Trampoline Year 10. Surveillance City

Earlier tonight I went along to most of the events taking place today at the Broadway Cinema for Trampoline.
I started on a group walk called the "psychogeographic walk" around the town. My new pal and fellow mm student Sophie was in the group too! She didn't remember me though and that left a wound. We used maps made by Heath Bunting, who sort of led us around but left most of the decisions for us to make. This lasted for 2 hours and I thought it was a nice experience, but I came away not feeling the same as some of the others in the group. I think you could split the group into two exactly, where one half knew exactly what was going on, understood and got something out of it, while the other side didn't really understand it; I definitely stood in the latter. ...if you see any chalk markings on the ground around Nottingham town, that was us!

After this expedition Sophie and I got some coffee and made our way back to the Broadway cinema to see the films.

The first was a collection of short films titled The Surveillance City. I enjoyed the first film, titled The Bodyguard because the music was quite hypnotic; I could hear a synthetic sound that reminded me of a grasshopper, while very high pitched noises were distributed to every degree of the room.

The next film was quite interesting. It was the video diary of a man (Casper Below - direct video link) trying to gain access to the CCTV footage of himself from different shops that he went into during the course of one afternoon one day. In the end he had no luck from any company and he had to go through weeks of stupid bureaucratic letters. I felt I could relate to this because of the problems I had video recording on a tram a few weeks back, and also because earlier on, on the walk with Heath Bunting at the Broadmarsh Centre, we were stopped by a couple of security people telling us not to take pictures or record anymore (documenting the walk)! The person in this film also went through similar trouble when he tried to film at important buildings around London, such as the back of 10 Downing Street. This piece was called Sensitive Building. I like it!

Another film I really didn't understand especially how it related to the surveillance theme, was a film of many jolty, unpleasing to the eye quick shots/video recordings of someone doing there washing up-i think. You couldn't really tell what they were doing, you just saw water, bubbles and heard the noises from the movements. So basically I fell asleep a couple of times because it was SO dull! Reminded me of the Bill Bailey joke on Part Troll though :D

Then I stopped to have another coffee with Sophie.
The she went home.
Then I had a wee.

I went upstairs to the Mezzanine bar because an interesting experiment was supposed to be taking place called "Fortechnique/Fontechniquer" by Cormac Faulkner. I was a bit late and when I got up there there was nothing happening, just a bar.

Then I bumped into Steve who was working there and we went down to the studio where they had an experiment taking place called Satellite Bereau "Join". This was a very cool idea... They hand you a GPS telephone and a bluetooth device. Then they tell you to walk around town for a about half an hour. The GPS device will track everywhere you go, send a message back to them and then project your movements onto a wall, which is then drawn on top of with a highlighter pen. So the idea we had was to go outside and walk the shape of a penis, just to see how i might turn out. They may even well tell us that we cocked/ballsed up their experiment!..that would've been perfect. However, 20 minutes later we got back and they said it tracked it fine and we could see it on the wall. The first question they asked us though was "were you trying to make a shape?" I turned to look at Steve and we both convincingly and innocently said no. It turned out to look like an aircraft, though Steve said it was more like a leaf.

Then an insane man called Frank Abbott performed his "Hoose Memory" in the bar at Broadway. It was so bizarre! He stood there underneath a spot light, holding a remote control connected to two mini amps that had the horns from a fog horn stuck on it. All this connected to a pole he was holding, like a pole used to hold various liquids given to those who are really sick in hospitals. He told an anecdote about the time he was in New York, killing a mongoose, meeting a Jewish couple and how the law prohibited him from driving with the Jewish couple as his passengers with a dead mongoose in boot of his car at the same time.....
It was weird!

Finally I watched the last of the short films.
Here is one of the final films I watched and managed to find on the tube. It is Jeroen Offerman performing the entire Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven backwards and then later reversed the video. It's really amazing!



An eventful evening you might say.


Update:
Here are some more things i've found from Trampoline on the net...

A still image from another short film called A Veritable Logorrhea. It used beautiful language, most of which I couldn't understand though.


A stop motion film I really liked called Lisa and Jean. It was filmed in Nottingham, here's a still.


Here are some films similar to the ones I saw at Trampoline (and by the same people who has their work at Trampoline)...




And here is something cool but I can't figure out how to embed the video like the ones above!