6-7 June 2008

Jem Noble and Angela Piccini

Jem: To what extent do we bring new possibilities to place and place present new possibilities to us? Are we always bound to fill it with the well worn arcs of our own particular ways of seeing, familiar patterns of thinking, trusted concerns? Or does engagement with place germinate new ways of seeing?

Angela: And new ways of sensing. We’ve been interested in how we might collaborate for a very long time. We once spent 7 hours in a hospital considering the potential of micro projections and sound installations in derelict buildings. How might our individual concerns with remnants, displacement and the everyday co-mingle to bring new possibilities to place? How might working together open us to new possibilities of place?

Jem: Emptiness is both a mode of seeing and a product of being: the simultaneous filling of space with our own expectations, the production of meaning through patterns of use; and the erasure of all other possibilities not contained therein.

Angela: Emptiness is also a forever fluid term. As it comes into focus it slips away again. It’s another productive aporia: as hospitality requires exclusion, as dialogue requires listening, emptiness requires plenitude. Emptiness has an ethics, referring to eviction and erasure. At the same time it reproduces that eviction for it fails to account for who and what must inevitably remain.

This 10-minute piece expresses something of the performative power of place and emptiness. Jem and Tim find an empty box on the beach. The night before, one of the women at the hotel pub where we stayed railed against the litter on the beach and how it stopped her and her family from picnicking there. Jem and Tim begin collecting litter – empty containers – and fill the empty box with emptiness. They seem to be doing this almost absent mindedly. I set up my tripod and begin to film, thinking that this would simply fit into a longer narrative around the observer book of the overlooked.

Jem: The material accumulation on the littoral strip presents tangible evidence of the interconnectedness of places and people: flotsam, jetsam, litter – wrappers and containers once measuring matter that mattered, now quantifying abstract sections of space at the margin of freeform leisure activities. 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L: how many standard measures would completely enclose this space?

I am reminded of Matrioshka dolls: an empty receptacle filled with empty receptacles. The accumulation of containers, partial measurements of a peripheral landscape produced by marginal activities.

Angela: Since our weekend and following various viewings of the 10 minutes of video, we started thinking about how the empty box and empty containers contain the air of this place, particles of sand, remnants of food. Like the 4:3 video frame, these various containers frame different possibilities of emptiness. They enclose and produce specific emptinesses. In pointing towards the becoming of emptiness, this framing can only produce not-emptiness. It is the present that passes.

Jem: The town is bounded by spaces of exchange, zones of transmission and reception, but resists these to some extent. The popular decision to refuse access to and from the bridge; the invisibility of the beach and channel behind the sea defences.

The littoral strip is a dynamic space of exchange: deposition and withdrawal of materials from land and sea, washed up, dropped, washed out, collected. The bridge too has its tides: the swash and backwash of steel, glass, rubber, petrochemicals, human traffic.

The boundaries that describe the town, the bridge and the sea wall, divert the eye away from it, offering views of more picturesque value in other directions, across the channel to mountains beyond national borders, or round the sweeping estuarine curve with its bird-rich flats, its islands, the international traffic of deep-sea freight. These boundaries empty the town of sea views, resist reflections of seaside ‘glory days’.

Angela: Boundaries and their relationships to emptiness are expressed in the formal qualities and decisions taken in the screenwork, too. I set up the tripod with the requisite driftwood in the foreground and point the camera towards the town, rather than to the sea. In terms of method, I suppose that I am composing a still life. There are points of visual interest and activity and I subconsciously frame materials that signify a moral landscape of emptiness. The rotting fruit is replaced by the litter in its box. The town guildsmen by Jem and Tim. The geography of earthly excess by the town in the background. The potential of recuperative nature by the driftwood and waving grasses.

Alongside such art historical allusion, the flare of light in the upper right-hand corner gives it the cinematic quality of Super8 nostalgia, memory, happy days on the seaside. These are also commodified memories, circulated forever through the idealised tousled families of Boden catalogues and Ralph Lauren tv adverts. I reproduce these aesthetics in the need to video this moment, now.

I can talk in retrospect about how in framing Jem and Tim and the litter in this way allows me to point towards the process by which litter is washed up to the margins of civilisation with the tides. I can acknowledge the terrestrial origins of this stuff and implicate towns like Severn Beach in the production of flotsam and jetsam. I can also talk about creating a visual relationship between driftwood, box, milk jug. There are various boundaries. The camera separates me from everything else. The driftwood separates the hybrid me-with-the-camera from the action. The filmed action produces its own boundary that cannot be crossed, with the child in the background keeping a safe distance away from it all. The littoral strip of course separates the town from the sea. Yet, all of these boundaries are porous and the spaces that they separate are also interconnected. They are all under the thrall of the camera.

Stepping back to Jem’s point, dynamic exchange is what these workshops are about. What happens when people with different disciplines and practices have to find ways to get on together? Only through their conversations, through having to work together in a group, through having to respond to the notion of emptiness and the overlooked do Jem and Tim come to fill the box. They transform litter into something else. It’s a simple action, but one that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t there. It’s not an activity that either Tim or Jem would have performed in the context of their own individual interests. Not only does the workshop produce the circumstances for them to work in this way, but this activity has an affective quality that calls me to film it, so I am brought into this dynamic exchange. And in pointing the camera up towards the town, I’m lucky enough to witness the little boy in the background as he watches Tim and Jem busily clear the beach. Their activity and my filming of that activity shows that boy that this might be something to be done. He finds his own container and begins filling that. The dynamic exchange extends beyond our own group to the community in which we act and in to this setting here.

Jem: Invisibility: the undisclosed matrix of invisible relations that flow from and shape the landscape: concerns of ownership, use, value, potential: treaties and conflict. What may seem empty can, in fact, activate and bind complex interrelationships.

Sound is invisible, but ties our sense of space to visible things. Spaces shape sounds, as sounds shape our sense of space – provided we can hear, that is.

- 360º of recorded sound, rendering space through time – its playback a spatial form in its own right, tied to another time: an artefact in a sense. - The tension of the artefact: conflicting modes of being and regard: the sense of ever becoming, defined by unfolding relations in space, time, location, situation, versus the sense of being fixed by historic relations, previous uses and meanings, only partially accessible, if at all, in the antiquarian gaze.

A sonic cast of the space is collapsed into a flatland of representation: three hundred and sixty degrees of spatial sound through time is bounced to mono and contained within the box. The box in the landscape, the landscape in the box.

Angela: We discussed how we might develop our thinking and working together to consider dynamic exchange and transformation as part of the practice. For the symposium Jem created a 360º sound installation while I positioned 4 monitors at the corners of a 7x8 space, the dimensions of a standard shipping container. My camera looked out in 180º arcs at each corner (represented by 3 separate, locked-off shots) while the interior ‘space’ of the container was filled with sound. Here, our container emerges out of the frame to occupy real space-time, while the sound and video are seemingly flat. Yet, the sound you hear is transmitted to the box via radio waves, while the image you see is projected on to the wall via the movement of light particles. It’s actually all happening in the spaces in between, the seemingly empty space of the floor.

Jem: Looking is productive; doing is productive: moulding possibility with assumptions shaped between the last expired moment and the bedrock of experience, even beyond – with dispositions buried deep before the fold of birth.

Looking is reductive; doing is reductive: in fixing forms of perception and action, a field of infinite potential is reduced to the point of the actual. The possible is temporally emptied of content.

This happens wherever we go, whatever we do. It is who and how we are. So what of ‘empty’ spaces? For this term certainly means something and the places it describes compel attention with peculiar power.

Perhaps, in such spaces where the density of human concerns is spread thin – forgotten corners, margins, swathes of barely attended title – our tendencies resonate with greater strength, in waves that will eventually fold back upon themselves, whereby we see that what there is to see, is ourselves in the act of seeing.