echo - video clip
echo - video clip
echo - multi channel video installation
An egg, top hat, clothes pegs, bird cage and a line of rope - these are just a few of the objects that inhabit the world of echo. In a multi-channel video installation projected across and above the museum cabinet, these objects exit the confines of the film’s original narrative into different realms of time and space.
The objects take on an energy of their own, activated by different hands or animations, playfully shifting, mirroring each other in a dance, turning inward and outward. Accompanying this visual journey is a soundtrack crafted through the digital processing of ASMR-style recordings, capturing the tactile sensations of the objects being manipulated and interacted with.
echo reanimates the objects and actions depicted in some of the early films made by Brighton and Hove’s film pioneers, tapping into the spirit of innovation in digital video collage, utilizing imagery and sounds generated during participatory public events and a workshop with The Wonder Club.
echo presents videos in both monochrome and purposefully intense, digitally-processed green and red, paying homage to George Albert Smith’s 1906 invention of Kinemacolor.
Thank you to all the participants for their rich and valued contributions in the making of aspects of this work.
Archive films courtesy of Screen Archive South East/ University of Brighton/ BFI National
James Williamson: A Big Swallow (1901), Fire! (1901), [35mm tinted], Magic Extinguisher (1901)
George Albert Smith and Laura Bayley: Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900), Hanging Out the Clothes; or Master, Mistress and Maid (1897, Two Clowns (1906), The Miller and the Sweep (1897), The House that Jack Built (1900), Let Me Dream Again (1900) The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899),
Serpentine Dances (1894-5), Edison Co.Fire
George Albert Smith: Kinemacolor Flowers (c 1910), The Sick Kitten (1903)
Lazy Boy (2 min 20, 2023)
Lazy Boy is a short film (5 mins 20 secs) exploring the body in relation to memory, family and mental health. Shifting between three different worlds - a studio rehearsal room, a black void, and a green hilltop – the story of the 'Lazyboy' chair is gradually revealed, spoken by its author, Kerry.
Lazy Boy was made by artists Cole & Joslin (2023)
Performers: Clea Godsill, and Flexer and Sandiland's 'Acting Our Age' Movement Class
Music: James Kirby
With thanks to Mike Samson, Brightfire productions, and Michael Danks, 360 Consultant
Supported by Arts Council England and Research at Central Saint Martins, UAL.
Baggage (4 min 44, 2023)
This video emerged out of a project called SHIFT, made by Cole & Joslin and members of Brighton Women’s Centre.
Filmed during a visit to Stanmer Park, we found a tree with a hole at head height where we whispered our reflections on what we carry. During an interim exhibition at Phoenix Art Space, visitors added their own reflections to this question by completing a postcard, and these were later added to the voiceover of the film.
Baggage was made by artists Cole & Joslin (2023)
Performers: The Shifters
Music: James Kirby
Supported by Arts Council England
video available on request
The Change (trailer)
Cole & Joslin (2022)
Additional footage from
The Kiss in the Tunnel by George Albert Smith (1899) courtesy of Screen Archive South East.
Exquisite Archive (1:11 2022)
Annis Joslin and Seo Hye Lee
A silent video created remotely by Annis Joslin and Seo Hye Lee via a game of video exquisite corpse repurposing early films courtesy of Screen Archive South East’s collection. Annis and Seo Hye are based on opposite sides of the UK, and their collaboration began during the uncertain times of Covid-19, when they began to find ways to test out ideas remotely by exchanging a series of videos via WhatsApp.
Originally made for Days of Wonder, produced by
videoclub and Corridor.
360 film - for best quality change settings
to 4K and use mouse or finger to move around
STATIC invites you into an uncanny domestic and dream-state environment, explored on a VR headset or your mobile phone. Navigating each 360 scene, you witness a character’s confined life as she seeks to cope with her situation. Developed out of a year of working with survivors of domestic abuse, and made during 2020 during the covid pandemic, STATIC is an intense audio-visual experience that plays with your sense of scale and personal agency. The work portrays loneliness, resilience, frustrations in communication and the complex comforts of routine. It is also hopeful, suggesting a move away from the containment of the domestic and the associations of coercive control.
Soundtrack by Isa Suarez
Performers Lilian Mae Deans Allison, Annis Joslin and Susan Merrick
Messy Business:
This is a trailer for a 30 minute film comissioned by People United and made in 2018/19 in collaboration with Sarah Cole with women who attend Joining Hearts, Joining Hands, a support group for survivors of domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Journeying through six passages of time, Messy Business was made with women who have experienced domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Playful, insistent, dark yet uplifting, Messy Business is an elegy to their wisdom, resilience and pain, giving a voice to those who kept quiet but now want to shout off the rooftops.
Consisting of six interconnected segments, the shorter videos can also be used individually, as provocations, activist tools to help people speak about violence in their own lives.
The Look of Love.
Cut to a broken collage of numerous versions of Burt Bacharach’s eponymous song as most famously sung by Dusty Springfield, The Look of Love slowly unravels the illusion of romantic love as sold to us through the pages of glossy magazines. The lover’s gaze is contrived through a sequence of cuts between different male and female air-brushed beauties of the white western ideal fantasy pulled out of magazines and held up like puppets by the artist’s hands. As we watch we may smile knowingly but the dream gradually shatters and the images become fractured and distorted revealing the reality of ageing and perhaps the false promise of love’s myth that we are complicit in consuming. At the end, we are reminded that this was in itself a performance as the artist's hand is seen drawing the final corrupted face from the frame.
Whistling Round Corners (2012 11 mins 55)
As night falls National Trust staff and long term volunteers share private moments and reflections of their time at Mottisfont.
This video was the made during an artist residency at The National Trusts, Mottisfont.