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I am making daily experiments now and find I am able to take passing horses at a lively trot square across the line of fire – bits of snow in the air – spokes well defined – some blur on top of wheel but sharp in the main – men walking are no trick – I will send you proofs sometime. I shall show you what can be done from the saddle without ground glass or tripod – please notice when you get the specimens that they were made with the lens wide open and many of the best exposed when my horse was in motion.

Michael Ondaatje The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

The above quote is from an original comment about taking photographs by Western photographer L.A. Huffman around 1870-1880 from the book Huffman, Frontier Photographer. The photographer’s words, a message from the past, mark the introduction to Ondaatje’s poetic portrait (of Billy the Kid) based on fragments of fact. It is one of the voices that comes to mind when I sit down to write about two of the artworks I was fortunate to see at the WHAT MATTERS festival. The history of photography and the moving image has always included documents of animals and human figures in motion and from very early it has always included horses. Many of the pieces that were to be found in the festival, so thoughtfully selected and carefully sited at the Siobhan Davies Studio, refer directly or indirectly to the human experience of movement and draw attention to how we experience watching representations of movement. The artworks here also asked questions about the idea of choreography, whether stylised or incidental. And yet, not all the works chosen were intended to make us think about dancing in any particular way and not all of them even contained images of people moving at all.

In my memory of arriving at the festival the first thing I encounter is entirely made up of the recorded image of the anatomy of horses – The Four Riders (2010) by Chaja Hertog and Nir Nadler. The video installation plays on a loop of almost eight minutes, projected into four screens in the Research Studio on the first floor. I am immediately drawn into this as a very close movement study with it’s intense specificity and attention to detail. The deconstruction of the animals is emphasised by the four screens which are life-size and running simultaneously. The muscles of the chest of each horse seem to become dominant in the image. I find myself thinking that in a sense this would be the part of the horse that is shared with a human body. On the upright stance of a Centaur’s fantasy body the human torso necessarily joins the horse body in this place – the horses shoulder girdle becoming a sort of second pelvic girdle on the front of the mythical man/horse body. But there are no Centaurs in this video installation, and no horsemen, yet the title gives us the idea of the imaginary riders. The powerful chest area is also the part of the animal that would strike you first, fell you to the ground in that imagined apocalyptic moment.

The artists’ own online descriptions of the imagery include “wild and grotesque” and “restrained and elegant”. They also cite Muybridge’s Nineteenth Century photography and Durer’s Fifteenth Century woodcut as inspirations. Even without these references an audience could recognise here something ancient or biblical, and perhaps an older more ordinary relationship to the horse as a working animal. With very few visual clues I can gather this is indeed filmed with the horses on an actual treadmill and the event of the shoot and the choice-making in the edit is quite present, if in the back of my mind, alongside the immersive feel of the sound and the rich surface of the image. The expanses of flesh do become like landscapes, the skin moves over muscle and although we never see the whole animal we are given enough information to know that these are big animals and are reminded by the scale and sense of power just how huge a horse can be and the size of the passions we project onto these animals even now. Many people still work with and rely on horses. Many of us rarely stand this close to one. What matters here? The encounter between the body of the viewer and the body of the artwork. A fascination with an image which is painterly, cinematic, epic and intimate. The horses are never fully revealed but I seem to get to know them. There is a sense of waiting and potential as the hoof paws at the ground (the floor of the treadmill). The eye fills the screen, returning my look. There is always a question in the act of looking at animals.

Writing and editing several weeks later I plunge into this attempt to describe the work, revisiting my first impressions and finding a curious link. This installation, The Four Riders, and the very different work of Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Ruins were the two pieces I experienced first at WHAT MATTERS and for me they have become strongly connected. Coming across them both in close proximity in terms of time and space was of course due to the way they were brought together by the creative curation of Lucy Cash and Becky Edmunds. Later I felt as if I saw both on the first evening but now I don’t think so. I also thought I’d written several pages of notes about The Four Riders but I hadn’t at all. I mis-remembered, picturing them alongside the notes on Robinson in Ruins in my notebook. The connection I find between the two works is in a particular kind of rigour, a commitment to movement on screen and a patience with the passage of time, even though their form of presentation and duration is completely different. Curiously, both have little or no evidence of actual human figures – the four riders don’t ever appear and in Keiller’s film it feels like a long way in before we see any people in the long shots of the streets or landscapes and the humans that do feature seem to have the same degree of importance as any other figure in the picture, such as a road sign or a bee or a car. Yet I find there is a trace of the human body in the experience of watching each of the works. In both of these pieces something in the approach to the use of camera, the edit and the care for the subject in the frame tells us that we know we are seeing because of the eye of the camera and with the reminder that someone was there behind that camera.

The screening of Patrick Keiller’s film, the third in his Robinson series, took place the evening before the actual Private View and the Roof Studio on the top floor became the temporary cinema and performance space for the weekend. Before the opening of the other installed and durational works throughout the building this first evening offered a single screen feature-length film, a chance to tune into the festival in advance, to get a taste of what matters to the curators in terms of art and artists. Time was set aside for the particular vision of one artist to unfold and begin our thoughts and conversations around the field of practices to be found throughout the coming days. The curators called this a Pre-festival screening and this allowed an artwork to provide an introduction, a kind of foreword, laying out some ideas and concerns as meditations, as provocations.

Robinson in Ruins (2010) touches on four kinds of ruins: architectural, personal, ecological and economic. Keiller turns again to the landscape as “an appropriate context in which to examine the tensions between dwelling and displacement” (Keiller 2012: 12)

The film works on me as a kind of visual essay, made up of facts narrated through the “wandering” story of a journey pieced together through the abandoned documentation of an invented research project – which it so happens resembles the very research project being undertaken by the film’s director. The fictional character of the melancholy academic Robinson has a wry humour as he persists in his investigations into social and physical infrastructures and their histories. Keiller uses fictional pretexts to deliver a measured, descriptive style in a survey of selected examples – from industry, sites of scientific interest, defence installations, historical sites and architectural curiosities. The effect is a mass of information, a dense narrative and a sense of the tip-of-the-iceberg in terms of engrossing facts and references that alternately make me think “I know that” or “I can’t believe I didn’t know that”.

Scale seems to matter here. Attention is drawn to the 1940s mapping of the UK’s oil pipeline networks and the British Council’s mapping of oil fields abroad in relation to potential areas of war. Reference is made to the price of land, the price of wheat, the price of oil. The narration constantly connects back to histories of colonialism, and the politics of land and property ownership in Britain, specifically here, England. Stirring accounts of historical uprisings, including Peterloo in 1819 and the protests against enclosures of common ground at Otmoor in the 1830s are outlined. But as Keiller himself points out in the publication accompanying the recent The Robinson Institute exhibition at Tate Britain, quoting Robert Wade:

Some caution is in order. There is a recurrent cycle of debate in the wake of financial crises, as an initial outpouring of radical proposals gives way to incremental muddling through, followed by resumption of normal business. (Keiller 2012: 12)

The hum of an industrial estate. A car pulling out of a large edge-of-town supermarket. A yellow lichen is captured, over several years, growing around the honeycomb pattern on the surface of the large green reflective road sign. It is identified precisely as Xanthoria Parietina and you would only notice it if you looked closely and returned later to look again (and again), carefully and closely.

The film’s narrator tells us how Robinson “inclined to biophilia, the love of life and living systems”. There are long takes of the eye marking on the wing of a butterfly appearing and disappearing as the insect makes its way around the last flowers on a prickly teasel. A white foxglove performs a slow dance, swaying in and out of frame. The screen is often full of extended moments with little apparent action but the image will always reveal a movement within the stillness – of trees and grass in the breeze or the progress of huge farm machinery moving patiently across a field.

The moon is moving away from the Earth at 3.8 cm per year, and so has not always appeared to be the same size as the Sun. When it was closer, tidal movements would have been more extreme, and the conditions for life’s emergence perhaps even more favourable. (Keiller 2010: 47)

The movement and measurement of time returns on different scales, whether biblical, geological, industrial or agricultural. The film is full of history lessons and reminders of instances of short term thinking – not least in terms of modern economics and the unplanned ways which familiar environments can become altered. There are no horses here, as far as I can remember, but there are cows and sheep grazing – on common ground, such as the former US Air Force Base at Greenham Common.

In 1993, the Atomic Weapons Establishment became a ‘Government Owned, Contractor Operated’ or Go-Co institution [...] The government later sold its BNFL share to the Jacobs Engineering Group, a US company, so that the UK’s nuclear weapons production was in two-thirds US ownership. (Keiller 2012: 38)

Quite often something is shown to be covered up, changed, forgotten, abandoned or grown over, left to time and the elements. An image of dilapidation often uncovers the less than shiny aspects of a contemporary capitalist culture. It starts to feel that the wanderer doesn’t have to search too hard to find it. It’s all around us. But we know he spent some real time, noticing what is there, by the side of the road, and methodically turned the camera towards it, often repeatedly, often over several years.

The film Robinson in Ruins and the video installation The Four Riders both have a sense of ghosts about them. I return again to some of the voices that come to mind as I think about film technology and its fast-moving history of capturing movement that soon followed the first examples of still photography and its early love of portrait and landscape. I think of the voice of the photographer and also the ghostly voice of a fictionalised version of a wild young American cowboy, telling stories of traveling on horseback, at an earlier moment some time ago, in a history of Western expansion and progress:

MMMMMMMM mm thinking
moving across the world on horses
body split at the edge of their necks
neck sweat eating at my jeans
moving across the world on horses
so if I had a newsman’s brain I’d say
well some morals are physical
must be clear and open
like a diagram of watch or star
one must eliminate much
that is one turns when the bullet leaves you
walk off see none of the thrashing [...]

Michael Ondaatje The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

References:
Patrick Keiller 2010 The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet. Tate Publishing.
Michael Ondaatje 1984 The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Penguin.

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It was immediately easy to see and feel that Lucy Cash and Becky Edmunds had curated a thought provoking collection of events and films which mattered to them and which scratched at all of those who came to experience them.

One of the scratches on offer was that a common rootage in all the works could be found in dance, choreography, and movement. The collected works, in the context in which they were seen, made the larger concerns and appetites of dance more present. Dance can and has expanded into other terrains without losing its original DNA.

The quote that headed What Matters, from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, helped me to keep the scratch present. It asked us to keep noticing the patterns that connect what at first may seem distant, e.g. the lobster, the orchid. This initially unexpected pairing brought Lewis Carroll and “cabbages and kings” to my mind that then led me to Carroll’s quote “It’s no good going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” A wonderful way of thinking about the alterations that learning and experience can bring. I certainly encountered things that I had not seen or felt before and the learning that went with these encounters helped me to reflect on the notions to do, to un-do, and to do differently. While being with the works I would internally shout for joy as I found connections, or the potential to parry between the powerful, the beautiful, the absurd, the moving and the disturbing worlds that were present. But I also needed to dwell on the unique intentions that each author brought to their work, separately conceived from the rest, their lobsterishness, their orchidness.

The people that came over the weekend included, students, curators, other artists and those who are already contributing to a groundswell of thoughts and doings that shift dance into different, more challenging perspectives. Ones that allow dance to be tempered by others and that promote the values of dance as an investigative art, able to expand its terms of reference.

I hope that festivals such as this one become more frequent, that this groundswell of stuff will reach more people who can scratch back at it.

What Matters 2012 will become a marker to remember and be an influence in the future. Independent Dance invited Lucy and Becky who in turn made such an enormous commitment to this festival, when they could have been at work in their own fields. I appreciate and learnt a lot from their focussed work.
I also want to mention how much I enjoyed the very wonderful, far more voluble than I, co resident thinker Marlon Barrios Solano as well as the concentration of all the artists, the generosity of their performances and everyone else who made this such a forward looking experience.

I think that Gill would have loved What Matters, I can sense her cheeky grin and shiny eyes.

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CLOUDED@ What Matters Festival, London
An experiment on cognitive augmentation, collaborative curation and interfacing videos content from YouTube

Conceived by Marlon Barrios Solano, artist in residence at What Matters Festival, London, UK, Consultant: Lenara Verle. Development and conception partially supported by What Matters Festival, DanceDigitalUK, ICK Amsterdam, STEIM, University of Bedfordshire and Live Arts Development Agency.

CLOUDED@ is an experiment on participatory curatorial tactics within art contexts, interfacing video content from the massive YouTube video sharing site. It is aimed to create a mutating symbiotic space inside festivals, a hybrid space conflating curatorial visions with a participatory and open architecture. In CLOUDED@, the temporary microcosm, knowledge economy and community created by the event, is augmented by a swarming ecosystem of ideas carried and re embodied via online videos. The event’s curatorial frame is used as an associative node. The community gathered by the event organizers is invited as co-curators and co creators of a playlist of you tube videos. It produces co-curated knowledge with a human based recommendation system.

CLOUDED@ attempts to facilitate an idea/video dialogue that may register the thinking and associative idea network as an specific cultural context for the event. A context that is only afforded by the interaction of specific minds, new internet technologies and specific referential knowledge flows. Ideally, the guest co-curators are from several disciplines, professional levels and nationalities and the playlist in it self becomes a trigger/conduit it self, generating anonymous associative ripples and accumulations that are not centered on the representation of self and individual knowledge. I conceive CLOUDED@, as a system that that may deploy a context for the “adjacent possible”. The scientist Stuart Kauffman defines “the adjacent possible” as a kind of shadow future hovering on the edge of present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent it self. Yet it is not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field…

What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, bun only certain changes can happen. (Its) strange and beautiful truth is that is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Together, we create a changing yet organized context to explore the adjacent possible articulated as a nonlinear navigation map for the ecology of ideas that surrounds an event.

For CLOUDED@ What Matters Festival, the guests curators are invited to suggests at least two videos from YouTube that may respond the question: “What Matters.. ” to them personally and for their work/life at this moment. They are invited to suggest videos that MUST be watched, that we should not miss. It is suggested to the guests, not to recommend their own work directly. They can frame it with the phrase as: Have you seen this? The collaborators are credited as guest co-curators without identifying the suggested video: they become a crowd and their videos are from the “cloud”.

The recommended videos are offered in several formats:

1. As a floating cloud transparent QR code representing each video.The visitor may interact with the CLOUD watching the videos with their own portable devices and with one scanning station placed on the center of the space
2. As a playlist in YouTube that loops on a laptop with small spackers in the same space and can also be watched on the internet
3. As a printed and downloadable pdf that the visitor can take with them
4. On the installation website

The festival visitors (and anybody) may send their suggestions to be included in the playlist via email: marlon@dance-tech.net and they will be added. You need an app on your smart phone or tablet to scan the QR codes. Search in your own APP store or market.

Guest co-curators for CLOUDED@ What Matters Festival:

Andrew Mitchelson thisisliveart.co.uk
Becky Edmunds beckyedmunds.com
Gilles Jobin gillesjobin.com
Henry Montes
Katharina Plethke
Kelda Free and David Brazier brazierfree.blogspot.co.uk
Julia Bardsley hometag.net
Jeannette Ginslov jeannetteginslov.com
Marlon Barrios Solano dance-tech.net
Marta Renzi martarenzi.blogspot.co.uk
Magali Charrier magalicharrier.com
Nilesh Patel
Nik Haffner independentdance.co.uk
Lois Keidan thisisliveart.co.uk
Lucy Cash lucycash.com
Sheila Ghelani sheilaghelani.co.uk
Tamara Ashley beds.academia.edu
Simon Ellis skellis.net

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