I was looking at demolition videos. Buildings that twist or roll as they fall, balletic or tragic or funny.
This collided with an interest in playing with the rhythm and maths of animated film, the site specific situation of projection, sound (and image) slowed down and sped up. The timescales of Buildings, the short lifespans of things that seem eternal, much like ourselves.
These cooling towers have a particularly human curve and belly. They were filmed by the crowd of bystanders at Richborough Power Station. Power Station chimneys, recently referenced by Jonathan Meades in his BBC documentary on Brutalism, given as an example of the failure of English Heritage to understand and protect a part of history currently, maybe briefly, out of vogue. Ultimately the video is crushed under the social and political weight of what industry means, so the reading of the falling Cooling Towers as empathetic figures is lost.
This exhibition was in the Silver Building, Silvertown, itself one of those buildings and areas that is leased to artists as preparation for development and gentrification. The film is stabilised, then divided into it’s individual still images and then reformed into video with each image layered on top of the last, so the projection wanders around the wall, (a method I have used again in the Canning Town/City Island film that is work in progress (as of Feb 2020)), the projection shifting with the human handheld camera of the original recording. The seconds it takes to fall are rewound and played back, first very very slowly and then increasing in speed. The slowed image is majestic and eerie, with the sound of traffic and birdsong rumbling and roaring. The speeded image is rhythmic and comic, with birdsong slipping out of range and cars whistling past like spaceships.
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Will Bishop-Stephens 