Suchergebnisse

In this essay I approach the subject of the Future-Past from an oblique angle, through a kind of time travel that involves the re-staging of my fantasies of the future, inside a structure of my past - my old school. In 2012 I realized an art project called SCHOOL OF CHANGE, the core component of which was an experimental Science Fiction Musical film, set in a dystopian future-past and filmed in my old secondary school, a deteriorating Mid Century Modern comprehensive in an English New Town. The aim of this essay is to develop some of the ideas and debates that were thrown up by that project; speculations on our belief in the future, technology, memory and representation. I am using the film, and its fictions, as a device with which to launch these speculations. My methods of filmmaking are quite unusual, they involve an elision of fantasy and everyday reality through what might appear to be eccentric strategies. I will examine these strategies, to unpick how it is via methods of making that I can create a tone through which ideas are opened to more affect. So as well as discussing the fictional conceits of the film and the ideas they generate, this is an excavation of a creative filmmaking methodology, because its strategies, its aesthetic politics, are intrinsic to the meanings that are generated.

The Unspeakable Freedom Device is a project commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery comprising narrative film and installation that investigates new ways that art can question our perception of contemporary social reality using speculative fiction. This project explores the idea of the image of Margaret Thatcher as an after-burn on the collective memory of our culture, using the Winter Gardens, Blackpool as a key location- a Victorian palace of fantasy-entertainment and the site of political rhetoric that has shaped society. It proposes a future-primitive world in which the difference between technology and magic is incomprehensible, and a cargo-cult of Thatcher has arisen.

This was a programme of my single screen video work curated and by Jon Davies for The Pleasure Dome, to tour 2 venues in Canada; The Pleasure Dome, Toronto, Toronto and Available Light, Ottawa. Kitchen-Sink Surrealism – by Jon Davies Over the past two decades, London-based artist Jennet Thomas has evolved a distinctive video practice that embraces a homespun aesthetic to produce absurdist narrative pleasures that stubbornly refuse reason. Strange and complex, Thomas's work develops experimental forms of storytelling to make sense of what seems like an increasingly non-sensical world. In tapes like The Man Who Went Outside (2008) and Because of the War (2005), Thomas takes the sober British authority figure – broadcaster, politician, manager, teacher, clergyman, etc. – and subjects him to her comically bizarre scripts. The arbiters of rational order become a fount of delightful ludicrousness; as Sally O'Reilly has written, society's "illusion of consensus" and "legibility" are befuddled. This Man who recurs in Thomas' work is just one ingredient of the rich stew of mass-cultural detritus and popular memory that she cooks up in each tape. Her concoctions give us a potent portrait of her kingdom's quietly deranged collective consciousness. Thomas's work taps into distinctly British currents of surrealist moving pictures, from Lindsay Anderson's carnivalesque 1973 epic O Lucky Man! to the idiosyncratic work of fellow video artist John Smith to odd cult series like Doctor Who. The TV becomes a gateway for the surreal to be unleashed on the domestic home, providing entertainment for a British suburbia that Francis McKee has described as "seething with unconscious and repressed desires."