An ISIS Arts ‘Year of The Artist’
residency, in collaboration with The Northern Region Film and Television Archive
(NRFTA) - Demixed by Chris Dooks. View this clip to
see the video side of the project. Audio clips on the music page
(soon).
I was the artist in residence with the NRFTA for several months
during 2001 and given access to thousands of hours of film to use
as source material to make new work from. I suppose I was a kind of
remix artist for the archive, observing the sociological
ramifications of all this flickering footage as I processed and
filtered the material during this large scale project.
I was approaching the archive with a strict manifesto - to try and
find works which reveal aspects of life full of humour, passion and
eclecticism."
The easiest way to explain this project is to read this review of
the enhanced CD we produced of the works I made. I've included a
review which reflects positive and negative aspects of what I
produced!
To Look North, review from http://www.spannered.org/live/965/
Chris Dooks’ former incarnations have included working as a film
and documentary maker (he directed the South Bank show on
avant-garde sound manipulator, Scanner) and as recording artist
Bovine Life for France’s Bip-Hop label. His motivation for taking
on the Northern Region Film and Television Archive and undertaking
a project to ‘demix’ it, stemmed from a frustration with how the
North East of England in particular was represented in the
media.
Growing up in Cleveland in the 1980s, Dooks’ home was reflected
back to him as a collection of ‘bleak industrial landscapes and
empty shipyards- not to mention the angst of the miners’ strike and
other industrial disputes’, leading him to wonder if that was the
entire sum of the North East’s cultural geography. So, To Look
North is a labour of love and a distillation of hundreds of hours
worth of film footage, from which fragments of sound, conversations
and reportage have been extracted and used as the basis for this
album.
As you might expect from something which privileges the spoken word
as a source of manipulation, distortion and repetition, it’s not a
collection you would necessarily want to listen to all in one go:
it works better as a collection of snapshots that you can savour a
few at a time.
Memorable pieces include the children talking about what they’ve
learned in school, accompanied by an undercurrent of electro
frequency manipulation (Making Shapes) and the spooky monologue of
a reporter talking about the grisly murder of a carpet shop owner
in 05/09/58. This tale of Mr Scriven of Newport Street begins in a
perfectly comprehensible manner, but in the course of a few
minutes, at the crucial moment the narrative starts to turn nasty,
the tape track is distorted almost beyond recognition, heightening
suspense and leaving an impression of something sinister at the
heart of small-town life.
It’s hard to know what Dooks wants his listener to glean from such
excerpts, which at times are rendered almost meaningless from the
squeaks, tweaks and interference he puts over the tracks. At times,
as on the critique of the ‘cult of the DJ’ in the hilarious
Partridge-esque The Toupe and Glistening Teeth, it is obvious, but
on other tracks the nearest I came to getting a handle on it was in
the appreciation of the kind of dream-language it creates, which
gives an impression of a time and sensibility that can never be
recaptured.