This article was written  prior to a talk Peter Strickland gave at the ICA as part of the BAFTA masterclass series.

by Seth Pimlott

There are many arresting scenes in Peter Strickland’s lovingly made Berberian Sound Studio, but there is one that delivers a psychic and almost physical blow. Although it’s a film apparently concerned with the ingenuity of sound engineers and foley artists tasked with the production of sound effects back in analogue time, this rupture suggests something else is going on. We initially follow Gilderoy, a British sound engineer cast in the rough mold of a diffident radio workshop boffin from his arrival at an Italian film studio where he has been hired to soundtrack the absurdly named, sexploitation gore-fest Equestrian Vortex. Strickland sets up a carefully handled narrative that posits Gilderoy as a spectator of this kind of hammy, rumbustious Roman world, poked and bullied around by the director, Santini and his imposing assistant. We have the growing sense that Santini has a sleazy second agenda; to entrap the assorted cast of beautiful women, vocal artists, and Gilderoy in his own sadistic little game. A central scene drastically undermines our belief in the fiction that has previously been established and it is the weirdness of the film, initiated halfway through and sustained until the end that I want to talk about. Both this central scene and the final episode have a very unnerving, disorientating affect, one that derives its force from surrealist poetics.

 One of the first scenes introduces us to the central character Gilderoy and the work that he will be undertaking. He arrives at the film studio, where Gilderoy is introduced to the director’s assistant who shows a rough cut of the film that he will work on. We watch them as they watch the film. This cuts to the title sequence of Santini’s, ‘The Equestrian Vortex’, the only part of the movie we’re allowed to see. The sequence, masterfully produced by the graphic designer Julian house (who was also responsible for all the other design work throughout the film and its promotion, http://andyhague.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/julian-house.html)) gives a sense of the movie that we’re never shown. A Giallo shocker, psychedelic lashings of scarlet blood and human tissue dribble down fracturing silhouettes of the fictional cast while the credits role. We presume the film has started and we cut back to a shot of a perturbed Gilderoy and the assistant watching what must be a blood-bath, ‘Is that entirely necessary…What is he doing to her… and it doesn’t seem to be about horses?’ Gilderoy then grudgingly accepts a slice of watermelon from a beardy studio-hand, introducing us to the material that Gilderoy will work with – namely soggy fruit and veg.

Berberian Sound Studio is, among other things, a meditation on the lost art of physical sound making. Gruesome scenes find their sonic equivalent through Gilderoy’s ingenious use of groceries. The whip of a blanket followed by smashing a marrow on the floor becomes the sound of the defenestration of a witch, a cabbage vigorously dunked in a tub soundtrack a brutal murder in a vat of boiling water, the sizzle of oil on a frying pan simulates the sexual assault of an amorous Goblin using a red hot poker. Gilderoy is also shown to be in complete control of his art – a power cut at the studio prompts him to display a delicate inventiveness: a light bulb rolled over a toast rack becomes a UFO.

In one of the many references to the wizardry of tape and the machines used to manipulate it, Gilderoy loops the actress Sylvia’s voice into a hauntingly beautiful soundscape using a delicious bit of equipment called a Watkins Copycat. There is a real love of the matter and mystery of these perfectly designed bits of kit,  and the camera often interrupts the film to linger on a deeply satisfying circular mixing knob, or spool of tape (infact, there is a circular repetition throughout – gong, spool of tape, frying pan, eyeball.) There is a formal visual game going on that has its apotheosis in the final scene, but there is also a pleasure taken in these things in and of themselves. The film celebrates the wonders of sound production, and a different analogue method of old school movie making. However the disjoint between material, sound and image, fits into another theme that Berberian Sound Studio confronts – the basic deceit of filmmaking.

The first half of the film suggests continuity of space and time, but only through inviting the audience to make a series of assumptions without evidence. The story plays out in three different spaces – the studio, the corridors connected to it and Gilderoys’ flat (where he takes home his work). There seems to be a logic but we’re never carried with a character from one space to the next. Rather, certain objects provide the link as we segue from one scene to the next: a spider in Gilderoy’s bedroom cuts to a spider a crawling over an organ in the studio, an open cabinet door in the in the studio cuts to an open wardrobe in Gilderoy’s bedroom. These transitions hint at a more radical transgression of space and time that marks the switch from character motored thriller to a more abstract engagement with the nature of film that occurs later on.

The central scene finally breaks the narrative flow – what had previously felt uneasy becomes drastically confusing. Gilderoy is asleep in his bedroom, where he is woken up by someone ringing at the doorbell. He asks who it is, picks up a knife and moves towards the door, attempting to open it there is a struggle. Someone on the other side is preventing him from forcing it open. He finally manages to shunt the door open and stumble through, but rather than moving outside Gilderoy steps into the deserted studio. The film’s straightforward spatial logic is overturned. A film projector turns on, and we watch Gilderoy watch himself in the scene that we have just observed:  he sees himself rise from his bed, grab the knife, call out and then move towards the door. As Gilderoy’s image tries to turn the doorknob, the studio door that he has just walked through rattles. Gilderoy rushes over to prevent the projected image of himself breaking in; the terror is of having to deal with this animated double. The film then cuts to an accomplished, abstract scratch film with layered shots of Gilroy’s image gradually falling apart, before the film emulsion itself disintegrates. The rest of the film develops from this moment of fracture.

This scene feels unnerving for more than just its illogicality. What is perturbing is not just the way it undermines everything that we’re moved to believe in the film, but the way it provokes the effect of, ‘watching oneself watch oneself’. I was reminded of it a few days later when I came cross this photograph by the Belgian surrealist Paul Nouge. Titled ‘The Birth of an Object’, it is one from a series made in 1931 called, Les Subversion Des Images.  Nouge’s caption for this photo reads: 

A group of people watching something particularly attractive and precisely located. An ordinary wall is substituted for what they look at.

This image seemed to resonate with the central scene in Berberian Sound Studio. Partly there is a humour to the photo, and Berberian Sound studio, for a film that is ultimately reflective and serious, makes you laugh a lot. The birth of an object implies a portentous seriousness that it then undercuts, but nevertheless it is in the joke that you grasp Nouge’s argument.

Nouge was a badge-wearing signatory of Andre Breton’s second Surrealist Manifesto in 1929. For surrealists, photography made the straightforward plastic expression of what we see redundant; therefore the sole domain of art became pure mental representation. However, if they agreed about the ambition to make manifest the process and content of internal perception, they disagreed about the methods that might reveal these phenomena.

For Breton and the artists and writers around him, ‘pure psychic automatism’ held the key. They hoped to evade conscious censorship in order to liberate un-doctored, unconscious desires, The primary technique was the acceleration of the speed of writing which was believed to elicit a flow of mysteriously linked images ‘In the absence of control by reason’. They were interested in the ‘honest’ writing produced by naive, marginalised authors like the mentally ill or children. They thought it was possible to discover the product of the unmediated psyche: it was already out there in places no one had bothered to look, and all it required was a novel – and rhetorically abusive – mode of expression.

By contrast, Nouge (a chemical engineer by profession) represented a different, almost scientific and logical strand of surrealism. For him the escape towards a new artistic reality was attainable in the presence of the, ‘control of reason’. His work was influenced by the work of the poet Paul Valery and linguistic theorist Jean Paulhan who both argued that there was a profound disconnect between thought and language, and that therefore the automatic methods of the French surrealists were bound to fail. If Breton believed that automatic writing could dismantle or bypass the arbitrary rhetoric or rules of language, Paulhan argued that this was pointless – by using any language at all you were already snared:  once bound within language, you couldn’t trick any superior veracity or authenticity out of it. In his essay “Young Lady with Mirrors,” Paulhan comes to the paradoxical conclusion that the more we attempt to fix language, the more elusive it becomes: “A man can no more grasp his mind intact than he can directly see the nape of his neck or throat. There are, however, mirrors for seeing the back and front of the neck. But there are none for the mind.”

From this point of view the poem or work of art could never be the pure expression or thought of the artist because it was the result of a collaboration between artist and audience that relied on a system of communication that existed beyond both. Consequently the only way of creating critical new expression was to embrace the rules and rhetoric of languages. For Paulhan, ‘The honest poem is the poem that acknowledges its dishonesty’, one that is self reflexive about the rules of poetic construction, confronting the poet and reader with the sensation of, ‘watching oneself watch oneself.’ Although for these writers there was an unbridgeable gap between the word and the world, poetry could make manifest a kind of parallel structure, a shared set of rules between the two. They were distinct systems whose constituent parts remained immanent to their own individual spheres; however the internal relations of one could be understood in relation to the internal relations of the other.

Nouge went one step further. Language and the arbitrary signs that aided communication were more than just an intermediary between two interlocutors, they existed in their own right, having their own, almost organic, life in the world beyond the will of author and audience. This ‘reality’ that subsumed both the rules of language and the operation of thought might be revealed when the rules that govern the medium were embraced, but then pushed to the limit of reason where they would collapse. Nouge was not interested in art as a means of expressing human experience, but rather he turns to a more scientific approach where you systematically manipulate signs to the point where momentarily the otherwise unbridgeable gap between word and ‘the real’ is breached. At this moment, which he labels ‘terror’, the conventional structures of the language system you’re working with (text, photography, film) are turned inside out. The idea is that you simultaneously recognise the manipulations involved in language, yet glimpse a reality that supersedes them. Proceeding in logical steps as far as logic will permit, for Nouge it becomes possible to perceive, ‘a ‘visual phenomenon which we believe exists beyond ourselves; a thought, an emotion which we perceive as existing within us.’  This is what is attempted in Les Subversions des Images, and seems directly relevant to the film.

The Birth of an Object’s oddness derives in part from its straightforward adoption of the conventions of photography. As with the rest of the series, Nouge stresses the normality of the photo being taken; he is working within the taken-for-granted’s that delineate the way we expect a photo to be approached, the camera as automatic machine recording ‘fact’ without ‘fantasy’. In addition he is playing with the mores of petit – bourgeois, domestic existence. Everything appears in front of the camera as normal, a suburban interior, where the actors are absorbed by their activity. Like any old photograph, we are witness to something apparently quotidian and boring- it could be a photograph of an after dinner event, a slightly deranged evening with the new neighbours.

There is nothing to see here apart from one very strange thing. The object the group stare at is missing. But it is the complexity of its absence that is jarring. Nouge has removed the object from its context and replaced it by a wall. Rather than a simple omission defined in terms of absence or presence, our attention is focused on an absence that resists easy symbolisation – that can’t be defined in opposition to its positive, present, other.  The words of the symbolist painter Odilon Redon could be used to describe Nouge’s method and ambition: putting ‘The logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.’  It is through the logical, systematic twist and push of an idea of absence that the photo has its effect. It is this that produces for the spectator an unusual, slightly ridiculous shock. Nouge brings you up short against you’re expectations, and in doing so attempts to affect a reality that is inconceivable, in his words, ‘Inventing a universe and not describing it.’

The photo alerts you to the mediums dishonesty, testing our faith in pictures. You’re brain scrambles to find meaning that’s not there. But the Birth of an Object also establishes a loop. We look at a photograph of a group of people staring at something that isn’t there, which reminds us that we are in a similar position. The internal relations of the photograph correspond to the relations set up between the spectator and the photograph. The indefinable absence within image alerts us to the indefinable absence of the image –its dishonesty – where the caption describes both the reality we inspect within the photograph, and the experience of viewing it, as unresolvable. The same kind of self-reflexive loop is established in Berberian Sound Studio.

However, in the film this process is far more troubling because the flow of moving images induces a far greater power of identification and involvement than that of photography or literature. Strickland takes advantage of this passive acceptance, lulling you into a set of expectations derived from the rhetoric of conventional filmic narrative, space and time only in order to upset them. Gilderoy’s movement from apartment to studio is the first of these transgressions. A pre-existing, natural space and time is not being imitated, rather what we witness is merely the space of an encounter unique to film. The concern here is with the matter of film at the expense of reality – what you can capture and create with film and only film.  Gilderoy then turns to watch himself in the scene that has just played out in his apartment. If in Nouge’s photograph the group stare at a static object that is radically not there, in the film Gilderoy identifies with the illusion of his own character constructed from a flicker of light – cinema.

It is not just representation that is being challenged, but the psychological and emotional process of our identification with a fiction in film. Rather than use identification to involve us in a representation, Strickland (by no means the first to walk off this plank) exposes its mechanics to our scrutiny. It is a move from the usual goal of inspiring belief in a fiction ‘behind’ the image, to one that focuses our attention on the properties of the image itself – the projected illusion of a presence that is radically absent.  There is no opposition or difference between the film image and what it expresses. In a way it’s a bit monstrous, it entices you into a film world that you think you understand – before showing you that it’s a film world that works according to its own rules, and that it exists in its own separate domain beyond our habitual conceptual parameters. It induces a queasy existential state that is quite exciting and curious, that your own involvement with the film as shown to you in the film can only collapse, leaving a kind of mystery in its wake. That this central scene then cuts to a startling scratch film of physically manipulated footage underscores a preoccupation with a reality that film alone can produce.

Up to the central scene Gilderoy appears to be the ‘victim’ of the film – but after it he becomes a cog in its machine. The action takes place in a much more confounding cinematic world than that posited initially, and is overdubbed in Italian with English subtitles. There is a residual narrative thread, for instance there is some relationship between Gilderoy’s life at home, a letter he receives from his mother that details the grisly end to a nesting family of chaffinches in his shed, and the dodgy goings on in the studio, but it feels ancillary to the real work being done.

The final episodes seem to show Gilroy now, apparently in ‘control’ of what we see and hear.  We find ourselves in his apartment when he then turns a reel-to-reel tape machine off. With it, the diegetic sound also switches off, and the film goes quiet. Although there has been a constant play between the images we see and Gilderoy’s innovative sound making, this is another way of alerting us to the kind of blatant manipulation that is going on. If this Gilderoy had originally been resistant to Santini’s claustrophobic film world before the central rupture, afterwards he has apparently become the film’s accomplice.

Next we see Gilderoy asleep, while a recently hired vocal artist creeps up to his bed and attacks him. It is not clear which of them comes out on top in the struggle. Then we segue to what is apparently the very first scene of the film again: Santini’s assistant introducing Gilderoy to the film that he will work on – The Equestrian Vortex. The shots are the same, the dialogue is the same, and Gilderoy repeats himself, ‘It doesn’t seem to be about horses.’ We can see them, but for the first time we can also see what they’re watching – the rough cut of The Equestrian Vortex – a privilege we haven’t been afforded before. The scene within the scene shows the struggle between Gilderoy and the actress at his apartment play out again, before the image of Gilderoy stabs her manically. The last moments of this scenario replicate the structure of the central scene, but map it back onto the first, rather innocent, opening of the film. Facing the screen Gilderoy repeats his naïve ‘what’s he doing to her?’  Gilderoy balks at the heinous murder being committed, but fails to recognise himself as the murderer. Identification has now exhausted itself completely, the actor on screen is reduced to his own effigy, and his effigy has stolen his mind. It produces further loop, implying the possibility that our sense of ‘self’ may have been kidnapped by a set of images and dispositions we construct, then blindly, and habitually act out.

In the final scene Gilderoy is subsumed by a dot of projected white light that gradually engulfs him, by extension his incipient psychology, and then the entire screen. The projection of light is ominous and inexplicable – not symbolic. Any remaining trust in the previous reality of space and time and character is overwhelmed by a mysterious and all engulfing shape that first arises out of and finally takes over the narrative world posited at the start of the film.

Both Nouge and Strickland are playing a surrealist, rhetorical game; their impact in part the result of folding the conventions of the respective mediums they work with back onto themselves. This process is crucial to the impact of the central and final scenes in Berberian Sound Studio. What is revealed is the startling capacity of film image, not to imitate, but to create and capture an alternative reality, disrupting our passive acceptance and identification with a hallucinatory play of light. The ‘terror’ one feels is not simply the sensation of exposure to something extreme, it has been produced at the point where rhetorical manipulation of the commonplace conventions of film language becomes its’ opposite. At this point there is a mystery, it resists interpretation. Berberian Sound Studio, in a true surrealist way, does not leave you where you were but picks you up and leaves you ‘elsewhere’.

Jane Scarth from the Student Forum spoke to Anne Massey, art historian and co-curator of the current Fox Reading Room display The Independent Group: Parallel of Art  and Life, about the fraught and dramatic history of the ICA archive, what makes the Independent Group radical, and the challenges of re-contextualisation.

When asked if she could describe her relationship with the ICA archive, Anne Massey laughs and tells me “It’s the longest one I’ve had in all my life!” Her extensive research career as an art historian began in the late 1970s, doing a PhD at Newcastle Polytechnic on the Independent Group. Anne stepped through the doors of ICA for the first time in 1980, coming to consult the archive with a strong desire to get her hands on primary sources.

Anne was put in touch with Dorothy Moorland, ICA Director from 1951 to 68 and one of the biggest advocates for the Independent Group within the ICA staff in the early years: “She really helped me. She had looked after the archives and was really concerned that the history wasn’t being properly recorded or preserved or shared. The ICA’s archive was more or less accidental and it would have been thrown out if it wasn’t for Dorothy and Judy Lawson. We had a good relationship and we worked on this together throughout the 80s and 90s. We tried to get the ICA to put on an exhibition about its history but there was no interest. I carried on using the archives when they were based here at the Mall – all in grey metal office cupboards”.

In the mid 1990s, the ICA sold its archive material to the Tate who had the space and facilities to house it.

Jane Scarth: In the display there is a lot of your own archive material. How has that been generated and evolved?

Anne Massey: Just by accident! Partly it is because people know of my interest and give me things. I own a lot of original photos of the opening of Parallel of Life & Art in 1950 that no one else has got. For instance I don’t think anyone else has a copy of the installation shot that is blown up in the display.

A lot of the founding of it was from my own father. He was training to be an architect at Kings College when Richard Hamilton was teaching there, so he designed things like the arts ball invite for 1956. That is what partly sparked my interest as well. My dad came from that mind set, he was very similar to them in the way that he looked at the world.

JS: The Independent Group has been brought together with Bernadette Corporation for this season on radical collectives. In what way can the Independent Group be considered radical? Is it just an aesthetic radicalism or is it political too?

AM: They were young, working class and lower middle class people who would not normally be part of the art world. It was only because the ICA was so open and welcoming that they managed to infiltrate the place and were given some kind of space in which to operate. But it wasn’t a central space, they were on the fringe.

A lot of people have told me that they actually weren’t that friendly because they were so ambitious. They argued a lot between themselves too and it did get quite nasty. It was that burning ambition to make it that I think was beyond anything else.

It’s like you’re watching that film Top Hat, and on the one hand you’ve got a stuffy gentleman’s club in London and Fred Astaire comes in and starts tap dancing to jazz music, I think it’s like that. There is just that shock value of talking about the popular in an archaic atmosphere that I think can be quite political.

JS: Just to finish could you talk about the upcoming event Parallel of Art & Life: A Conference on the Independent Group that you are organizing and the kind of things that will be addressed?

AM: The plan is for it to be a two way process: looking at the IG’s own exhibitions and then how exhibitions now reflect the IG. I am really looking forward to the first morning, as it is PhD students or people who have just completed their PhDs. It will be great as we will get some new material and ideas. There is a younger generation coming along with their own ideas and that is fantastic, I really welcome that.

There are some excellent speakers over the two days and I am hoping there will be a bit of disagreement! It’s part of what we need to do at the ICA. I think often we’re far too polite!

Anne Massey is founding editor of the Berg journal, Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture and Research Associate, ICA Archives. She is the leading expert on the interdisciplinary history and contemporary significance of the Independent Group. She has written several books including The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59 (Manchester University Press); Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (Berg); and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Independent Group and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press).

Student Forum members Amber Turner and Jane Scarth spent some time with the ICA archive to think about how this material might be relevant to the current exhibitions of radical collectives, Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years and The Independent Group: Parallel of Art and Life. Their research has developed an upcoming seminar event Radical [vs?] Institution: Revisiting Archives to form the future that will take place on Wednesday 5 June (more information to follow).

Amber chronicles the research process.

Following up our initial interest in the ICA archive we selected some boxes to be delivered to the studio in order for our research to progress. A full day working with the archive seemed daunting because of its current state (loosely organised with an un-detailed database and generally lacking in TLC). However, as we continued to trawl through what seemed like an endless array of material, much of which without name of date, we began to appreciate the ICA’s history as an environment for radical exchange and ideas. This inspired some questions, such as what constitutes a radical institution? Are the terms Radical and Institution mutually exclusive or paradoxical?

How does the process or the act of keeping an archive actually affect the term radical? Does an institution or collective stop being radical? We actually found that one of the ICAs early fundamental values was that it was not initially going to keep an archive at all. The institution was going to be based on the new and contemporary art world, which would not be interrupted by keeping a record of events. Thinking about the ICA’s upcoming exhibition – Independent Group: Parallel of Art & Life and the fact that it is based upon the IG’s activity within the ICA, got us reflecting upon the group’s importance to the institution’s history.

Our interest in what an archive might mean to an establishment or organisation developed, because so far our research had proved interesting. We listened to a talk that took place at the ICA last year, Making Archives Public: Digitisation and Display, which had centred on the uses of archives and their accessibility. In particular, it was interesting to listen to what Naiya Yiakoumaki (Archive Curator, Whitechapel Gallery) discussed, because many of her experiences working with the Whitechapel archive appeared to be similar to our own at the ICA.

She noted that the Whitechapel’s archive (although it is now archived properly and continually utilised by the Whitechapel) was kept in a similar condition to the ICA’s. She found that much of their archive was accidental, emerging simply as a way for staff to make room for other files, as a means of utilising space. So, is the archive often subjective the needs of an individual, based on ideas of what they feel are necessary? Naiya’s discussion brought to light the way in which archives can be used to help stage future exhibitions and to instigate new research surrounding current programmes and artworks. It also addressed how archives trace the popularity of artists or artworks throughout an institution’s history. The key questions of interest were; what happens after an artist or curator has studied an archive or intervened? Making an incision within the archive but also the creation of a new archive by intervening within the main one. Is the archive enhanced by curatorial intervention and the re-archiving of materials?

As we delved deeper into our research we came across some interesting articles regarding the Independent Group exhibition in 1990. It was interesting to note the general unease from the press about the exhibition, some articles reflecting negatively upon it, one even considering what the IG actually contributed to the art world at that time at all. This in itself brought up some significant questions in relation to revisiting and re-contextualising exhibitions or groups such as the IG. Can the return to a past exhibition actually taint or damage it in some way?

The terms of re-contextualisation raised the question of appropriation and the way in which the ICA and other institutions choose to appropriate their own history. Interestingly enough, one article (while referring to the IG exhibition in 1990) considered whether the ICA was “cannibalising its own history”. The idea that we settled on as an overarching theme from our discussions became the relationship between Radicalism and Institutions, questioning how many institutions are or have actually revisited past radical exhibitions. Once more, some key questions have been raised: Why are these institutions re-contextualizing these radical moments in history? What happens to radicalism when it is re-contextualized? And what does this say about radicalism within art today?

Text: Amber Turner

Artists and curators Kate Mahony and Rachel Dowle (Kate Mahony TM) for one night only are excited to present LIPA! (Lock IN performance art) at the ICA bar.
From the garage to the gallery the LUPA artists: a mad mix of early career, emergent to established performance practitioners are leaving the lock-up to stage a Lock in: closing the bar doors behind them to orchestrate a one hour intervention. With props in hand the artists will enter the bar at 8:00pm, highjacking the bar to create DIY Performance art.

Its gonna get messy.
PARTICIPATING LUPA ARTISTS SO FAR:
Daniella Vaz-gen (LUPA6)
Sean Francis Burns (LUPA12)
Holly Slingsby (LUPA7)
John William Fletcher (LUPA11)
JB&The Bubbles (LUPA11)
Hans Jacob Schmidt (LUPA14)
Selina O (LUPA15)
kit Poulson (LUPA8)
kate Mahony TM (LUPA2/10)
8PM (SHARP)-9PM

Inspired by Bruce Nauman piece ‘Days’, Kate Mahony, Cameron Foote and Rachel Dowle turned the touring talk into a performative exploration into the notion of time and memory within the ICA gallery space. Asking the audience of the tour to become participants, they created the 101 sound piece to be added to the Soundworks archive, released on the ICA blog. After a brief explanation behind the nature of both Days and Soundworks audio pieces, copies of blank diary pages were handed out for that current week, the previous week and the following week challenging participants to recall what they did, are currently doing and what they plan to achieve in the future. This was then recorded on site to make an audio diary entry merging the lives of 6 strangers.

 

The first student forum film night, Terrestrial Futures was screened on 16 June 2012 in the ICA’s Cinema 2.  The program was organized by Seth Pimlott, Jane Scarth, and Rodney Uhler.

Exploring the wider implications of television in art and culture, Terrestrial Futures looks back at how artists, filmmakers, and writers used and questioned television. They have been interested in what has been the dominant and collective cultural form – as an artistic device and a political force. A response to the ICA exhibition Remote Control, the program is a snapshot of how politics, science-fiction and art worked with TV. Journey to Orion explores a fictional outer space where media-technologies are used for more sinister ends. The film by Ian Breakwell, One, shows us the ways in which artists began to engage with the issues of television, the broadcasting of mass events, and their removal from everyday life. Death Valley Days is a re-working of news spliced and mis-matched, subverting the images of political leaders.

DEATH VALLEY DAYS
Gorilla Tapes (1984)

UK, 1984, 20 minutes
Colour, Sound, Video

The writer J.G.Ballard said of Ronald Reagan,‘How could a man so intellectiually third rate, an empty stage set of a personality across which moved cartoon figures, dragon ladies and demons of the evil empire ever have become President of the worlds most powerful nation? Was the image everything now?’ This film was an attempt to explore what politics as a branch of advertising, entertainment and even romance, might mean.

Death Valley days (1984) was the first pro-duction of the British artists Jon Dovey, Gavin Hodge, and Tim Morrison working together under the name Gorilla Tapes. The film uses television news and interview footage of Ronald Reagan(and sequences lifted from his B Movie west-ern of the same title, Death Valley Days) and Margaret Thatcher. Taking advantage of a time when television news in Britain reached between twelve and twenty million people, and images of these two leaders were ubiquitous, Gorilla Tapes re-contextualized familiar images. The film edits this material to highlight and play with the personal and political relationship between the twoleaders. The piece was produced during a particularly divisive time in politics; the Cold War was still running, and Reagan had just launched Star Wars, a missile defense system that seemed like a confusion between reality and a half remembered B movie from his youth.

The film seems conventionally hostile to the two leaders in what is now a slightly cliched way, with a kind of bolshy pop politics that feels typical of the moment it was made. But at the time it was radical, and its wit was original – the techniques it helped to invent in analogue video, with a real political purpose, foreshadowed and has now become the model for anybody playing with content online.

However the film represents a response to J.G. Ballards’ understanding that television produce politicians who confused their position withentertainment and spectactle. His idea – which finds a kind of expression in this film – was that politicians seduced the public, involving the audience/voters in their private fantasies. As a consequence, he said, politicians , ‘could hardly complain if we involve them in ours’.

ONE
Ian Breakwell (1971)

15 mins black and white video
Performance. Original 16mm film made in 1971 with Mike Leggett and digitally reconstructed in 2003

On a day when every television shop displayed the broadcast of the Apollo 17 Moon mission, the downstairs window of the Angela Flowers Gallery screened CCTV footage of a performance by Mike Leggett that was taking place upstairs. It was the galleries first anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than to subvert the legitimacy of a space mission. As an endurance piece the performance itself uses the act of digging to trivialize the geological experiments of the astronauts whilst commenting on the current socio-economic climate of unemployment. Ian Breakwell’s film, which both documents and narrates the event, draws out a meditation on the significance of historic events and the effects of our viewing of them.

The banality of the every day activity – digging – when undertaken on the moon has special significance because we are viewing it. We see it and thus believe it because it is recorded and acknowledged. The repetition further enforces the notion that the two digging events happening simultaneously have a pertinent link. In the wider context of Terrestrial Futures, One shows us the ways in which Leggett and Breakwell have tuned in to the significance of widespread cultural images and and potential subversions of CCTV which was only beginning to be introduced in a big way during the early 1970’s.

JOURNEY TO ORION
Solveig Nordlund, (1987)

Solveig Nordlund’s Journey to Orion is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s short story Thirteen to Centarus, but also a unique piece of short cinema itself. In terms of an adaptation it tells the basic skeleton of Centarus, a curious young boybegins to question and thus disrupt the life he knows on board a spacecraft. Nordlund has only changed names and other small details, but the biggest difference is in the omissions. Nordlund is wise to keep the story simple as Ballard’s Centarus is a particularly loaded short story. Where Ballard forgoes heavy atmospheric description typical of science-fiction he adds psychological weight reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick or Stanley Kubrick. Throughout the story we follow the on board controller as he becomes increasingly aware of one of his pupil’s, Adam, (Abel in Centarus) unique curiosity. As the story progresses we understand the dangers and implications of Adam’s curiosity, but the controller comes to discover new aspects of the mission as well, which alters his perception of the journey. Despite an unusual and complex situation the questions it raises are grand and universal: How do we react when presented with the reality of our existence? What dangers and freedoms does knowledge present? Neither Nordlund nor Ballard attempts answers to these questions but simply raising
them makes for an engaging experience.

Now living and working in Portugal, Swedish born Nordlund has always found particular inspiration in Ballard. She interviewed him for Swedish television and directed a feature-length adaptation of Low Flying Aircraft in 2002. Journey to Orion, filmed in 1987 on a ferryboat between Stockholm and Helsinki, is a moody, atmospheric adaptation that despite omitting certain story elements from Centarus, adds a level of creepiness and mystery. There is no on camera dialogue, instead the story is driven by the Controller’s narration and a few added lines for Abel. The visual element is also strong; the industrial set is frequently awash in large fields of color as if Mark Rothko was the consulting production designer. We’re given hints of other life on board the ship (an aimless old man, some nude sunbathing girls, Adam’s female friend Eve) but the driving personal story is of the Controller and Adam. The Controller’s obsessive observation of Adam gives an eery Death in Venice tone; a game of hide-and-seek between an older man and a cherubic boy. Yet the chase here is not guided by sexual underpinnings; it is driven by the commitment to the upholding of innocence and construction of reality. Still the relationship seems uneasy and we question the Controller’s motives. A powerful tool (and visual device) for the Controller is the CCTV on board the ship. It allows the Controller to observe all areas and also provides mini canvases for Nordlund to present
addition frames. There is a particularly captivating sequence in which we see a lone monitor recording Adam as he swims leisurely. In the film we are often looking at another monitor, an effective visual device that provides a compliment to some of the ideas behind Terrestrial Futures. The power of television both as an artistic device but as a mode of surveillance and control. It’s progression has seen dramatic changes both in its technological and mechanical self, but also in regards to both the content and delivery of content. Nordlund and Ballard present theoretical visions of the future but as we reflect on what has been written in the past and what awaits us in the future it seems inevitable that some of the best science-fiction will become, simply, reality.

The student forum would like to thank Solveig Nordlund, LUX, and Debbie Herring for their assistance with Terrestrial Futures.

Saturday 16 June, 9.45pm
£5 / Free to ICA Members

For J.G.Ballard, Television was the ‘hardware of the twentieth century’ that determined the software -namely people. Through television, politics became a branch of advertising, fantasy a substitute for human contact, usurping reality for a fiction. Loosely using Ballard’s work as a theme, and responding to the exhibition Remote Control the ICA Student Forum curate a late night screening of short films. They look at censorship and surveillance, and consider how analogue media influenced society and shaped the future we now live in.

This event is initiated by Seth Pimlott, Jane Scarth, Ruth Sweeney and Rodney Uhler, members of the ICA’s Student Forum. To book tickets to the event please visit the ICA’s website.

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The exhibition Remote Control unexpectedly reveals a golden age of artists working with the media landscape that conditioned the late 20th century. There was a ten year period – 1974-1984 – twenty years after television had become the confident, dominant mass-media, when thinking about television was a central cultural concern. If you wanted to think about politics or culture or popular everyday life then you had also to think about television. Reflecting on the power and significance of the ‘19” picture window and engaging guest who’s staying permanently’ became a vital subject for many writers and artists who wanted to try and engage with their time. Their concern was matched – for a moment – in British public service television by the willingness of executives to commission interrogative, experimental work. The ICA’s archive of papers from the period – which we went through – reveals how active it was around this moment (as well as its recurrent financial near death experience). The archive shows an ongoing conversation: it seems as though every other month was dedicated to a six part seminar on the impact of the TV on some aspect of daily life.

In looking at this exhibition it is important to try and understand just how powerful and communal television was, then. There were only four channels, the entire British public watched television. Moreover it was watched together: both in the sense that there was only one screen in the house, viewing was collective and domestic, but also in the sense that half the public often watched the same thing at the same time. Any 9pm news bulletin in 1982 on any ordinary news night would expect an audience of about twelve million – twenty million would be good, but not exceptional.

In this way Britain was as much an electronic community in the 1970’s as we think of it in the internet age. This gave video a special power at that moment. Video art now sometimes gets a bad name; it is seen as a medium that exaggerates the worst characteristics of lazy work – a realm of poorly produced footage, banal but pretentious ideas where the ratio of thinking to duration is in an inverse proportion. But in the seventies and eighties it offered an apparently radical way of making work and intervening in the mass- media that was television.

But there is nothing in Remote Control that isn’t totally absorbing. It presents an era where artists at the top of their game really grapple with television. The gallery downstairs, lined with original TV monitors (imported from China – because you can no longer get cathode ray tube sets in Europe) shows work that can be loosely divided into two strands. One body of work is interruptive. It either inserted carefully crafted video into the television schedule disrupting the unthinking acceptance of TV – and unimaginably now – no doubt somewhat puzzled the several million people who came across as a part of an ordinary evenings viewing. One example of this is David Hall’s This is a television Receiver, made for the BBC in 1976, to interrupt normal programming with a deeply weird image of Richard Baker. At this point Baker was the most familiar newsreader of the time (who would have been recognisable in every home in the country). He is seen talking about the unreality of his own television image while visually and aurally dissolving to the point of abstraction. The video’s elegant simplicity punctures the unthinking experience and glazed identification with the TV image.

The other strand of work mimics the forms or exposes the means by which TV content – advertising, soap operas or news – was made, taking them apart for closer inspection. Alternatively by cutting and editing found television content, it problematised the flow of TV. It summoned up a latent meaning, and explored the way in which TV was colonising how people thought. In Adland made by the Guerilla Collective TVTV in 1969, falsely chummy interviewers get admen – from the boardroom to the studio – to talk disarmingly frankly about the how they try to seduce the public.

In the gallery upstairs, Farocki & Ujică’s Videograms of a Revolution, shows how state television became the site for revolution – for a brief moment, direct political action involved the appropriation of state media: rather than storm parliament, you stormed the TV network. The revolutions of the Arab spring in 2011 all appeared to need a public space to occupy, a square or even a roundabout would do, and used the digital media for organizing demonstrations. However, back in analogue time, television stations were the public space you had to take over. In Romania in 1992, or Russia in 1989, and in a very different way Serbia (where we controversially bombed the television station), the capturing of a television station was the revolutionary moment. The troubled aftermath of the revolution in Romania – there was no easy transition to decent democracy – is also foreshadowed in the coverage of the brutal end of the deposed dictator and his wife, who are shot in real time on screen.

The student forum spoke to the artist Simon Denny, who played a curatorial role for part of the exhibition, and to Ira Schneider, an experimental videomaker from the 1969 on. Schneider had also played a major role in the politics of video distribution – a radical analogue issue. Denny was responsible for the installation in the gallery of the massive television signal Hub – an exhausted bit of grey equipment which was the engineering behind the distribution of the TV signal in all of north east London. We asked questions and they had a conversation about the different perspectives that working in analogue and digital periods provoked. Ira began by talking about the last time he visited London.

Ira: I was travelling around the world for a project called Timezones, where in one room, on 24 TV screens you could see all around the world at the same time. I was videotaping in London, but also in Papua New Guinea, in Africa, around the world. That’s because there was no global satellite coverage in 1977. Only two-thirds of the world was connected for real-time communications.

Cameron: How have you found the advances in technology have affected your work since then.

Ira: Well that’s why I’m here. I keep renewing… it keeps renewing me. Back then I carried 72 video cassettes that were this big (gestures). Sony video cassettes, in black garbage bags so that you could never see the word ‘Sony.’ And it worked – we never had anything stolen. And the camera was that big (massive) – and this is my camera today (phone-size) and next time in a couple of years I’ll be doing it with just a ring, a ring on my finger.

Simon: Maybe with the finger itself.

Ira: Yeah (laughs) (points his finger at us) ‘Hey you’re on TV!’

Seth: When did you both start working with film or video?

Simon: I was at art school in New Zealand making sculpture but when I started travelling, I started working in video

Ira When was this, the 90s?

Simon: No no, early zeros, not that old!

Ira: Wow

Simon: From travelling, I thought it was kind of ridiculous to be making rooms with stuff in it, so I started working with more ephemeral technology from my computer and that’s when I got into the history of video and started making videos for my own presentations.

Ira: I started doing video in January 1969.

Seth As a student?

Ira: No. I had a master’s degree by then in psychology and made 8 short films.

Simon: You were about my age then? I’m 29

Ira: Yes, actually, I was about 30. I discovered I couldn’t go on making films because they cost too much and I didn’t get a return because they were experimental films and played only in underground cinemas and didn’t return much money. So I switched to video and then suddenly I had sync sound because in film it was too complicated and expensive and you always had to travel around with somebody who held the microphone and did the sound.

Seth: Science fiction writers like Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut were prophetic about the way in the changes in information technology would radically alter or colonise inner space or the mind in some way. They were accurate about the physical way that this technology would come to permeate everything we do. I was wondering about that future that these writers imagined, that we seem – to some extent at least- to inhabit.

Simon: In terms of prediction, one of the main problems that Ira’s generation probably faced when they were first starting to work with video was distribution. Artists didn’t have the same access to distributing information as the main networks did. No one predicted how easy distribution would become. Now all of us have access to distribution but what we might not have access to is the intense marketing tools that are standard in media industries.

Ira: Getting paid for it!

Simon: One of the aspirations of Ira’s generation seemed to me to be trying to use televisual technology to produce less sensationalist, closer to the everyday, more realist, ecologically sound material, to use video in what they felt to be a more positive way and not only commercially. Now the same kind of maybe sensationalist material – that Ira’s generation was working against – still gets pumped out and this is what we all come into contact with. [Digital distribution hasn’t necessarily improved the chances of non-commercial, unsensational material, to find an audience]. So even if I’m wanting to find an audience on youtube, a young kid farting on a mouse or whatever is going to be better suited to finding large audiences than say ammeter social realist documentaries, because of the nature of what viewing youtube is like as an experience.

Ira: Yeah, Bohemian Rhapsody in the back of a police car, singing the whole song, and it got on CNN

Simon: It’s not what I have the impression Ira’s peers were hoping to use that network for.

Ira: There is this crap about ‘Clash of the Titans,’ ‘Revenge of the Titans,’ ‘The Killing of the Titans’ these big monster things. Now, it’s these giant things that come from games. It’s all crap and unfortunately that’s what’s dominating the experience of young kids today.

Simon: I slightly differ on my opinion on that. I think that often the material that is used is not so interesting but the forms are. I know people that do very inventive and progressive things with that kind of stuff. Do you know what I mean?

Ira: With the technology, yes. Not only shooting other people…

Seth: Can the gaming form, where you can indulge fantasies or pathological ideas but without there being any physical harm might have some beneficial social effect?

Simon: Well, there have been studies on exactly that, actually. There are claims that it’s cathartic if people play out those fantasies out, not in reality.

Ira: It goes back to archaeology and anthropology. The human being is born of the Savannah, with wide expanses of flat land where the eyes developed into a tracking tool so that you could hunt the prey. We embody this coordination, this calculus. This is it! I’m reaching and eye and hand (reaches for his glass of water). The ability to track over time the movement and bring things together. Calculus does that and we have it in us!

That’s just the description of what we are doing. How we function. That’s what these games are.

Simon: Some people would argue that any kind of technology is just an extension of people. The body is already a prosthetic and so any other technology that you can put on top of that is just the same as the body.

Cameron: Would you see modern technology as being neutral?

Simon: No I don’t think it’s neutral. In terms of social media for example, my personal position is that social media isn’t necessarily evil but it certainly puts things into a particular environment. Facebook makes money partially by giving very detailed demographics to their advertisers. That’s the fundamental underlying function of that business. The social function that happens between us when we use it is something different.

Ira: Just be careful what you put on it because they own it.

Simon: Exactly, yes they own it, they own everything. There was a guy who requested all of the information that Facebook had on him and a very substantial dossier came and it still wasn’t everything. They have a vast data mine and apparently they’re only just starting find good ways to use that vast amount of detail. I think we’re also not at the moment seeing what will come out of all this knowledge gathering that’s happening because the processing is only starting.

Seth: You have no idea where that information might end up. It might not fall into benign hands.

Simon: Yes, exactly. I have friends who think it’s absolutely fine; this is just the forces of survival of the fittest happening. I’m not sure that I believe that myself and would imagine that Ira doesn’t. If you give all these people this information they have all this power. You’ve got nothing for it. You’re at the whim of a small minority still deciding what they want to do with detailed information from people like us. I’m a bit on the fence with it myself – I can see both ways.

Cameron: People say that the Arab Spring would not have happened without social media.

Simon: Yes, this is true, but it’s only a small part of what that technology’s doing. Ok, you can enable people to do that, but there are other sides of things happening at the same time. There’s this great little meme that I saw on 4chan that’s two chickens in a chicken coup saying ‘isn’t it great that we have all this free food!’ I don’t know if that is the situation but that’s one way of reading it.

Cameron: How would you see your own practice in relation to these technologies?

Simon: It’s something that I’m totally consumed with processing, in a different way and in a different moment, from people like Ira. Ira’s been doing it for a lot longer than I have.

Seth: Artists in the early twentieth century were very quick to recognise the ability of film – or moving images on a screen- to work on the mind covertly, its form analogous to something like the unconscious. Do you see a different relationship to the screen now? How does a kind of complete immersion in moving images affect us psychologically?

Simon: it depends how, where and when it’s experienced maybe?

Seth: What type of content do you look for?

Ira: I prefer reality, abstraction from reality, and juxtaposition. Other people prefer sensationalism. There was a woman – la Fontaine- she did a video installation with 24 screens . Each screen had the same guy on it doing the same dance. What the fuck is that. Nam June Paik had 100 screens with the same image on every screen: what the hell is that about. Bigger sells is what it is,not content.

SD: My reading of what Ira is interested in is human scale, something closer to a human level. Making it bigger and more saturated is definitely not what I think Ira is interested in. He is interested in the capability of that technology to deliver video information, audio information to different place.

Ira: I have a bias in my own work, which for the most part is non-narrative. I don’t do stories. I assemble images and sounds to pass information along in a non proscenium way, whereas the television set is thought of as a stage. I often do installations with one or more screens . Even when I am doing a one screen video, its many different scenes, different people, different locations and somehow I tie them all into each other.

SD: That is where we crossover. I’m interested in the way information reaches us, what our interaction with the world feels like through information. I’m not only interested in video, but this is something that is very common in terms of the way we receive information so therefore one looks at it. I’m also interested in graphics and the way that they speak, and what their content is. I’m interested in looking at what the machinery is for visually and audibly describing ideas is.

Ira: I have a-book to suggest – McChesney,& Nichols : Our Media not Theirs. It’s straight to the point, a good starting point for artists using television.

Seth: Some of your previous bits of work uses found bits of video – often generic content- relaxation videos, self help films, that set up (or are intended to set up) a very personal or emotional relationship with its audience. I was wondering why you look at that sort of material.

Simon:I don’t always work with found material. I make things as well. For one project I used a relaxation video because I was trying to use fish tank imagery that was part of kind of art history dealing with video. The fish tank is often used as a kind of metaphor for the TV box. This was a history I was interested in participating in. On another project I recently finished, I worked with a psychologist trying to devise a non linear time line for a history of work and society in New Zealand (where I am from). That could seem like generic material, but actually takes the style of powerpoint and other formats that are often used to set out this kind of information, but coming to a more interesting way of using that kind of aesthetic. For every project I try and have a very specific aim, what I want out of it, and how I will go about doing it. So I provide myself with a very particular problem, which I then try and solve in the best way possible. It is not a formula that always works, but it is kind of template.

Seth: Is that a formula that you applied to remote control?

Simon; Yes definitely, because I was asked to design this room that would be a touchstone for a number of video art pieces from the 1960’s to 1980’s, dealing with the subject of television. This is why I brought Ira‘s material into it because it seemed to me so poignant/relevant to how people started thinking about dealing with this subject. The focus that Radical Software published by Raindance Corporation [a group that that Ira was involved in] put on television is for me a very useful one for thinking about what came later, especially the emphasis on information distribution.

The moment I got this giant transmitter -TV4 – this huge piece of equipment sitting in the gallery that was only able to happen because of the digital analogue switchover that is happening in London right now. We can only house this huge object that can be applied as a symbol for the mass distribution of media, because it is being thrown out at this moment.

Cameron: How did you acquire this monument?

Simon. While researching for the show I came across the fact that the show was opening at the same time as the switchover – which is a good time to comment on artists and television. I tried to find out who owned this bit of broadcasting equipment, I got the ICA Curator to help me get in touch with go-to’s for that, and its all owned by a private company Arqiva, who donated the equipment to us. They own every single bit of broadcast hardware in the UK. We managed to convince them to give us Chanel 4’s

transmitter for North East London.

Ira: Did they pay for delivery. Because that’s important

Simon: They did, 5 men came down to deliver it so it was quite a big deal.

Ira: What are you going to do with it after? Is it going into your apartment?

Simon: I wish.

Seth: Did channel four reach the entire country through that bit of equipment:

Simon: No, this is one part. The way it works is that you have several signal hubs, and you have this situation where every channel sends their video signal from the studio to this hardware, that then kind of blows it up, amplifies it and then sends it via these giant antennas that are all around. But that is just a fraction of the mass of material – one part for channel four for north east London. It is only part of the line that processes channel four. But I think it visually gives you some sense of scale in the gallery.

Ira: Are there any rare earth metals in there?

Simon: There are amazing copper ones, huge chunks on the transformers. This obsolescence cycle is so quick and happens so much, there is such a mass of things that get used and then re-used.

Cameron: It’s also a kind of abstraction, because you never see this kind of object, you are presented with something that is completely removed from any kind of context.

Simon: Well this is the one of the reasons I wanted to bring this bit of equipment in. It also speaks of Google’s situation, where you have this idea of the cloud, some immaterial resource where you’re information can be stored. But of course it’s not a cloud, its some huge warehouse, packed with enormous powerful machines, using lots of resources and power. This is the idea, to bring that very material force into view.