I LOOKED INTO THEIR EYES AND I SAW ONLY PIXELS

Spoken work performance with analogue 35mm slide show.

Manchester UK. 

Fieldwork.

Considerable redevelopment: an explosion of new buildings and reconfigured public space. Construction sites are surrounded by hoardings printed with giant illustrations of the proposed structures, complete with images of digital citizens inhabiting the space.

Two dimensional mannequins, known as entourage cutouts, scalable figures representing the corporate vision of where the designers think we would like to be and in this architectural context, who they imagine we are.

Architect’s serving suggestions, populated with imagined people framed in yet-to-be places.

In a drifting, dreamlike approximation of street photography, I documented these billboard characters.

Micro surgery.

The digital photographs were then printed onto acetate,  dissected, scalpel sliced and collaged into the frames of 35mm glass slide mounts.

Other elements provide layers.

Urban textures photographed in existing buildings, car parks, subways and walkways. 

Each of these tiny analogue collages is the only version, existing only within the glass slide mount.

When the slides are projected, the characters overlap and collide, now framed in new relationships and chance meetings. Illuminated in a new world, they begin to reflect the chaos of the city, not specifically what it looks like, but perhaps as visual clues to a visceral lived experience.

Non place becomes anthropological place (Augé 1995).