“Gulliver” presented by Caddick
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- Gulliver
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Gulliver is a two screen video work which shows archive footage from 1918 of the south Wales steel industry alongside footage generated from NASA data of the moon’s surface. At times abstract, kaleidoscopic elements cut in and out of the archive materials, disrupting any sense of narrative and occluding interpretation. The film is accompanied by a soundtrack by glitch musician Jaguar Min. The work seeks to ask questions about our industrial past by creating a fiction around the ‘real’ (the archival footage).
This work brings together a number of disparate elements: the 1918 archive footage with its depiction of individuals working in a landscape desolated by industry; the visual and temporal links between that film and the science fiction of Georges Méliès ‘Le Voyage dans la Lune’ (1902) in which gentlemen scientists escape a polluted industrial landscape in order to explore a fictionalised lunar one; and the availability of data (from NASA) which enables the creation of a lunar surface, within the computer – a work of imagination and a contemporary equivalent of Méliès’ evocation of the lunar surface as a theatrical space. Gulliver is a hallucination of the west’s industrial past. In much of the west, we have ‘escaped’ the landscapes depicted by Méliès and which appear in the archive, by transferring heavy industry to the other side of the world. A process which dislocates communities which once relied on those industries for employment as it degrades the environment in the east. In Sichuan province in China the smog created by heavy industry is often severe enough to partially obscure the moon and stars. The work is in development at the moment. I will show work in progress and soundtrack sketches or a part of the finished film at ISEA2015.
