PROJECT INFO
Grains is a new series of films which examine new methods of escape and self sufficiency. Each work focuses on a specific site and re-imagines its past, present and future history.
0.1 Grain – 06:20 (2010)
In the first film ‘Grain’ an anonymous group who appear to be influenced by The Coming Insurrection set out their plans for capturing the Isle of Grain in Kent, harnessing its resources and enhancing its power. The work notes that Grain is a forgotten hinterland “long invisiblised, used for storage and service” and makes reference to Grain’s use as a site for resources including a power station, a liquid natural gas facility, a container port and also its past history where Grain tower was utilised in World War 2 as a boom control point, employing a large net to capture U-boats.
The work explores how Grain can increase its power and elaborates on what this might look like within current conditions. There are suggestions of capturing Grain’s key resources and suggestions of employing a sort of appropriation and piracy to achieve this “all must become like the scavenger”.
0.2 Vorkuta – 05:20 (2011)
The film voices the plans of an anonymous collective who seek to build a sort of doomsday vault in the old mining tunnels of Vorkuta. The plan takes advantage of the freezing conditions as a method of preservation in order to create a seed vault and a record of all arctic life whilst also growing the old varieties of seeds and distributing them in order to “take things back”.
The work also references the battle to harness the resources of the Arctic from its oil, to its coal to its weather conditions and biology. Based almost entirely on fact the film presents a potential scenario for future actions that seek to find a way of controlling all elements of the biological down to cellular level whilst also finding a vast power resource to sure up all future activity.
0.3 Archimeters
Archimeters focuses on Ordos – a near empty ghost town in Inner Mongolia, China which has been newly built but remains almost entirely empty.
The work lays out a plan for appropriating the town and constructing “a fully integrated auto-poietic and auto-effective mechanism”.
From a central point within the empty Ordos Art Museum the plan is described, particularly focussing on ‘effects’ and ‘affects’ referencing both the physical and virtual structure of the town and the video’s own construction.
The digital effects used at certain points within the editing software are exposed in textual form “signal blur at 30%” – as if the video is itself becoming an auto-poietic mechanism.
The text that forms the voice over is appropriated from software testing handbooks and has been used due to its focus on creating a fully integrated and predictable, self-sufficient system, that continually improves itself and enhances its method of control over all things.
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