Taking Time

Taking Time Chris Welsby, Gabriola Island, BC, December 2020 In a recent broadcast of CBC radio's 'Unreserved,' I listened to Rosanna Deerchild interviewing a number of First Nations office workers in Toronto. One of the people interviewed had a habit of going across the road to a small park on his lunch break, rather than heading to the local cafe with his co-workers. As it turned out, he didn't take a book, or a pen and paper, or a cell phone. He didn't even take a sandwich or a cup of coffee; he just sat quietly for an hour in the one little patch of green that was available in his surroundings. When asked what it was that he was doing for all that time, he replied, "Oh, just staying in touch." As if it wer e the most natural thing in the world... ___________________________ I have been invited to write the opening chapter for a book on experimental film, and landscape at a time when the world is in crisis. As I begin this paper, it is August of 2020. The world is in the grip of a global pandemic and half of the West Coast of North America is burning. Wildfire casualties compete with daily death tolls from COVID-19 for attention from the ad-choked media. At the same time, a different and more direct form of communication is making its self felt. It is as if the planet is trying to communicate something and doesn’t need the help of social media or technology to do so. The air is thick with smoke. It is loaded with tiny poisonous particulates, too fine for a facemask to filter out. They enter our blood stream with the ease of a radio signal entering a building. It is time to listen carefully to what we are being told and the work I have made over the last half century and continue to make is intended to help facilitate a long overdue, and hopefully less toxic communication. This essay will be a departure from my previous writings, if only in the recognition that the future of humanity is hanging in the balance as I write. Confusion and despair is widespread but if the Pandemic has taught us anything at all it is that there can be no return to “normal” Normal is the pathology we must learn to do without. When I began making films as a member of the London Film Makers Co-op in the early 70s, we were living in a very different world. A degree of post-war euphoria still persisted and the environment was seldom mentioned in mainstream media. Few people thought to question the sustainability of the economic prosperity we enjoyed. Landscape art was sill living in the shadow of Romanticism and for years I have presented my work under the banner of “Beyond the Sublime.” Way past the turn of the century landscape was regarded as an escape but gradually that is changing and now we are beginning to understand that it is the hapless city dweller who is trying to escape. And whilst these billions of bemused city dwellewrs struggle to raise and feed a family just beyond the city gates cothing large and aggressive At that time, I saw my practice as being more of an abstract philosophical exploration, driven in part by the desire to wrestle the moving image away from the entertainment industry and engage it in the making of art. It is now sixty years since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the consequences of industrialization and unrestrained consumer capitalism are too calamitous to be ignored. To my surprize, my work is now being re-evaluated by a younger generation of artists and scholars. Perhaps Landscape art is finally free from the stigma of the sublime and the Romantic art of the distant past. And this is as it should be because, as artists, we are all charged with the task of making meaningful art at a time of imminent global catastrophe—and we must do this without succumbing to hopelessness (more images of melting ice caps etc), or to the mind numbing distractions of TV and Social Media. What is the place of art in the midst of global collapse? This is the question we're all struggling with, and there will probably be as many answers as there are artists. My intention has always been to start with my own immersive experience of the natural world and create a second immersive experience in the space occupied by the viewer and although I have worked across a range of different media, I have always tried to address the same all important issue: What is technology for and what can be done to re position ourselves and our technology back with in the natural world. Sadly the arts have become an increasingly marginalized activity and experimental film and video is even more removed from the general public. However, these are exciting times and Chaos theory maintains that a little bit of input can produce an enormous change in output over time, so perhaps we should not despair too quickly? I am both moved and daunted by the words of Toni Morrison: This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.  Essay in The Nation titled No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear, March 23, 2015 We are challenged by these calamitous times to expand our limited sense of who we are. It is not a great leap to surmise that we would all find it harder to tolerate environmental destruction if we did not feel so not separate from the environment. If we were able to experience ourselves as part of nature—not just cerebrally, but in an embodied way—we might be more committed to saving it. And by extension, saving ourselves. "If" is the operative word here. It is no mean task to shift into a more embodied experience of ourselves and nature. Will future advances in technology support such a shift? I have my doubts that it will be effected through the Transhumanist vision of a technologically-enhanced intellect and physiology. There is no doubt that new technologies will play a major role in our future as a species, but there is a real danger that, unconsciously or not, they will continue to serve the same corporate elite and perpetuate the human predilection for domination and control. Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade. FOOTNOTE # 1 Regarding AI, it would be prudent to ask what kind of intelligence we are we hoping to enhance. Will it perpetuate the same old dualistic split between humans and nature or will it support a more participatory engagement with nature? Will it reflect the wisdom and intelligence of our indigenous cultures?  _____________________________ In what follows, I will briefly discuss the early influence of painting on my moving image practice and I will describe three pivotal experiences of landscape that I have not documented before: an encounter with nature in the New Forest, UK, when I was younger; a more recent study of the pond in my front garden; and my lifelong affair with sailing. I will reflect on my art practice in light of the current environmental crisis, with a focus on three interrelated themes: my own embodied experiences of the natural world; some of the writings that have helped me to realize and develop my ideas; and a few examples of my art projects, past and present. The projects will include two early films shot in the UK: Seven Days and Park; two New Media projects made in Canada:  Time After and Tree Studies; and three recent films shot in Mexico: Momentum, Desert Spring and Casting Light. Though the constraints of this paper do not permit detailed elaboration on the works of people who have shaped my practice, I would like to acknowledge the following writers for their influence on my thinking and my work: Toni Morrison, Donna Haraway, Morris Berman, Richard Tarnas, Andrew Pickering, Gregory Bateson, Viveiros de Castro and Martin Heidegger. I would also like to acknowledge the good counsel of my father, Reginald Welsby, who served as a Meteorologist in the RAF during the second world war. My continuing challenge is to generate a collaborative experience in which technology is not invisible and not being used to dominate the landscape or re-purpose it as a backdrop to some kind of human drama. Instead, authorial control is intentionally reduced to allow nature to become a driving force in a partnership where agency is shared with technology (the camera), the viewer and the artist. My hope is to evoke a shift in the habitual human experience of being a separate subject in a world of objects: to invite the viewer to a more inclusive experience in which the sense of separation has a chance, if briefly, to dissolve. PAINTING AND FILM I was a painter before I became a filmmaker and my experience with painting was an important influence in my early development as an artist. I still see it reflected in the kinds of projects I choose to make.  Both the landscape painter and the filmmaker are inevitably dealing with the problem of time. For the painter, very briefly, I propose that the process works something like this: The painter observes a breaking wave, mixes a little grey paint, then puts a dab on the canvas. By this time, the wave has gone. The painter then sees a little red boat, mixes the colour and places it on the canvas. The sun then comes out, the boat moves on and everything looks different. Another wave breaks and this is added to the shoreline, close to the first wave, just as a walking figure appears on the beach. The painter mixes the paint to correspond with the blue of her coat and lays it on the canvas—by which time she is gone... And so it goes, until the canvas is filled. The end result looks very much like a still image, but is actually made up of multiple moments in time. I became fascinated with the realization that the daubs of paint were much like single frames in a time-lapse film. As the realization became more persistent, the focus of my art practice shifted from painting to film. PARTICIPATING CONSCIOUSNESS and THE NEW FOREST Cultural historian Morris Berman adopted the term “participating consciousness” in 1981 to describe an ancient mode of human cognition in which the perceivers do not experience themselves as separate from the world perceived. FOOTNOTE # 2 _____________________________ In August of 1970 I had a seminal experience of "participating consciousness" that has sustained and informed my art practice ever since. I was a first-year art student at the time, and though based in London, I would often head for the countryside on the weekends and holidays. On this particular occasion, I was visiting the New Forest in Hampshire. This is the largest remaining forest in Northern Europe and I was eager to see as much of it as I could. I borrowed a suitably docile horse and headed out of the stables shortly after dawn. As it transpired, I was not destined to see a lot of the forest, but what I did see changed everything. It was one of those blustery days when one weather system after another keeps rolling in off the Atlantic. Heavy showers were followed by moments of intense sunlight and saturated colour. Huge back and white clouds drifted ominously over a cobalt blue sky. As I rode through stretches of open heathland and densely wooded hills, the sobering constraints of my city life fell away and the sheer intensity of each passing moment made me laugh aloud.  I came to a clearing in a grove of ancient oaks. The grass was glistening and light was reflecting off a million raindrops. In the clearing, a pool of silver and black rainwater was pitted with rain and animated by fierce gusts of wind. Dark cats-paws competed for the surface, fragmenting the reflections of passing clouds and swirling branches. For what felt like an age, the horse and I were motionless in the clearing, rain pouring over us in one moment and bright sunlight steaming our coats in the next. The whole scene was alive, suffused with a supernatural light. Wind rushed through the clearing like a dancing dervish, casting leaves and branches before it in a wild cosmic dance. As I breathed in, everything seemed to rush toward me; as I breathed out, the trees and the wind drew breath in return. I was transfixed, no longer separate from my surroundings. It was as if everything, myself included, was connected to everything else by an invisible web, finer even than the glistening webs of spiders that hung in the trees.  SEVEN DAYS  In Seven Days (1974), I tried to recapture the essence of this experience through film in a very different landscape on the west coast of Wales. The shape and duration of the film are co-authored by three forces: my actions as the camera operator, the rotation of the earth and the rapidly-changing patterns of the weather. The seven days were shot consecutively and each day started at the time of local sunrise and ended at the time of local sunset. One frame was taken every ten seconds throughout the hours of daylight. The camera was mounted on an equatorial stand—a device used by astronomers to track the stars. In order to remain stationary in relation to the star field, the device was aligned with the Earth's axis and rotated on its own axis every 24 hours. Rotating at the same speed as the Earth, the camera was always pointing at either its own shadow or the sun. Image selection (sky or Earth; sun or shadow) was controlled by cloud cover—whether the sun was in or out. If the sun was out, the camera was turned toward its own shadow; if it was in, the camera was turned toward the sun. A directional microphone was used to sample sound every two hours and the samples were later cut to correspond in space and time with the image on the screen.  The overall shape and pacing of the film were created through the interactions of the film-maker, the rotation of the planet, the film technology (i.e., the camera) and the ever-changing weather. To watch this film is to feel the bite of the wind and rain in your face, along with the heat from the projector lamp, the chatter of the shutter, the chafing of the film as it rolls onto the take-up spool and the projector beam as it casts the flickering shadows of the camera onto the movie screen. My intention was to create what Andrew Pickering, social historian and physicist, refers to as a "dance of agency"—in this case, a partnership between nature and technology in which the filmmaker participates without directing. In Pickering's words, Dualist understandings foster a worldly stance of domination and “enframing," as Heidegger called it. Nondualist ontologies point instead to an experimental openness to what the world can offer us, a stance much less prone to evoke the sorts of social and environmental catastrophes that are coming to characterize the 21st century. FOOTNOTE # 4 SHARED AGENCY and HOMEOSTASIS The idea that we are separate subjects in a world of separate objects emerged as part of the Enlightenment and strongly informed the reductionist sciences that followed. The belief that we can objectively see the world through a frame is seductive and powerful, as our technological progress of the last few hundred years will attest. But this limited understanding of the world ran into serious problems in the post-relativistic 20th century. To believe that the mind has an objective existence outside of nature is, of course, a contradiction in terms, as quantum mechanics has made clear. By the mid-1920s, this fundamental principle of Newtonian Science was brought into question when it was found that it no longer applied to events as they approached the speed of light. FOOTNOTE # 5 With the arrival of Chaos Theory and a proliferation of new cross-disciplinary sciences based on performative interaction and probability, we began to really register that we are not separate from our surroundings—that in fact, we are all, scientists included, engaged in a dance of agency with the world around us. By the second half of the 20th century, these ideas migrated to the humanities, kindling a renewed interest in indigenous cultures and eastern cosmologies. The writings of Gregory Bateson first interested me in the phenomenon of shared agency as expressed by homeostatic systems. FOOTNOTE # 6 The term 'homeostasis' is used to describe self-regulating systems, natural or man-made, that are able to maintain a stable internal equilibrium despite fluctuations in their immediate surroundings. A good example is the human body, which is able to maintain a temperature of 98.6 Fahrenheit amid wide variations in external temperatures. Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind was a strong early influence on my practice. In particular, the notion of shared agency in self-regulating systems has influenced the construction of many of my movies and installations, including Seven Days, Park and Tree Studies.  THE POND An influence that continues to delight me and teach me about self-regulating systems is the pond in my front garden. It grows a filigreed layer of reflective weed during the hot, rainless summer that protects it from evaporation. As clouds gather through the fall, rain soon tops up the water level; as winter arrives, the protective layer of weed thins out and becomes compost. Slime quickly follows, and this rich food source attracts bugs and worms. These are now eaten by two fat koi who further process the nutrients and encourage the water lilies to grow. The lilies appear just in time to shelter a stampede of mating frogs that emerge noisily from the nearby woods in the spring, leaving a trail of eggs on everything that grows. A heron shows up from time to time, hoping to catch the fish or frogs that become more visible as the water loses its protective layer of weed. And so it goes, year after year—a self-sustaining, homeostatic ecosystem that draws its sustenance from its immediate surroundings, providing habitat for fish and frogs, and visual pleasure for me. I am no biologist, but even I can see that this pond is not operating in isolation or on blind chance alone. The various phases of its yearly cycle are a lovely example of homeostasis in nature. Each life form shares agency with the others in the maintenance of the ecosystem as it responds and adapts to changes in its environment—evidence, perhaps, that there are forms of 'cognition' beyond those we have traditionally ascribed exclusively to humans. In fact, beginning with Santiago Theory of Cognition, there is a growing body of research which maintains that evolution itself is a cognitive process. FOOTNOTE # 7 PARK FILM, 1972 I used the idea of a homeostatic system in Park Film, 1972. Recorded over a period of three consecutive days, the pacing of the film is determined by the flow of people along a busy pathway in a London park. One frame of film is exposed as a person on the pathway enters the frame and a second frame is exposed as they leave. (The viewer can clearly see the build-up of superimposed figures at each side of the image). The flow of people through the park is in turn determined by morning and evening rush hours, the weather and chance. On a stormy day, for example, walking home through the park will be considerably less attractive than catching a bus, so pedestrian traffic will likely decrease. Less predictably, a broken traffic light between Notting Hill and Knightsbridge may abruptly stop or wildly increase the flow of pedestrians, depending on weather and time. The number of film frames exposed and the interval between each will vary accordingly, and through all of these moment-by-moment interactions, the speed of the action we see on the screen will slow or accelerate. It is the shared agency between the weather, the city, the movement of people and the mechanics of the camera that give this film its unusual pacing, its duration, and its dramatic contrasts of light and weather. To quote Andrew Pickering once again: I think it makes sense to say that everything in the world—cats and dogs, rocks and stones, all engage in performative interactions with their environment. …Dances of agency have their own inner dynamics and an emergent quality—in dances of agency we find out how to react to the unexpected; their trajectory takes shape in real time, rather than being structured by pre-existing causes or whatever…. FOOTNOTE # 8 SAILING When we travel by car we are well-protected from the weather. It is as if we were watching it on TV. We pass through it, but we are not connected to it. In a sailboat, however, we are actually in the weather. We have to work with the weather to get from A to B. It is a collaboration between human, technology and nature. In a car, you can be in a hurry. You can drive and still stay in your head for most of your journey. In a sailboat, you have to be in your body and in the moment, with all of your senses attuned to every nuance of wind and tide. The journey really is the destination, and your participation is a partnership. You are sharing agency with nature and technology. I have been sailing for half a century and this dance with weather and tide has had an enormous influence on my work. At the age of eight, I saved enough money delivering newspapers to buy an eleven-foot open sailboat. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of sailing and the sea. I taught myself to sail and had many adventures in my little boat. Later, at school, I was put into sailing boot camp. I was so terrible at football and cricket that when they found out I could sail, they put me where they hoped I might do something useful for the school. It was a rigorous program run by a team of veteran dinghy racers. We were trained on an eleven-foot International Moth, a boat I had hitherto only admired from afar. I mention this formative experience because it was through the course that I learned what it meant to be fully immersed in the landscape. With eyes open, we learned to read the sky and the surface of the water as if it were a moving map.  With eyes closed, sailing upwind in blindfolds, we learned to “read” the same complex information with our bodies. Relying only on our senses, we learned to assess the full power of the wind in the sails, the currents on the water and the responses of the boat to every fluctuation in direction and speed. The training enabled me to sail competitively for the school and survive a few storms at sea. More importantly, perhaps, it had a fundamental influence on my art practice later in life.  MY FATHER That said, one doesn't need a sailboat to make a connection to the natural world. My father, who was a meteorologist in the RAF, taught me that if you stand with your back to the wind in the northern hemisphere, high pressure is always to your right. If you slowly rotate, keeping your back to the wind as it shifts, you will always have some idea of what the weather is likely to do next. Thus, using nothing more than the hairs on the back of your neck, you can be connected to the gigantic thermal forces that drive our weather and climate. With one simple exercise, you are no longer a subject in a world of objects, but a participating element in a dance of agency where collaboration takes the place of domination and control.  SAILING AND FILM In the late summer of 1969, I returned from a keelboat race between the south coast of the UK and Vigo, in Northern Spain. It had been a tough race with gale force winds for much of the way. We had staggered into Pool Harbour just before dark the night before and I was sitting in the warmth of the sun in a state of exhausted reverie, watching as the boat swung safely on her mooring. On a whim, I borrowed the skipper's super-8 mm camera, tied it to the wind vane on the self-steering gear and let the wind and tide make a film. This was my first film, and the first of many wind-powered projects to come.  WIND VANE, 1976 My first 16-mm project was Wind Vane, 1971, a twin-screen film shot on Hampstead Heath, London. The original is comparatively well-known, so I will instead describe Wind Vane ll, a single-screen, three-camera version, shot in 1976, which has been recently restored by the British Film Institute in London. In this film, agency was shared in real time by the wind, the wind vane, the film-maker and the image-making technology. Three cameras were mounted on wind vanes and placed in a triangular configuration at the western end of Hampstead Heath, London. A microphone was placed beside each camera to accentuate the familiar, though generally baffled sound of wind hitting a mike. The wind vanes were equipped with sensors that measured the wind speed at each camera. The data from the sensors was relayed to a custom-built circuit board designed to activate the camera where the highest wind speed prevailed. That camera would continue running until one of the other cameras was activated by a stronger gust of wind. Then another, and another, until all three cameras ran out of film. Everything ran in real time and the film was fully edited by the time it was back in the can. INSTALLATIONS Between 1995 and 2015, I began a long and productive collaboration with Vancouver artist and software designer, Brady Marks. Together we made a number of large-scale computer-driven gallery installations. Three of them, Trees in Winter, Tree Studies and Heaven's Breath were driven by real-time changes in wind speed and direction as they were happening outside the gallery. A fourth installation, Time After, is neither a movie nor a still, but a technological hybrid designed to record the larger time scales of natural events like day and night, seasonal changes and even climate change.  For me, the promise at the heart of digital technology was that it would enable me to present current real-time events in the gallery—rather than limiting me to filmed records of retrospective events (e.g., Wind Vane and Seven Days). Of course, there were drawbacks to working with the weather in real time. E.g, on the opening night of Trees in Winter at the Images Festival in Toronto, Brady called me in Vancouver to inform me that there was absolutely no wind. What should she do? "Enjoy the party,” I replied. If there was no wind, the image and sound would be frozen and the viewer would simply have to wait for the wind to blow—or come back on a windy day. The new technologies opened up a wide range of creative possibilities. I have chosen Tree Studies and Taking Time to represent this period of my art practice. TREE STUDIES Tree Studies was a weather-driven gallery installation commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, in 2008. This installation is one of a series of similar works with the generic name, Trees in Winter, (2006), borrowed from the poem of the same name by Silvia Plath.  The interactive system that drives the installation takes data in real time from wind sensors positioned on four different continents around the globe. The data is relayed to the gallery in real time via the internet to determine frame rate, image and sound edits and sound mix levels. In effect, the installation operates like a wind-powered editing suite in which all decisions are made by incoming weather data. The incoming data is displayed on a console on the gallery wall, prominently exhibited as part of the installation. One of three different viewpoints of the same tree is visible to the viewer at a time, depending on wind speed and direction. Covering the circular floor of the gallery, a large compass rose made of tiny LED lights indicates the wind direction at the weather station that is driving the work in that moment. Input from the weather station pushes the system toward instability, cross-cutting from one camera angle to another. Shifts between modes of generative sonic representation constantly create new and unexpected combinations of image and sound from the same set of pre-recorded components. The ‘shape’ of the work at any given moment is governed by the forces of nature, both local and global. The installation is a collaboration between nature and technology in which both are seen as interconnected parts of a living system. As with actual trees in an actual landscape, the representation in the gallery changes its form and appearance in response to input from the weather. The flickering, ephemeral nature of the projected image combines with the changing winter light to create an uneasy equilibrium between the power and presence of the tree, the transitory nature of the light and clouds, and the human presence in the landscape. The overall feeling of the work reflects both the enormous thermal energy that drives the global weather and the vulnerability and transitory nature of all living systems. TAKING TIME, 2008 Taking Time was a real-time gallery installation, first exhibited on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. Three further iterations of the piece were shown in Vancouver, Canada, Auckland, New Zealand, and Nantes, France. The latter, which is described below, is titled Time After. TIME AFTER In this installation, a custom software program slows the digital imaging process down enormously. The idea was to create a camera system capable of recording the long slow changes normally associated with the extended durations of natural change (e.g., in weather, seasons, tides, daylight, etc.) that are so often imperceptible to the human eye. As the refresh rate gets slower, human activity becomes less noticeable, eventually disappearing altogether. Instead of using the lines and frames of a conventional video image, the software chooses small groups of pixels at random from the web-cam image and relays them to the image in the gallery. The process is continually repeated, gradually filling out the image as our painter in my earlier example filled the canvas. Unlike the painter's work, however, the image is never complete because the pixels are constantly erasing and replacing themselves. Using this system, the photographic image is never blurred by motion, as it would be by its photographic relative, the 'time exposure.' The whole image is always sharp, no matter how fast or slow the moving object, event or sequence of events may have been. FOOTNOTE # 9 The project was viewable live online in Nantes for three years (14th June, 2013, till 14th June, 2016). I have a rather ambitious plan to make a 100-year version of this piece. Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable. —TS Eliot, first of the Four Quartets RECENT WORK In my recent art practice I have chosen to take a break from the large-scale computer-driven installations of the previous fifteen years and return to working alone with a single portable HD camera. My practice now is simpler, more spontaneous and less time-consuming. The change coincided with my departure from academic life and the opportunity to live half-time in Mexico. Getting to know a different culture is exciting and intense. There is much to learn—I am not yet fluent in the language—and for a fugitive from northern climes, working in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile landscape is both challenging and inspiring. MOMENTUM Mexico, 2015 The only constant is change: Heraclitus AD 530 -470  Momentum was shot in the ruins of the Hotel Bahia Azul in La Manzanilla, Mexico. Violence, corruption and political intrigue were foundational in both the creation and destruction of this hotel, which makes it an excellent metaphor for disaster capitalism, or at the very least, for the inevitable decline of all things man-made. (The average lifespan of concrete constructions is 50 to100 years.) I shot and edited the movie to make it look as if the huge cement ruins are in motion. Everything is seen to be running downhill. Even the concrete and steel are just showers of swirling pixels, dust and rubble. As it all moves inexorably toward a reluctant reunion with nature, nature moves to meet it, slowly but also inexorably, as the ocean advances from the west and the mangroves encroach from the east. This film was shot during a time of personal crisis. The tempo is fast and erratic, the imagery ragged and disjointed. My disillusioned state found a perverse comfort in the personal graffiti that adorns the crumbling walls of this once grand hotel. The magnificent gang-tags give evidence of angry defiance, testifying to the creative energy of the culture's dispossessed. In the words of Mexico’s celebrated writer, Carlos Fuentes: Mexico’s ruins are the vital ruins of the nation’s origin, the debris of projects promised and then abandoned or destroyed by other projects, natural or human, but always proximate to something that an innocent look can only identify as a perpetually original force. FOOTNOTE # 10 New constructions, unfinished building and buildings in decline are in evidence on every street. The history of the Hotel Bahia Azul is one of human greed, political intrigue, violence and disregard for human rights. It was built on the sacred ground of indigenous people and given in exchange for political favors. Sadly, it was mainly hotel and construction workers who died in the blast when a poorly installed propane generator exploded. The opening section of the film draws the viewer quickly into a claustrophobic experience of collapsing concrete walls and ceilings. The restless camera then gradually offers a more three dimensional perception of the space. In the final section of the film, the brilliant red flowers of a bougainvillea accompany a gradual opening into the lush greens of the coconut palms that will one day return the land to its original state. DESERT SPRING Mexico 2017   Shot in the Sonora desert, Mexico, in March of 2017, I view this video as a joyful little musical trio composed of camera (autofocus), wind and some remarkable desert flowers that I came upon high on the shady side of a mountain. There is hope in this movie—prompted in part by the surprise of finding such delicate beauty in the midst of such harsh climatic conditions.  The view of the desert from high on the mountaintop was spectacular that day, but I wanted to capture the close-up detail, to draw the viewer's attention away from the more dramatic long view to what might easily have been overlooked in the face of it. I have generally avoided the picturesque and the long shot in favour of the close up. The media is already choked with spectacular images, historically of beauty and more recently of disaster. We watch the ice caps melting, the plastic islands growing, the air becoming more poisonous, and it fills us with despair. I think of this as the New Sublime—disaster porn that raises TV ratings and sells product. It is fast-paced, well-shot and sexy, but it doesn't inspire change, any more than the warning images on a cigarette pack inspire the addict to quit. Despair is the problem, not the solution. In Desert Spring, I invite the viewer to stop for a moment, as I did on my walk, and take time to look at these exquisite little plants clinging to existence by the side of a dusty desert trail. I want to offer an experience of a nature that is alive and well and still accessible. I want to work with images that are similar to the ones most people can choose to experience: in their local park or back yard, on their day at the beach or their walk in the woods. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment... Thich Nhat Hanh CASTING LIGHT Mexico, February 2019 Casting Light is my most recent video, shot just before the pandemic travel bans of early 2020. It is a comparatively late addition to the long and respectable tradition of the single take film. The success of this genre generally depends on the filmmaker’s ability to isolate some aspect of the world and 're-present' it with a minimum of mediation. It is my hope that in choosing the single take approach, I might facilitate a moment of "participatory consciousness"—i.e., a shift in perception in which the gap between subject and object is dramatically reduced. I'd like to think that the more immediacy we are able to bring to our experience of the world, the greater our chances might be of discovering what is needed to save it. The video is a low-angle, continuous take of a clear pool and waterfall deep in the tropical jungle. An ape-like rock formation standing ominously at the crest of the falls is playfully referred to as an ancient river god by the voiceover that dominates the first few minutes of footage. Fish dart busily back and forth in the pool, unaware that they are probably doomed. The river downstream is already dry and it will be months before the rains come—if they come at all—to replenish this once-fertile river valley. Oblivious to their fate, the fish continue to compete for food and shade—crude, if obvious metaphors for the human predicament. When the voiceover falls silent, the viewer is freed to immerse themselves in the clear water and to contemplate the scene with fresh immediacy. Drawn almost hypnotically into the magical world below the surface, they can now bring their own thoughts, associations and responses to the mix, sharing agency with the filmmaker and creating a parallel narrative of their own. FOOTNOTE # 11 ___________________________ I put my camera and tripod securely into my pack and make my way back down the dry riverbed to the village. The cool ocean breeze is refreshing and I decide to have my dinner at Pedro's beach taverna. Pedro is a first nations fisherman with a wicked sense of humour who I've known for many years. On his advice, I order the fish 'special,' which turns out to be very special indeed. In my best Spanish, I say, "Pedro, the food was excellent tonight. Tell me, please—what kind of fish is it?” Pedro looks thoughtful. "I am glad you enjoy it, señor," he says. "What kind of fish would you like it to be?” FOOTNOTES # 1—Donna Haraway. From You are Cyborg, Wired Magazine, www.wired.com, 1997/02 # 2—“Participating consciousness" involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene. Alchemy, as it turns out, was the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West." Wikipedia # 3—From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams: In a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that ‘it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. # 4— Andrew Pickering. New Ontologies—Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain, 1940-2000, 2008. # 5— Expanded Cinema: Notes on twentieth-century encounters with art, science and technology, MIRAJ, 5: 1 & 2, pp. 88 – 107: In the strange field of quantum mechanics, the chance–like behavior of subatomic matter turned out to be extremely resistant to reductionist methodology. In particular, it was the question of “decoherence” that was vexing to those who insisted that matter should behave consistently as a particle or as a wave. In the now–famous “Two Slits Experiment," an electron is fired at a perforated metal plate. Newtonian Physics predicts that, as a particle, the electron should pass through one or the other of the two apertures in the metal plate. As a wave, on the other hand, the electron should pass through both Slits at the same time. However, in the world of quantum mechanics, the electron reaches the other side of the plate as both a particle and as wave. The problem is further compounded because obtaining an accurate position in time affects the position of the electron in space, and obtaining a position in space affects the position of the electron in time. The experiment demonstrates that, at a quantum level, the very act of taking a measurement alters the system that is being measured. It follows that, in the subatomic realm, the spatial and temporal coordinates of matter can only be expressed in terms of probabilities. Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”, first formulated in 1926, challenged the framework of an objective viewpoint that had been at the core of classical physics, and laid the groundwork for a shift of Western scientific practice from a descriptive science toward one that articulated relationships between particles as an abstraction based on mathematical probability. The window separating the experimenter from the experiment had collapsed, along with the collapsing wave fronts of subatomic matter. # 6—Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential ‘runaway’ if uncorrected. The regenerative potentialities of such subsystems are typically kept in check by various sorts of governing loops to achieve “steady state.” Such systems are ‘conservative’ in the sense that they tend to conserve the truth of propositions about the values of their component variables—especially they conserve the values of those variables which otherwise would show exponential change.— Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind P447 Paladin Books UK 1973 # 7——Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980.  # 8— Andrew Pickering. Against Human Exceptionalism. Written for the workshop What Does it Mean to Be Human? Exeter University: Department of Sociology and Philosophy. See also: Andrew Pickering. Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. November 2007. Berlin, 2007. # 9— Incidentally, the first photograph, The View From the Window at Le Gras, 1826, was taken by Joseph Niépce in the nearby village of Varennes, France. It took six hours to expose and I imagine that a comparatively eventless rooftop view was chosen in order to minimize the blurring effect that would have been caused by such a slow shutter speed. # 10— Carlos Fuentes, A New Deal for Mexico. 1997 Berkley 97420 # 11— Casting Light, Voiceover: Chris Welsby, February 2020 This pool is known locally as La Fuente. It is hidden deep in the jungle, an hour's climb from a busy little fishing village. The water is cool and clear and on a good day, only small white clouds punctuate the blue arch of sky above.  The light from the sun reflects off the surface of the pool and as if by magic, shines out into the room where you're sitting now. By a similar magic, the water reflects the deep greens of the surrounding jungle canopy. Closer at hand, a different world is revealed below the water's surface.  The fish you see are unaware that, just downstream, the riverbed is dry and the rainy season, if it comes at all, is still many months away. In this little world it is business as usual. Oblivious to their plight, these doomed creatures busily compete for food and shade. The villagers talk fearfully of an evil ogre made from solid rock, who stands guarding the spring. They say this angry river god was formed by fire and water when the planet was still young. Yet it is fear of the future, not the past, that haunts this special place. You feel it coiled in the shadows. You see it in the dust devils whirling through space. You hear it ripping twigs and dead leaves from the treetops. At these times, even the sunlight feels unstable and the voices of children in the schoolyard far below sound somehow transitory and increasingly unreal. Relevant Film Clips: https://chriswelsby.uk https://chriswelsby.uk/film/park-film-preview/ https://chriswelsby.uk/film/seven-days-preview/ https://chriswelsby.uk/installation/taking-time/ https://chriswelsby.uk/installation/trees-in-winter/ https://chriswelsby.uk/film/desert-spring/ https://chriswelsby.uk/film/209 Momentum https://vimeo.com/37228606 Tree Studies Gwangju Biennales, South Korea https://vimeo.com/416082417 Casting Light 18