kind of as a veiled referencer to becoming a useful member of society as a work/capitalist structure demands and the third piece is maybe a little more complex or veiled.
| | Thus far this work/collection exists as about 8 hours of conversational (rambling) video interviews with the two surviving subject/witnesses; the Farm wife and the foreman, and a (slightly later) pilot who flew Victors for the RAF throughout the Cold War. Photos and statements from the declassified military inquest in the national archives, extensive footage around the village, and footage of the cockpit of a victor jet, some footage of drainage works in. |
| | I am gradually establishing both placement and categories as I go, but this is taking place much more heavily within the sequential structure of Final Cut than within a text editing program. But I realise now is more or less the same process. Its just a lengthier process and one which has a different set of possibilities for cut and pasting, without breaking down the flow or reality or possible veracity of the content. |
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| it tells a story which is very loosely based on heart of darkness by joseph conrad, which again, i think is a nice cinematic reference for apocalypse now which i understand you are showing as part of your war films season next….next month?
| | The conversations cover a broad swathe of the subjects lives, and I have been cherry picking points which address perforations of the membrane between local and global narratives, the incident itself; when an object of a global arms race devastatingly entered rural isolation, the creation of farm land within the membership of the newly formed EU drainage committee, the labour of German prisoners of war, etc. |
| | The Pilot goes into great detail about the spaces of the plane, the position of it within the British “defence” force, its position within the development of nuclear arms and its role during the Falklands conflict. The overall sense of this is currently a little vague and being worked through. it will structurally form scenarios stepping around around the threshold of the particular or locally beautiful and the global sublime, lives fragmented by a body of the military industrial global machine and the productive potential of trauma. |
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| v yes, next next month, in two months.
| | This project grew out of research into witness accounts of the Tunguska incident in 1908 and the meteorite crash in Siberia in 2013 as methods of telling and distributing stories. This was being considered through Walter Benjamins Storyteller essay (1936, from Illuminations 1968) which deals with the demise of the possibility of embodied storytelling as being characteristic of the development of modernity, particularly observed in the incapacity of veterans returning from WWI to tell their stories as embodied experience as participating in a narrative of global and strategic scales which enormously exceeds the bodily. |
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| s um
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| and which i think does a simlar thing, which takes the overwhelming experiences, which are everyday for the members of the military which are there and they become poetic, i mean, visually, but the piece itself tells the story of a trading altorhyth going in search of a data scraping algorhyth, as though they are characters, spoken in the first person by this, as a journal by this trading bot and, as i said, its a way of glueing together bits of information about whats happening to the physical world as a result of stock trading which is taking place as increasingly fast rates and the channels which are being placed around the world, so that these trades can take place more quickly because having to take a cable round a mountain means that you loose millions of dollars a day in lost trade time, because its an extra few milliseconds to go around, because the trades are happening at such inhuman speed, and they are kind of out of the control of human beings now, you can get a flash economic collapse which will happen in five minutes, too quickly for anyone to understand. so really its just a way of trying to humanise s a global situation which has been created by humans, but is ultimately totally inhuman, but has a real effect on us, like looking at austerity politics as a result of financial breakdowns, and looking at our pensions, which, i personally don’t have a pension, i impinge, you
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| v not yet
| | Material has been sourced in a fairly serendipitous way, access to people and spaces like the plane itself followed on from one another and has been generating the archive of the research process as it has been generating the trajectory it takes, and now I am at a point where I have been separated from the sources of material (unlike before) and so running a recursive gathering process whilst editing is not very feasible. As an exercise in the discipline of making sense this is a challenge but also, hopefully one which cements possible techniques for working with the available and the actual construction of a piece which makes sense within a closed set. |
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| s you must have one as part of the institution? ]
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| v yeah, a small percent, its under constant negotiations
| | here is a working trailer |
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| s and its part of a pot which is being played with on the stock market, and so the value of that is dependent on computers operating as speeds which we as humans can’t perceive the screens change, the screens themselves can’t change as a rate which can keep up with the numbers which are changing for the trading, and so i kind of wanted the story to be that and the imagery either directly relates to the things its talking about, as animals, or its a way of analogising the situation, and beautifying it, so flocks of birds stand in for millions of little pieces of code which operate consecutively to try and make a trade happen, and the same for shoals of fish, and the rules that you can use to predict flocks of birds can also be used to predict trading events on this scale. i don’t want it to eb a didactic tool. but i want it to kind of illuminate the face that this is an almost un-understandable situation.
| | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtRwyzsiiFI |
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| v | | == '''Conclusions or w/e/v/r'''== |
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| the last question
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| how would you liker she audience to engage, what do you want them to get out of the visit? how do you expect them to react? are you going to do any like, seminar or something or special evenings? you are talking a lot about the global and the uman time and something that takes out of our understanding of tie and that that creates maybe a common space of understanding in your work
| | I guess what I'm attempting is in someway the construction of a realm of intertextuality, where all things will be a text, all things will be a source. A human body containing a story will be a text, a video of a meteorite will be a text. The purpose of the research is to establish a plain wherein all things generate an equivalence. To produce in all possible sources an archival technique in which the productive potentials of compression and conjunction can articulate the reality the collection exists within. |
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| s well, i would like people partly just to be excited by the visuals and go away with the sense that there are things affecting their lives which you don’t think about but you can think through in visual terms by comparing to something other. which is an important tool for me i would like to do a public program of talks, especially as here in holland you had the first stock exchange but I’m not sure if that is going to happen but I’m not sure what state we are in
| | A part of this is to investigate the gradations of veracity inherent within particular witnessing technologies, e.g. the record without memory from CCTV or the camera, and the burden of proof history places on the shoulders of it, the embodied memory of the witness as the opposite of that, the memory without record and the processes which contextualise and biographise the event into HISTORY and life. And how these processes themselves change over time, the witness statement taken the day of an event is an altogether different beast to the one taken many years later. I have been working primarily with video as a means of charting courses through aggregated data. A number of the key ideas to which I will return to further down the page are well suited to visual time based work, and are; |
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| v and i think we are also working on it, quite intensely
| | Construction and expansion of alternative narratives through the repurposing, reworking, aggregating, collision and adjunction of existing texts. |
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| s yeah
| | == '''Bibliography''' == |
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| v we all hope that its going to happen
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| s so. yeah more information to follow/…….. on that.
| | Savage Detective, Roberto Bolano |
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| | 2666, Roberto Bolano |
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| SOME REFERENCES AND RESOURCES
| | Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899 |
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| Text = (http://www.vurdalak.com/tunguska/witness/witnesses.htm)
| | Dark Pools, Scott Patterson, 2012 |
| Sol was looking at eye witness Statements of the Tunaska Events in 1908, when it is thought that an airbust of small asteroid caused an explosion in Russia. These are primary sources, where the statements are very subjective and personal as opposed to being scientific.
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| Media = (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrU90Ub4Uw)
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| The media that Sol was interested was a conglomerate of footage of a meteor shower in present day Russia. Grainy film shot on a combination of car dashboard cameras, security cameras, and newsreel. Art piece = (http://theactofkilling.com/trailer/)
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| The Act of Killing
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| | Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, 1759 |
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| “The Act of Killing” is a stylized documentary about “gangsters” in North Sumatra, who in the wake of a failed coup in the 1960’s went from selling black market movie theater tickets to leading the most notorious death squad. These “gangsters” re-enact some of their killings for the film, doing so in the style of their favourite movie genres.
| | Rosencrantz and Gildensterne are Dead, Tom Stoppard, 1966 |
| How does the medium the story is told with add to the tale ? Sol chose historical events in a combination of primary and secondary source material. Looking at the embodiement of stories, and how they can be told both objectively and subjectively.
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| Sol responds, or adds from discussion
| | A Midsummer Nights Dream, William Shakespeare, 1605 |
| I wanted to present the witness statements and the videos as two very different means of presenting what is in essence a very similar occurrence and as collections of multiple stories surrounding one enormous event. I am interested in the embodiment of the data in the specific actual bodies of the witneses and in their conversion of it into something mundane and focussed in the observations of its effect on their world, their livestock, houses, furniture, furs, and family health. I think there is something odd about the relationship between these embodied/human stories of the event when compared to the steady blinkered view of the dashboard camera in the 2013 event, which shows the fireball crossing the sky, but nothing of the weight of the event, just its video-recorded 'accuracy' and particularly in the footage from security cameras which observed only the shockwave hitting, or the reaction of people in offices without the subjective narrative of the trauma.
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| the Witness statements from 1908 mostly come from a marginal northern Russian tribal group and so were collected as a partly anthropological exercise. They were recorded a few decades after the event and some are already secondary and recount the stories of the subjects parents experiences.
| | Illuminations, Walter Benjamin |
| The meteor was quickly incorporated into the religious story of the people and some of the witness documents are transcriptions of shamanic songs, passed down orally from shaman to trainee, becoming an embodiment of the event or memory in the particular ritual or voice of the shaman performing it. we perform memory to ourselves, at the point of recollection as much as we ever perform it to anyone else and in each performance it becomes more a story, more an epic with ourselves as character. I have a half eye on Walter Benjamin (as we always do) for his essay on the story teller which talks about changes in the technology of telling and the news as a mode, the alienation of death from our daily lives and the dominance of the written word and the form of the newspaper as dividing us from a history of storytelling. The writer, Leskov, who Benjamin presents as the last novelist as storyteller, incidentally, is a right good read.
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| http://slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf
| | Alberto Toscano articules in Mute Magazine, |
| There is something extraordinarily weird which happens throughout the act of killing, but particularly with the witnesses being the perpetrators and the re-enactors of the crimes. the Bruegels painting Landscape with the fall of Icarus was raised as both a direct example of life just getting on with going on around the catastrophic event and as a direct visual connection with some of the security camera footage.
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| Breugel Landscape with the fall of icarus
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| Breugel Cencus at bethlehem
| | The Village that died for england, Patrick White |
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| | The View from the train, Patrick keiller |
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| magnolia, amores perros, Werkmaster Harmonies, satantango, close encounters of a third kind, and independance day all came up as films that are structured as multiple subjective narratives around one central traumatic event in this model
| | the robinson trilogy, Patrick keiller |
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| | for one or more voice, cavarrero |
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| | the human condition, hannah arendt |
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| | the sandman chronicles, neil gaiman |
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| | summa technologiae, stanislaw lem |
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| | collected story, anton leskov |
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| | de vita libres tres, Marsilio Ficino |
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| | Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben |
In this text I will briefly detail the research and production trajectories of three video works made over the last year. Two of these are complete and one is in archiving and research stages. The aim being the identification of similarities in approach and the success of particular strategies. Identifying research as an open process, with goals nascent in its unfurling, and articulating the value of its internal processes, rather than research being a justification process for a predesignated project outcome.
This is a quick critical look at methods as they have emerged with a view to assessing how appropriate they are and accelerating by simplification future research processes.
I try to look at the consistencies in approach to the creation of an archive and the production of research tactics which can pull in material from diverse and fragmentary sources.
The Earth is not at rest, 2013
This is an HD video without audio, 13 minutes 13 seconds long, produced in collaboration with another video artist; Frances Scott. It consists of 5 chapters, released one chapter per week over the period of its original exhibition. Each opens with a title leader featuring the names of paired planetary bodies and each ends with astrological transits for the following week, specifying the dates on which events within the show were scheduled to occur.
The Woodmill curators, who invited our participation proposed a Sandman comic, (Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, A midsummer Nights Dream, 1991) as the genesis point for a group discussion: 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.
Throughout, subtitles follow a narrative aggregated from disparate sources; primarily 'Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead' (Tom Stoppard, 1966), 'A Midsummer Nights Dream' (William Shakespeare 1590-1596), interviews with an astrologer (who also provided transit bookends to each segment), and information from various websites and books on astronomy and astrology.
Frances and I wrote, shot, and edited together, at the same time, and on the same machines or through shared script files. We read through the texts and extracted lines which suggested a general relation to astrology, games, chance and predetermination, the governing of subjects by planetary bodies, 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 fictional dialogue between the astrologer and the texts.
This formed a very large archive of quotes, fragments and lines, much greater than we could have included in a single work, or from which we could have produced a consistent tone and the writing process was one dominated by excision. We processed this both together and apart. The headers for each chapter and the events of the week following its release dictate a particular tone or set of astrological relations which produced the first organising method, we then deleted within each subsection to reduce and even out a tone. This was primarily carried out independently and then charted the overlaps, talked through disagreements and developed a consensus. We aimed for a rough length for each chapter and then for a rough number of possible lines based on the speed of reading them aloud and our internal editing clocks, which happen to be very closely aligned.
We shot a lot of footage throughout the spaces of the show, which took place in a public park in London, with particular focus on the objects and spaces to be activated by other exhibitors in performance or other work and with a focus on behaviours which related to some of our interests in the source text and its relation to change, chance, gaming, prediction and predetermination. We filmed mostly around twilight on midsummers day. This produced another large archive of footage from which to proceed. We followed a similar process of arranging into groups and matching tones, text fragments and abutment of clips. Except for the jogger, a child on a bike who briefly passes in chapter 4 and a group of men dressed in white, in the middle distance and out of focus there are no living human figures.
This at the time felt like quite a natural process of coalescing and constructing, but that might just be that we have similar collection and arrangement (over strict archiving) methods.
Each week we would shoot, edit and 'release' a new instalment, added on to the first to form a 5 chapter single length linear video.
BLACK SUN 2014
Black Sun follows a slightly more linear narrative loosely based on Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899). A trading algorithm going in search of a missing data scraping algorithm, lost in streams of data.
Using the first off-screen (disembodied/acousmatic) narrator, voiced by computer text-to-speech software, as a device to assimilate an information aggregate primarily about the physical effects on the world resulting from the infrastructure of high speed stock trading.
The script was produced through a lengthy aggregation and editing process where the processes of gathering and assimilating sources ran concurrently and was performed in quite a physical manner. Across multiple text files and print outs it is essentially a process of deletion and partial rewriting, editing into the film format/sequence, reassessment and rewriting (primarily deletion) resulting in a process which sort of mirrors the initial gathering process as one of selection and reduction.
This is quite a lengthy process and one which I think could benefit from identifying clear parameters for the successful inclusion of new material, rather than the possibly blunt tool of inserting material and gradually wrangling a structure out of it as I go along. The construction of an armature for the text to hang off is something which I persistently desire, but which persistently evades the process. Recognising the essential writing characteristics of this and developing it as a structural essayist exercise is probably a wise move.
The unseen narrator is a device, particularly one using a synthetic voice, if one I have used repeatedly, primarily to allow for this plastic editing process as without the need for rerecording a script partially or entirely rewrites can be incorporated swiftly and without altering already edited sequences I might like (though its unusual for much of a previous sequence to survive a re-edit) but also as it allows for the production of a character of unclear provenance. I enjoy the ambiguity of geographical origin, the weirdness of gender or dialect specificity in an artificially produced voice and the simple reflexivity of using a computer to describe a computer.
HFT takes place at incredibly fast rates and channels which are being cut around the world. Now trade signals can transmit through mountains, as the time difference produced by curving around means loosing millions of dollars a day. A flash economic collapse can happen in minutes, chain reactions escalate too quickly for a regulator to understand.
Black Sun is effectively an attempt to humanise a global data set on a sublime scale into a group of small scale units within a short story. To humanise a global situation which, while created by humans, lacks human qualities, while having a real effect on us; austerity politics as a result of financial breakdowns.
The gathering of text information and the gathering of visual information run concurrently and continue through the editing process. Both text and image go through a similar process of being collected together and assembled as discrete units within a timeline and proceeding by deletion, aiming for a position where the two streams run together, but maintaining a dual position where each acts as both open and shut gate to the other in order to enact the symptoms of knowing empirically and rationally when mediated by the screen and the technologies like the internet.
A great deal of the source material comes from Dark Pools (Scott Patterson, 2012), a biographical history of the origns of high speed trading, Gaming the plumbing: High frequency trading and the spaces of capital (Alberto Toscano, Mute Magazine, 2013), Destructive or destruction? An ecological study of high frequency trading (Inigo Wilkins & Bogdan Dragos, mute magazine, 2013), Pythagoras by way of Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, 1759), BBC natural history documentaries (Planet Earth, 2006), De vita libri tres (Marsilio Ficino, 1489)
HOME FARM it sounds like a love story (WORKING TITLE)
Stubton, a small faming village in Lincolnshire, England. A region notable largely for being of little note, its low population density, its easterly location in England, its flat horizons, and its high concentration of Air Force bases.
Just after lunch on March 23rd 1962 a Handley Page Victor, an experimental nuclear bomber jet, crash landed into a farmhouse. In the crash two women in the house and 2 passengers on the plane died. The farmer and his wife were blown clear and survived, though severely injured, thanks to their foreman dragging them them clear of the explosion.
Error creating thumbnail: File missing
I am in the process at the moment of winnowing sense out of a collection of quite disparate materials, but for the first time this isn't proceeding from a collection of text, but from a collection of filmed interviews.
Thus far this work/collection exists as about 8 hours of conversational (rambling) video interviews with the two surviving subject/witnesses; the Farm wife and the foreman, and a (slightly later) pilot who flew Victors for the RAF throughout the Cold War. Photos and statements from the declassified military inquest in the national archives, extensive footage around the village, and footage of the cockpit of a victor jet, some footage of drainage works in.
I am gradually establishing both placement and categories as I go, but this is taking place much more heavily within the sequential structure of Final Cut than within a text editing program. But I realise now is more or less the same process. Its just a lengthier process and one which has a different set of possibilities for cut and pasting, without breaking down the flow or reality or possible veracity of the content.
The conversations cover a broad swathe of the subjects lives, and I have been cherry picking points which address perforations of the membrane between local and global narratives, the incident itself; when an object of a global arms race devastatingly entered rural isolation, the creation of farm land within the membership of the newly formed EU drainage committee, the labour of German prisoners of war, etc.
The Pilot goes into great detail about the spaces of the plane, the position of it within the British “defence” force, its position within the development of nuclear arms and its role during the Falklands conflict. The overall sense of this is currently a little vague and being worked through. it will structurally form scenarios stepping around around the threshold of the particular or locally beautiful and the global sublime, lives fragmented by a body of the military industrial global machine and the productive potential of trauma.
This project grew out of research into witness accounts of the Tunguska incident in 1908 and the meteorite crash in Siberia in 2013 as methods of telling and distributing stories. This was being considered through Walter Benjamins Storyteller essay (1936, from Illuminations 1968) which deals with the demise of the possibility of embodied storytelling as being characteristic of the development of modernity, particularly observed in the incapacity of veterans returning from WWI to tell their stories as embodied experience as participating in a narrative of global and strategic scales which enormously exceeds the bodily.
Material has been sourced in a fairly serendipitous way, access to people and spaces like the plane itself followed on from one another and has been generating the archive of the research process as it has been generating the trajectory it takes, and now I am at a point where I have been separated from the sources of material (unlike before) and so running a recursive gathering process whilst editing is not very feasible. As an exercise in the discipline of making sense this is a challenge but also, hopefully one which cements possible techniques for working with the available and the actual construction of a piece which makes sense within a closed set.
here is a working trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtRwyzsiiFI
Conclusions or w/e/v/r
I guess what I'm attempting is in someway the construction of a realm of intertextuality, where all things will be a text, all things will be a source. A human body containing a story will be a text, a video of a meteorite will be a text. The purpose of the research is to establish a plain wherein all things generate an equivalence. To produce in all possible sources an archival technique in which the productive potentials of compression and conjunction can articulate the reality the collection exists within.
A part of this is to investigate the gradations of veracity inherent within particular witnessing technologies, e.g. the record without memory from CCTV or the camera, and the burden of proof history places on the shoulders of it, the embodied memory of the witness as the opposite of that, the memory without record and the processes which contextualise and biographise the event into HISTORY and life. And how these processes themselves change over time, the witness statement taken the day of an event is an altogether different beast to the one taken many years later. I have been working primarily with video as a means of charting courses through aggregated data. A number of the key ideas to which I will return to further down the page are well suited to visual time based work, and are;
Construction and expansion of alternative narratives through the repurposing, reworking, aggregating, collision and adjunction of existing texts.
Bibliography
Savage Detective, Roberto Bolano
2666, Roberto Bolano
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899
Dark Pools, Scott Patterson, 2012
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, 1759
Rosencrantz and Gildensterne are Dead, Tom Stoppard, 1966
A Midsummer Nights Dream, William Shakespeare, 1605
Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
Alberto Toscano articules in Mute Magazine,
The Village that died for england, Patrick White
The View from the train, Patrick keiller
the robinson trilogy, Patrick keiller
for one or more voice, cavarrero
the human condition, hannah arendt
the sandman chronicles, neil gaiman
summa technologiae, stanislaw lem
collected story, anton leskov
de vita libres tres, Marsilio Ficino
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben
