free the text: Final, not Over (2021)
This work was exhibited in a group show at Unit 1 Gallery, London over the bank holiday weekend of 27th-31st May.
Continuing the work with free-writing live performances on twitch.tv/offsitch, this installation of the work simultaneously broadcasts via projection into the Unit 1 Gallery space. This bi-location opens up, like a crack in a shell, the question of ‘where’ the work is, or if there is a ‘true’ work, or if it’s this big nervous system of encoded video that’s reaching from the keyboard to the gallery to Amazon’s datacentres to viewers at home.
Inspired by psychogeography as well as the practice of Iain Sinclair, the work incorporates dash-cam footage from idle driving on the roads of Malta. If my experience of London’s psychogeography is that of a pedestrian, then Malta’s really would be on road, by car; to many, the car is the only sensible option for travel and commuting on the island.
In response to the images; to dusk blue skies, overwrought construction, dense crowds of vehicles, the abundance of white contractor’s vans, tunnels, and sun-bleached skies; writing takes lines of flight. Essays, notes, poems, flash-fiction, genre fiction, tweets, all seem to latch onto images from the footage and take them somewhere wildly different, no doubt in places unexpected by an audience whose own response to the footage would be so uniquely their own.
The recordings of these sessions can be found in this collection on twitch and watched at leisure
Above is a small excerpt of the recordings of the broadcast, hosted on Vimeo.
Below is the raw text collected at the end of the Unit 1 Gallery showing, with all its flaws. This will be the same font from which a publishable version, expanding on the foundation present below, will be drafted, edited, and sold.
