Projects 2010 > Give Me Back My Broken Night > Journal
So within these days of working out our logistics (including the realisation that we will have to pay a programmer more than any of the artists involved!) we’ve manged to try out a few exercises and writing experiments.
We tried writing descriptions of sites around soho while we were there and then today tried rewriting them as if they were happening at some future date.
It’s very easy to lean towards a dystopian vision, maybe we’ve just seen too may dark futures in the films, but helicopters from the present were quickly replaced by remote controlled drones.
For me the most interesting texts opened up possibilities of hopeful scenarios without being to explicit. The subtle inference of an office ‘co-operative’, or mentions of the abundance of local shops/traders. Part of this came from a discussion we had with the owner of the Algerian coffee shop in soho, who wanted to see a return to the village feel that Soho used to have. Funny how sometimes we hope the future will be more like the past.
We then spent some time in Bristol walking and experimenting with speaking descriptions ‘live’ to each other of our surroundings. Describing the present as if it were the past, speaking about we could actually see as if it had gone. In the same way you’d talk about ‘and here there was once a roman ruin here’ we would describe the Radisson hotel tower as ‘here there used to be a tall tower’.
It worked really well to use small anchors in what was around you. We moved onwards in time and began to talk about the fantastical, the communities of musicians who live on the roofs of houses on Corn Street, the bicycles powered by beer and the resurgence of horses travel in city centres.
Playing with the common desire to return to the past it’s interesting to use the old signage that people tend to leave on buildings. Talking about a pub which is still signed as ‘the old fish market’ as if it actually became a fish market in our vision of the future.
We then played with mediating the voice a little, Jess spoke to us over a mobile phone, as she walked further way from us physically her descriptions moved further into the future. The mediated voice worked really well as it helped theatricalise the situation, and describing a future image of a building we were looking at was really easy to picture.
