Station to Station

A 21st century phantom ride on Docklands Light Railway. Some of the earliest films made in the late 19th century were shot with heavy cameras mounted on trains, one of the only ways by which smooth movement could be achieved. Called 'phantom rides' because they appeared to present the point of view of a disembodied floating entity, they were a novelty and popular with audiences. In the early 21st century we carry devices in our pockets capable of recording, editing and mass distributing such images without even getting off the train.
Made for the BabelFiche project

Cities Methodologies - Aroundabout: Second Person Present

CitiesMethodologies is an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities, exploring the city and its multi-faceted realities, showcasing concrete examples that push the boundaries of urban research with exhibits, installations, films and workshops for exchanging ideas.

For CitiesMethodologies I will be presenting Aroundabout: Second Person Present. Aroundabout is an occasional placeblog of hyperlocal ambulations around public spaces along the south-eastern section of the inner-London ring road, using a combination of text, image and video to reflect upon specificities of each location. Aroundabout: Second Person Present will consist of installation and expanded performance presentations based on Aroundabout, by way of an elaboration of the blog, reiterating extant material while adding a performative layer to create an enhanced interpretive context for questions around how subjectivity in place is articulated through a convergence of multiple media.

Other participants in CitiesMethodologies:
Jelena Calic | Ben Campkin | Laura Cerasi | Ayona Datta | John Dickie | Nick Dines | Ger Duijzings | John Foot | David Forgacs | Matthew Gandy | Stephen Hart | Nicole Hewitt | Woon Jung | Margareta Kern | Malgorzata Litwinowitz | London in Motion | Anthony Luvera | Deepa Naik | Rastko Novakovic | Trenton Oldfield | Nathaniel Rackowe | Joanna Rajkowska | Daniel Sayer | Transtango | Eva Weber | Tony White | Huang Xiaopeng

UCL Slade Research Centre
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0NS
Thursday 28 - Friday 29 May 2009
09.00-17.00

Private view 18.00-20.00 Wednesday 27 May
Download the private view invitation

Over The Borough Island

Horizons and Centres

If my blog writing has been a little skimpy the last few months it's because I've been incredibly busy with other things. Two of those things reach some kind of fruition in the next few weeks: two separate curatorial collaborations, both involve Australian artists.

Transcentric, an exhibition at Central St Martins's Lethaby Gallery, a collaboration with RMIT in Melbourne on the theme of the urban centre, opens next week on Monday 17 November.

Figuring Landscapes, a touring screening programme of Australian and UK moving image works on the theme of landscape, has its first public exhibition at ArtSway in the New Forest on Monday 24 November.

Click on the links for details - I'm too busy to write more!

Hard art makes intelligence soft

Cryptic Burgess Dub 12:26, 2006

download QuickTime version (76 Mb)

Dubstep meets experimental video meets cryptology. Electronic video manipulation follow dub music processes producing visual distortion, echo and reverb. Like much contemporary dubstep music this evokes the grimy South London summer, as pavements melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze. The image track provides a background rhythm to an experiment testing a proposition that the cryptic in experimental art might not simply be subjective obfuscated poetical aestheticism, or self-reflexive formalism, but a vehicle for the transmission of statements which, from a current paranoiac 'homeland security' purview, could be considered as sensitive, even dangerous.

Two years ago I screened Cryptic Burgess Dub in the Shifting Latitudes programme, the first cogcollective programme in London; the video had been completed specially for that programme. Last weekend, nearly two years later, the programme became the first cogcollective screening in Australia. So to date Cryptic Burgess Dub has had exactly two public screenings. Why have I not attempted to get it screened in any other context? I might have responded to the various calls for submission from festivals and gallery programmes, perhaps even sent it to Lux for consideration for distribution (while Lux has exhibited zero interest in my recent work, I persist in submitting work, perhaps out of masochistic perversity I like to imagine that the consistent rejections are intended to discourage me and that my submissions are met with exasperation by the acquisition panel, it’s a sad little game to play I know…), but with this video I didn’t. The video is the result of a difficult experiment, it embodies its own problematic.

Summer 2006 resounded to dubstep, I suggested of the form that “…the languorous rhythms and caverns of reverb of dub infiltrates the jerky twostep, dropping deep sonic bass notes in its path…” making for a “…music at once raw and expansive…” and “…on this sunny weekend, with long term reports that this could be the longest warmest UK summer since 1976…” dubstep sounded “…like becoming the inner city soundtrack of the season as pavements around the Borough melt, the humidity rises, a steamy fug settles and the city slows into an uneasy and frazzled hallucinatory dub daze.” - from Big up Bare at Spherical Objective. While dubstep had been around for a few years, it had been overshadowed by the grittier spitting Grime, but with the haunted sounds of the debut Burial album having just leaked, this music resonated with the undercurrent of fear in the capital with its post 7/7 institutionally fanned paranoia; in short it sounded like the Zeitgeist. This spirit was hard wired into Cryptic Burgess Dub. The images are mostly shot in Burgess Park, south London, between Old Kent Road and Walworth Road, linking Bermondsey with Camberwell with Peckham, a shabby sprawling park that has seen better days and which, rather than offer the casual walker some space to stretch their legs and fill their lungs with fresh air, offers ample opportune concealed space for potential muggers to hide and plan their ambush, at least this is how it feels in situ: an agoraphobic’s worst nightmare. The video sequences were subjected to ‘visual dub’ techniques. I used an analogue video mixer wiring delayed output to input loops producing controlled accumulating feedback as the visual equivalent of the tape delay echo and reverb that gives dub its distinctive deep repetitive resonance. The video feedback on the edge of dissolving into abstraction, produces electronic colours that seem to suck the ‘natural’ colour out of the scene replacing it with a toxic hallucinogenic aura. Treated loops of dubstep from Rinse FM cemented the musical relationship with map references to highlight the specificity of the locations.

I was however also concerned with what the use of experimental moving image practice could be. The distorted visual effects of video signal bending are all very well in an abstracted modernist way, but ultimately do little more than become, well, attractive visual effects, conforming to the condition of music. I thought that it would be interesting if abstraction could provide a function, as a conceptual container perhaps. I was concerned with the danger of facing the dead end of obfuscation for its own ends, an aesthetic device that merely succeeds in arriving at a vague ineffability. The cryptic should not be an end in itself, but a means to an end, the end of the smuggling of a text, hiding the real meaning or intention of the work, readable only by those provided with the tools to decrypt. If experimental moving image work has exhausted the efficacy of the novelty of formal experimentation, then perhaps the cryptic in the abstraction could, literally, contain an encrypted ‘message’. In the post-homeland security political climate of the first decade of the 21st century, where policy is based on paranoia and everyone is a suspect, where fears of encroachments on civil liberties drive liberal protest, if ‘they’ are actually snooping on ‘our’ every move and reading all our emails, then perhaps an experimental video practice could be the Trojan horse for the transmittal of subversive messages. Cryptic Burgess Dub was a test for this.

Throughout the duration of the video a succession of numbers scrolls across the bottom of the frame. This is an encrypted text, produced with a one-time pad, an encryption procedure which, if used properly, provides an unbreakable encryption algorithm. The Wikipedia One Time Pad entry provides a good description of how the process works. It necessitates the reader having access to a decryption key, normally provided once only and destroyed immediately after use. At the end of Cryptic Burgess Dub is the information that a decryption key can be found at http://www.steven-ball.net/onetimepad01.html however for this to be any use the viewer would have had to have noted the numbers running throughout the video - the encrypted message - and then match each number in sequence with the key. Remember that there have only been two public screenings, two years and continents apart.

This particular encrypted text is not particularly subversive: it speaks to the possibilities of this method of transmitting text and the potential for it to be subversive. It is essentially self-referential. The irony is that revealing from the outset, rather than at the end, that this video carries a ‘secret message’ would undermine its efficacy as an encrypted text. The paradox is that when the transmission of encrypted texts is itself shrouded in obfuscation the fact of encryption becomes ineffectual.

So the video is embedded above and, if anyone has the inclination, it should with patience and determination be possible to decrypt the text. The comments box awaits your result!

This key is simple. This is a test.

Slow Space

SLOW SPACE
Klaus W. Eisenlohr
16mm film/67:00/2004

Slow Space will screen in the no.w.here Light Reading series on 28th May 2008 at 7pm. Following the film I will be in conversation with its author.

About the film:
Slow Space takes the viewer on a visual trip through the city of Chicago without showing streets or plazas like we have seen in travel guides. Instead, the journey goes through places roofed and lit by glass architecture, a private living room, Gran Hyatt Regency and some other places. Scenes set in open urban space and interviews filmed in private homes complement this passage through public and private places. Slow Space investigates the relationship between the body and the urban architectural environment over the time period of three years. Searching the anomalies of the normal, the filmmaker traces a 'Desire for Modernity' in the city's architecture being shaped by pre- and postmodern forces. In addition, the film discusses the topic of public space in American cities through interviews with the Chicago artists and filmmakers Deborah Stratman, Chris Harris, Gretchen Till, Ken Fandell, Thomas Comerford and Eduardo Pradilla.

Klaus W. Eisenlohr is a Berlin-based artist who works in a number of media including film and photography. He is also a curator and has for a number of years curated an ongoing series of Urban Research programmes which have screened at Directors Lounge in Berlin and elsewhere, including cogcollective.

Light Reading
7pm, 28th May 2008
no.w.here
3rd Floor
316 – 318 Bethnal Green Road
London E2

£5 door £4 prebooked
courses@nowhere-lab.org
telephone: 020 7729 4494

Rolled Up/Rolled Out

Rolled Up/Rolled Out
20:00, Monday 28 April, 2008
Resonance 104.4FM

Produced and presented by Steven Ball, this programme will present Breath: Polymers and Pneumatics, a breathing performance by Australian artist Irene Barberis specially recorded in Australia for Resonance FM alongside work by London-based artists featured in the Melbourne exhibition Rolled Up/Rolled Out including Riccardo Iacono, Tina Keane, William Raban, Anne Tallentire and John Wynne.

Rolled Up/Rolled Out is part of a collaborative project between the University of the Arts London and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology exploring the urban centre within and between the two cities. The Centres Project brings together two centres of Fine Art research, each central to their respective cities; within the complex flow of forces of an urban hub, each institution simultaneously responds and contributes to their cities’ stimuli.

Curated by Irene Barberis (RMIT) and currently on exhibition in Melbourne, Rolled Up/Rolled Out is concerned with how the production of art in global cities is responding and contributing to the intensification and expansion of cultural flows in globalization, providing a snapshot of the diverse practices that emerge through the common experience of contemporary urban space.

**Update: the show is here for anyone who missed it.

The Horizontal Rule (for Sam)

Sam Renseiw recently picked up on a reference I made to the Horizontal Rule. This is a formal compositional device that Martin Blažíček and I identified last year in Lucca. Lucca is an Italian medieval city, one of the few with its city wall still intact (see our circumnavigation of the city around the wall here) and contains some fine examples of medieval architecture intact after several hundreds of years. It is also a very rich city, so devastatingly well-preserved and picturesque that more or less where ever one points a camera produces an image that could easily pass for a tourist postcard view. In order to overcome this and produce video sequences that might provide some new insights into the city space and its architecture, we proposed the use of strict compositional rules. So in capturing images around the city we started to deploy the Horizontal Rule and its close relative the Vertical Rule. This determines that any straight line within the image composition, whether it be a moving or static shot, should as far as possible, depending upon ones ability to keep the camera straight while moving smoothly, remain horizontal and central, or vertical and central. This then traces a line that acts as a ‘rule’ bisecting the image plane as precisely in half as possible.





From the above it is clear that my own hand is not as steady as it might need to be - no matter, it’s always possible to straighten things up in editing software. The Horizontal/Vertical Rules can ensure a compositional consistency from one image to the next, and one can start to achieve interesting results by combining two sections using a strict 50% divide from two different images:



And also to further layer and multiply these:





A project concerned primarily with space suggests that attention can be firmly concentrated on spatial organisation. The videos above are as far as I have got in experimenting with the possibilities of the Horizontal Rule to date. It might seem contradictory that an investigation of place should benefit from the imposition of a formal compositional rule, rather than a more 'open' exploration, the more 'intuitive' approach, but there would seem to be great potential for constriction to reveal new perspectives from the peripheral spaces of corners, between spaces of shadows. The spatial is the realm of the chance meeting, continuously accidental collision of sounds, voices, people, traffic and architecture, its character and identity can reveal hitherto unforeseen connection through the imposition of a strict organising principle.

I acknowledged of course that formal strategies applied to the production of images of particular places are not uncommon in experimental film, however these have typically concentrated upon elucidating structure and process, their ostensible subject matter mostly secondary to issues of temporal structure, the relationship between the camera/viewer and the visual reproduction of images and other more didactic intent, often through a practice of heroic endurance in both the production and reception of the images.

The challenge perhaps is to make formal experimental processes responsive and porous to the particularities of space and place; to excavate new local phenomena through form, where, in the words of Doreen Massey "...the complex resonances of place, the constitutive interrelatedness of social space, the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and non-human..." become integral to the exploratory representative process, rather than space and place simply being reduced to the status of arbitrary material for formal experimentation.

No-way Street

No-Way Street
1:00, 2007 click on title for 6Mb QuickTime
Cordoned areas and blocked streets have become an increasingly common occurrence in urban centres. The strategy of producing public spaces of exception disrupts the pedestrian’s everyday practice of writing the city. As regular pathways are rerouted along side streets and down unfamiliar alleys, the city starts to become a strange place, a more abstracted experience. No-way Street enacts the discombobulating effect of such orientation realignment through a series of multiple short video and audio loop sequences of blocked streets, diverted pedestrians and police cordons, constructed as a spatial and temporal matrix.