Projected digital video (12:53), looped subtitles, stretch bar TV, wooden frame, salvaged bus shelter bench, sandbags, jelly, mirror
Image credits: Ellen Dixon
On a research trip to record construction workers laying new pavements on the edge of a stolid business park in North Tyneside, a serendipitous, unaccounted-for-encounter takes place. The film depicts a “contact” situation: a form of unplanned sociality that Samuel R. Delany, in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, compares to the spatial arrangement of “networked” connections. “Networking” prioritises predictability and organises interactions via social class, foreclosing the possibility of connection outside of these codes. “Contact” is fundamentally random, inter-class and collective; the connections enabled radically undermine the predetermined spatial logics of neoliberalism. However, the potential for “contact” in public space is strategically restricted by regenerative civic planning and gentrification.
The films’ subtitles are dislocated, rolling endlessly on a stretched public transport announcement screen whilst the film is projected onto a wooden frame, citing both a theatre prop and a construction site.
For the exhibition, There is something where there should be nothing; there is nothing where there should be something, the film screened every half hour, with an accompanying spatial sound work playing in the intervals, entitled There is something, there is nothing. The sound piece comprised random audio clips from the artists’ phone, recorded in various weird public spaces. The work as a whole is a glitch; an accidental illustration of the unplanned socio-spatial interactions that can emerge beyond the rigidity of organised mundanity.