(Music by Defunkt Dialekt)

Collapse

Collapse runs a loop of footage of a towerblock standing against a blue sky, white clouds and small birds scroll across the screen, glitching back as the film loops. The loop is broken by the viewer as he or she passes a motion sensor, causing the building to collapse, before the film returns into the loop. The work aims to challenge the typical presentation of video work, and is dependant on the viewer’s interaction. 

Saturday

A child’s birthday in the summer of 1989 and the adults are in the kitchen of a suburban West Midlands semi attempting to operate a borrowed camcorder. While these people are trying to switch on this novel, new equipment, the machine records the entire scene, picking up a sense of nervousness around this alien technology as the camera is dodged. This piece of found footage, filmed at the end of the eighties symbolises a heightened consumer culture in the last years of the Thatcher era, and working class ideals conflict with class aspiration.

Evil Dead Beat

Stoke Foke

One rainy Saturday afternoon in August 2010, a former lingerie shop in Stoke on Trent played host to nine bands and musicians. Organised as part of a programme of events at SHOP, an art in empty spaces project in old Stoke town, the day was planned to engage the local community. Performing in the film above is rare talent and local legend, Jason lockett. Video courtesy of Behjat Omer Abdullah and Mark Brereton. Enjoy.

Ex-

Every album we ever owned is stored on devices that we keep in our pockets. The music we love is compressed down into tiny files that we can’t see or touch. There is no substance. ‘Ex-’ is a reversion to analogue in a digital world, to a time when listening was less convenient and more tangible, the title referencing the former high-tech status of the objects. It is a lament to vinyl, to its beauty and substance, to its resonance and imperfections.

The piece is a system of faults. A loop of sound is created by an intentional cut made to the surface of a record, causing the needle to jump backwards, replicating a familiar idiosyncrasy of the medium. The cut in the record acts as a switch. When the needle passes over the cut, the levels peak, causing the amp to turn the speaker on or off, so that, as well as the constant loop of music coming from the headphones (muffled within a 7 inch vinyl case), there is the click of the amp and the sound of the broken speaker rattling on and off in sequence with the record. The speaker sounds for one rotation of the record before switching off again when the needle is jolted. The fragile nature of the work means that occasionally this sequence alters, or that the switch fails once or twice before it triggers the speaker. And there is sequence within this failure too.

The record is ‘Tubular Bells’, made by an experimental pioneer of an analogue age. It is also the soundtrack to an iconic horror film of the era. The record is slowed down, increasing its haunting quality and emphasising a suggested link to ‘The Exorcist’, also hinted at in the title of the work. The idea of possession is played out through the strange sequencing between turntable and speaker. The equipment appears to be haunted. Pinned to the wall behind is the album sleeve, its back cover showing a desolate beach scene with bones scattered on the shore and birds hovering. There is an absence of human life in the photograph, and an absence in the room, since nobody is there to lift the needle.