SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE
The Accurate Perception Available When Our Eye Becomes Single / Mirror VI: Border
A film and sound installation by
David Cotterrell & Thomas Vann Altheimer
Richard Ducker & Ian Thompson
Empathy & Risk:
1 Borthwick St, London, SE8 3GH
Private View:
Friday 22nd Sept, 6-9pm
Opening times:
Saturday, 23rd – Sunday 24th & Friday 29th – Sunday 1st, 2-6pm
Closing drinks:
Sunday 1st, 4-6pm
Spooky Action At A Distance is a group installation of two films with an independent surround sound work centred on the politics of the landscape. They address the past and present of human drama as seen through a sense of place within the landscape. Cotterrell & Altheimer’s film addresses the contemporary issue of migration at the US border, while Ducker & Thompson’s film evokes military history at the MoD site on Orford Ness, Suffolk.
In Cotterrell / Altheimer’s film Mirror VI shows two strangers in darkness, separated by undefined distance in untrusting environments; but somehow held together through the fragile beauty of an intermittently blinking light and the powerful human curiosity of the unknown.
Set against the dramatic topography between La Rumorosa, Tecate and Jacumba Hot Springs, California, against the fluctuating paranoia of the Southern US Border; the region’s deep historical experience of migration for work, opportunity and exploitation; Mirror VI sets out to examine what might possibly be communicated between strangers if their words were reduced to beams of light and their faces need never be revealed.
The border has been both a dynamic shifting area of encounter, and a barrier to communication. Referencing the restrictions, censorship and disruption that the Bracero men experienced when trying to write to their families, the artwork explores the longing of a thwarted conversation and the poetry in imagining another.
Border portable encoding devices were fabricated to enable broadcast via focussed spotlights in Morse Code. This form of communication has been used traditionally to convey a situation of human emergency but also offers the potential for messages to be shared without defining the recipient. To the layperson, the language offers the possibility of discovering and interpreting coded meaning in distant flickering lights, mirrors, reflections and beacons. It raises the possibility of chancing upon a broadcast or sharing in a silent language. Mirror VI is a fictional narrative that is located in such an unexpected encounter between strangers. It is a two screen video installation showing the dynamic dialogue through light between California and Baja.
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The Accurate Perception Available When Our Eye Becomes Single is a non-narrative film evoking the emotional specifics of place, Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast that explores the elasticity of time, history and myth.
Orford Ness is an eight-kilometre shingle spit, used for secret military testing during the First World War until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. The site is now desolate but the decaying architecture from seventy years of military occupation remain. These strange elemental structures are formed out of an alien landscape that resembles a lost movie set.
The film is mostly shot slow motion black and white inviting the viewer to slowly absorb the extraordinary landscape and ruined buildings that appear like post-apocalyptic ancient burial sites. Intercut with this are sections in colour, shot with a handheld smartphone camera and telephoto lens as a deliberate counterpoint. The film’s slow tempo sustains a narrative tension without ever revealing it, inducing a sense of arrested curiosity. The telephoto shots, by contrast, suggest a sniper’s view through the sight of a gun looking for targets, or information, revealing details of the place in the process.
The soundtrack is a spatialised arrangement of prevailing features in the Orford Ness soundscape: sea, stones, and structures. It accompanies the imagery but is not synchronised to it. As such, sound and image combine to create constantly shifting counterpoints. The sonic elements characterise a specific sense of place before, during, and after military occupation, expressing the relative permanence of the Ness and its soundscape heard across many centuries.
It is here too that British atomic bomb detonators were tested. Just along the coast from Orford Ness is Sizewell B nuclear power station. The first radar was also developed at the site, and later, conspiracy theories of alien visitors and UFO sightings in nearby Rendlesham Forest began to appear. The site and its hinterland are often referred to as Britain’s Roswell. The film includes performance by artist Sarah Sparkes, in costume as part mythical creature, part out-of-time character. She appears incidentally, unexplained, like an avatar, contrasting mythology with military.
The title of the installation, The Accurate Perception Available When Our Eye Becomes Single, is taken from the writings of the religious cult Heaven’s Gate, connecting the area’s UFO sightings to the paranoia of conspiracy theories. It is this conflation of the military, science, and myth, which establishes the strange dislocation and eeriness of the place and constitutes the meaning of the work, while the buildings, landscape, and soundscape are its subject.
Richard Ducker
07957228351
David Cotterrell
07958 565995
Ian Thompson
07801789743