SOL EDIT DOWN 1

Sol

In this text I detail the research and production methods of three video works made over the last years studio practise, two of these are complete and one is in archiving and research stages. Identifying similarities in approach and the success of particular strategies and identifying research as an open process, with goals nascent in its unfurling and articulating the value of its internal processes, rather than its being a justification process for a predesignated project outcome.

This is not a manifesto, nor is it a manual for further works, but a critical look at methods which have evolved with a view to assessing how appropriate they are and accelerating by simplification future research processes.

Works to discuss

The Earth is not at rest, 2013

Black Sun, 2014

and Home Farm (working title), ongoing.

C/P 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, (Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, A midsummer nights Dream, 1991) 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.

BLACK SUN 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

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,

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 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 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 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.

REFERENCES – ALCHEMY, Tristram Shandy, (pythag), dark pools, heart of darkness, meteor statement, alchemy text, mute magazine article, natural history documentary. interested in aprticlar approaches – such as.........

HOME FARM (WORKING TITLE) 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.

Now some breakdown of method.

Introduce

a realm of intertextuality, where for the purposes of convenience mostly, all things will be a text, all things will be a source. A human body containing a story witnessed 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. All things produce an archival language in which their compression and conjunction can produce the stories which construct the reality they exist within. A part of this intention is to investigate the fluctuations in veracity produced by the adjunction of recall processes which utilise different recroding methods, the comparison between a camera viewpoint, particularly CCTV vs a witness statement, vs a witness statement conversationally recorded many years after the event vs a military record, in the case of 'Home Farm'