I’ve just returned from a hectic, whistle-stop weekend in London. I went with the duel purpose of looking for somewhere to live and also participating in a residency project with The Vacuum Cleaner http://bit.ly/BK3jp about mental health. While the residency yielded two interesting little videos with a lot of worthwhile discussion, the house hunt ended with two cancelled viewings and a wild goose chase around Archway…… something tells me that looking for somewhere to live in London may require a little tenacity…….
I applied to take part in Ship of Fools http://bit.ly/mMbv2O because I hoped it might help me to start developing some of the ideas that I generate through writing in more visual ways. In particular I’ve retained a morbid fascination with Internet Suicides that originated way before I started this blog. Its odd that it has never really seemed appropriate to write about any of the suicides I have read so much about in any of my posts. I still can’t really articulate what it is about these sad, lonely, yet very public deaths that I find so compelling. Its certainly a very difficult subject to broach, given that most people simply dismiss it as attention seeking or as being too perverse to be worthy of attention.
So I came up with a proposal to document a jump. Fortunately this didn’t require ME to jump off a building (I’ve not had any suicidal thoughts for ages) instead me and James crafted a fairly ingenious low-fi contraption made out of sponges, cardboard and cable ties that would allow a camera phone to make the 17 story drop from the top of his tower block completely intact and still recording video footage. You can see the resulting videos here http://bit.ly/mk6Mis
My favorite part of these films is the hesitation just before the fall. Its powerful to think of making a decision and overcoming that moment where fear threatens to override the wish to jump into oblivion. Obviously we have slowed the footage down to about 10% of its original speed giving the whole thing an air of melancholic detachment.
James and I hope to develop this work somehow, probably first and foremost by just making a lot more videos of ‘jumps’ and seeing which random combinations of falling and spinning create the most interesting video.
