Had an interesting talk with Juan Fernando Herrán today. We talked about me presenting some work to link with the site specific part of his installation programme.

He borrowed "The Conversation" a film by Coppola and Walter Murch from 1974.
Alot of my work has been influenced by film in a way; I am an unusual watcher of films. I hardly go to the cinema but accumulate films that become an obsession... then of course pick up bad films from tv along the way



Films like Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997), Solaris (Tarkovsky,1972) The Conversation ( Coppola/Murch 1974), The Blow Up (Antonioni, 1966), Barry Lyndon (Kubrick 1975) seem to have got stuck in my brain and filter into my work.

Tarkovsky´s Solaris, seeped into my exhibition Cheapjack! (Artist residency about Chemical Factories in Widnes my home town in the UK) its exploration of humanity and memory really resonated with the exhibition subject... the soundtrack was sampled in video and sound works with one sequence from the film referenced and reconstructed with local people....

The Conversation is the latest to have got stuck in my memory; a surveillance expert pieces together a couples private conversation in a busy park in the city.

It is interesting in that it is the first film to really explore the concept of digital audio (although in a way that gives it a super-nerd glamour which has kind of stuck). At the time digital encoding was a research project and far from its domestic invasion we are so used to today. Editor Walter Murch used an ARP synthesiser (now a vintage instrument like anything by the late Bob Moog) to scramble voices into what he imagined a digital encoding might sound like...

It is always fascinating to see the present from the imagination of the past... I see the film as about the construction of meanings through sound and space and relevant to my work here.

Juan and I talked a bit about the nature of site specific work and found sounds/objects... I showed him a film about Gelatin I found in the chemical factory where I was artist in residence and placed it in the present day factory... that when you use film or soundtracks as found objects then you are released from the burden of recording or constructing them. They are there as readymades. From then on the rest is contextual play and representation perhaps...

I am interested in using sound in some way that does not necessarily involve recording and constructing things digitally; these things of course can be part of the work and process but perhaps not the whole thing... perhaps the tools to lead somewhere else...

The other day Inti pointed out a building that was part modernist part hybrid fake terracotta referencing colonial styles and selling paella... The way the building could sit anywhere but would affect the context of its place...

It is tricky to find something that then interacts with different contexts... I am unsure if the video does that... or how to use The Conversation in some way... obviously there are some resonances with the independent security culture of Colombia but perhaps these are too certain... I have always been attracted to recreating the opening scene of The Conversation to actually do some audio surveillance on other actors in a square in a city though I am not sure how it would work as an artwork or unclear of what kind of contexts it could work in.

Its an intuition thing.... whether it should work in Bogota and in Liverpool who knows. It is tricky as I do not want to make a film but recreate the scenes process and then what to do...