CFCP News: Materials – building a particle accelerator for the mind – Q&A With David Ian Bickley David Ian Bickley is an intermedial artist working primarily with the fusion of film, music and light. He has won a Hotpress Award for his pioneering electronic music, a number of film awards including a Sony and an O2 Media award and two Arts Council of Ireland Project Awards. He has had over 100 exhibitions in four continents. David’s project MATERIALS is the 1st part of a landscape trilogy designed to process the human mind. Using only pure landscape filmmaking as its source, the story unfolds through a seamless atmospheric journey that takes us from dawn to dusk and from birth to death. The electronic score, created by David in collaboration with Tom Green (The Orb, Another Fine Day) Dare Mason (Noctorum) and Steve Bayfield is an essential part of the piece working to draw the viewer hypnotically into the imagery at a fundamental level. At each pass more detail and connectivity is revealed and abandonment to the piece becomes as much a part of the process as the warping of time and space that is at the heart of MATERIALS. Prior to the opening of his show in CFCP on 6th June we managed to grab a few words with David to find out a bit more about David the person and also Materials the show. David, you describe yourself a “A Pre-Raphaelite quantum engineer” – it’s really a great title.. but could you describe this in more detail? This was written in a Big Chill (UK festival) programme to describe a project I created for the “Stop the City” area. The visuals for this were based on a fusion of micrographic images, deep space textures and symbolic/mythological forms that were then projected using a spherical screen. What the title is hinting at is the idea of a sense of wonder and mystery embedded within these two fields, both in the detail and in scale and impact; when you walk in to the Tate and view Millais’ Ophelia you are immediately arrested by the power the painting, you can’t pin this down, you don’t really know what is going on within the image and it holds you with a kind of reverant hypnosis, I’m sure that walking into the room that houses the hadron collider at Cern would have a similar effect. I further developed these ideas when I worked with Blackrock Observatory, the Science Gallery, UCC and The Electric Picnic to produce two immersive pieces that continued this way of working with science and mythology. I love the idea of a “particle accelerator for the mind, built by Victorians for the digital age”, how does it work or look like? Do you use any elements of Jules Vern or H.G. Wells in your work or are there other influences at play? This idea is distinctly influenced by David Lynch’s science fiction film Dune, based on the book by Frank Herbert – the sets and design here are amazing, all wood polished brass and marble. When we imagine the future it is nearly always aluminium, chrome or Apple white, yet why should the future diminish our grá for quality materials. Surely there would be even more exotic materials on new worlds that would also be coveted. My use of this term was prior to coming across the Steampunk sub culture, but I do love the fusion of technology and earth materials; I have a modular synthesiser, hand built into a walnut case by Analogue Systems in Cornwall and used on many of my soundtracks, this again embodies much of this “feel”. This idea of spirits inhabiting a place seems to flow through your work, do these places actually refer to physical locations that surround you or you have experienced through various phases of your life? This is a reflection of the sense of a living landscape, a landscape in motion (albeit a very slow motion). This landscape is overlaid with memories, real and imaginary that manifest in a kind of “hauntology”. I project my imagination into particular places that seem to resonate with this process and this allows me “inside” the sense of place. Once I have this “key”, I can then work with the physical materials. Often this process is initiated by creating the ambient soundtrack first, a bit like mixing the colours for the particular palette I intend to use. Once I have this palette then I can never get lost on the creative journey because I have set the tone of reference. You spent a lot of time in Cornwall during your life, Cornwall is known for being a land of mysticism, myths and rituals, do you think that your memories of Cornwall permeated your work on a concuss of unconscious level? Cornwall is also a land of artists and musicians, and many of these, Hepworth, Wallis, Gabo, Lanyon found great inspiration in the remote, far west part of the county known as West Penwith. This inspiration has been attributed to both the light (the famous North light of the area is said to be related to the quartzz content of the sands and seabed, reflecting into the blue sky) and to the proffussion of bizarre granite tors (natural rock outcrops) and prehistoric monuments. Certainly Barbara Hepworth drew much from the latter. I first went to Penwith in the early 80′s and was astounded at the amount of creative enterprise taking place, I played in a number of bands there and every single one of my LP’s an film soundtracks has been originated in Penwith – there seems to be an outstanding clarity to thought when one is there. Of course it could just be the radioactivity of the place, this is after all where Marie Curie used to get her Radum. How would you describe the “Celtic Song Lines”? My knowledge of the aboriginal concept of song lines is based on Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and Alan Garner’s Strandloper. Garner in particular manages to connect this idea coherently with the western mind. The central character in Strandloper is William Buckley, a transported Cheshire man (the county of my birth) steeped in English rural mythology. After reading this I began to wonder what this concept would seem like set in the Celtic mind, and the idea of singing the landscape into an unfolding presence seemed to resonate with the work that I was beginning to make; using ambient music to unlock a journey through the Irish landscape and the creative process to bring the Irish landscape into mythological focus. You mention your increasing awareness of these “Celtic Song Lines”, a need to place a more mythological dynamic at the core of the work, effectively the “singing” of the land into being. How does this almost tranquil scenario fit in with the notion of the particle accelerator for the mind? Tranquil might not be the right word, what interests me in landscape are moods that reflect the dark, brooding, dangerous and “aliveness” of the natural environment (with the odd tranquil respite). Nature sets an agenda which we foolishly think doesn’t concern us, until the weather or tectonic plates remind us. The mythologies are fragments of memories which set our place within this framework and conspire to work symbolically with our subconscious. All art kind of works this way, we are reminded of something, we connect with something deep within. Thus a low drone creates a sense of foreboding because it reminds us of primal distant thunder. And because this works at such a deep, almost cellular level it is reminiscent of a machine, like a particle accelerator, designed to search for the invisible, the impossible. You say that your aim was to realise a project, Materials, that you had been developing over the last 30 years. A project that encompassed the notion of moving through the landscape to capture “the sprit of place”. Can you share more details about the project, the idea and where the influences come from that are behind it? Up to the age of 17 I grew up on the margins of a variety of dramatic English landscapes; the Derbyshire Dales, the salt marshes of Dorset. My father and mother used to climb, pothole and sail, so I was constantly moving from a suburban existence into these evocative environments from an early age. When back within the “ordered” town these memories, accelerated by reading Alan Garner, would brood in my mind and inhabit my dreams. At the age of 17 my parents moved to a remote village right in the middle of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset and it was if when there all those frozen memories thawed and came cascading through my nervous system to instantly connect me with a distinct sense of place within the rolling hills and ancient woods. This time also coincided with both my discovery of electronic music and with my ability to paint. It was then that I started to formulate ideas about how to communicate this experience. I also spent a lot of time working with archeologists and museums on research and film projects (including filming a large dig at the Iron Age “Maiden Castle” in the mid 80′s) this also helped inform the development of these ideas in a more tangible manner. Materials started as a narrative for a simple line drawn across the land, but as you immersed yourself in the land itself and began to drill down to your own underlying motives you began to see the need for a stronger storyline, one that could thread the objectives together in a more fundamental and human way. Lines have always played a part in the natural landscape, was the line you refer to a Ley line aligning to a physical or thought based place? This is a reference to “land artist” Richard Long and his notion that art is the act of taking a straight line for a walk. Rather like taking a slice through archaeological context layers where seemingly disparate events are shown to form a complete story. This was the original intention, but the line then became more of a device in its own right, a machine to facililite a process. I then realised that this process would need a story, so I built in the progression of the day as a simple chronology. Deciding that a particular mountain lake would be the end point – we start in darkness and slowly rise through out the film – I noticed that beyond the lake, through a narrow notch, was a vey distant field full of jagged stones, rather like an ancient graveyard of the gods. This made me realise that the simple progression of the day also mirrored life’s journey, from pre birth darkness (the moonlit valley at the start) through emerging light and growth then back into darkness. I then shot the bronze age circle sequence that appears at the end to effectively close this conceptual loop and also create the starting point for the film’s sequel, MACHINES. You also describe Materials as being a story of a journey from birth to death, from sleep to an awakening, from formless to form that is mirrored by the bumps and hollows of the evolving land. This journey seems to portray the journey of the Earths development, one that is mirrored in the flora and fauna of the physical landscape, where are you on this journey and where do you see ourselves in this journey? This journey is cyclical and endless, there is no division of the day, the week, the years. I think therein lies the key to long term thinking and man’s correct position within a future timeline. There is no reference to traditional sentient life within any of my landscape work but this is not because I’m ignoring man or the part other animal life has within the pattern of existence, just that I wish to focus on the pure materials of landscape and point towards the greater picture of this ball of earth and rock hurtling through space while locked securely into the giant machinery that extends ever outwards and inwards. You are developing a squeal to Materials, Machines. Can you explain the context of Machines in relation to Materials? How does it fit into the journey? Is Machines related to physical machines or the mechanisms that work together with the materials to form the physical landscape that we see today? I find it difficult to talk about a project that is in production, all I’ll say is that where MATERIALS deals with the elements, MACHINES deals with the interface between man and these elements. It is Interesting that you describe yourself as a Pre-Raphaelite but you also use notions of mechanics with the title Machines. Do you combine these opposites in your practice and step away from the either – or approach? I think as described above the idea of pre-Raphaelite quantum engineering is a a little different from the pure artistic genre and as mentioned the two areas of machines and mythology aren’t mutually exclusive. The machinery in MACHINES is not what the title immediately conjours up. Though both you and I will have to wait and see what exactly that is. David, thank you so much for your time. We are really looking forward to seeing the project Materials in CFCP in June. If you would like to find out more details on the show please see click here >> The show opens on the 6th June, at 6.30pm. About Ian Oliver I am the Communications Director for the Centre for Creative Practices. Prior to joining CFCP I worked in the Irish Writer’s Centre where my principle aim was develop processes and courses that would engage writers to develop their own aims and aspirations and give them the means and support to attain them. I have also worked as a professional photographer where clients included: RTÉ, WAV, Dublin City Council and the Irish Times. My imperative is to work with teams and organisations to enable them to elevate their thinking and strategy and to engage with them to look at the economic and social impact of Arts and Culture on Society. I also make staffs for walking. 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Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 16:12:26 +0000
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