Rick Prelinger in the Prelinger Library, photo by Cory Doctorow

APEngine caught up with Rick Prelinger, Archivist, Writer, Filmmaker and Founder of the Prelinger Archives at AV Festival 10 to talk about archives, home movies and iPhone apps.

I recently saw online a screening of your collage film Lost Landscapes of San Francisco where you were asking the audience to respond to the footage – is this one of the many ways you are enabling people to access the Prelinger Archives?

We’re really interested in different kinds of access to cultural material. I’ve always done screenings and I did CD ROMs and laser discs back when those were bubbling hot media. But I had never thought about the access possibilities of the web because when I moved to California in 1999. I was an Internet user but I wasn’t deeply into net culture. But then I met Brewster Kahle who founded the Internet Archive and he challenged me to put my material online, and so I said, “Yes” without knowing what that would really involve, although I knew that it would mean giving it away, which was a twist. But then after that it seemed obvious. And since then we’ve been constantly rehearsing new ways of distributing material.

There’s the online archives, there has been screenings all over the place, my spouse Megan and I started the Library as a means of taking our print collection, which is quite massive, and sharing it, to see whether it would be a lever for other things to happen. We’ve taken the Library around as well – we’ve built specialised libraries, and we take them into Maker Faire in California. We are going to go to Maker Faire in Newcastle, to see what it’s like.

When you start to define one of the highest callings of the archive is consumptive use, really interesting things happen and you begin to relate to people in a completely different way. All these remarks that we were hearing at the Recycled Film Symposium about tired archivists who are alienated Civil Servants, who are not necessarily helpful, this just doesn’t figure anymore. It becomes much more of a straight across transaction with people where no money changes hands. Collaboration I would say.

I was quite surprised when Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) was saying at the Symposium how difficult she had found working with archives, how they would demand money.

But I think Vicki might have been talking about a time she went to a commercial film archives looking for material. There is no perceived advantage for them to give footage to an artist because it’s not going to lead to sales and their time is at a premium.

You were saying at the Symposium that you are changing your collection policy to focus on home movies. Will you be keeping it restricted to US films rather than opening it up to become a worldwide collection?

We’ve always focused a little more on material from the States. It’s not that we are xenophobic or anything, it’s just that it’s what we do better. We have some materials that are produced internationally, but a lot of our international material is image of the world shot by Americans and I think that’s most appropriate. Footage of Japan probably should be archived in Japan. I’m focused on American history, the American psyche, American consciousness and I think that’s where I would like to stay.

Home movies isn’t an exclusive focus, it’s just what’s excited me and increasingly Megan much more than anything else.

You were saying at the Symposium that you are not trying to contextualise or curate the online collection. Have you ever thought of actually putting together online exhibitions of the work?

I have, I just haven’t had the time to focus on it. I’m really interested in just making more work now.

I made a film in 2004 and I’m starting another larger work soon that I’ve begun collecting for and will have to start editing soon.

You’ve made your latest feature film The Lives of Energy for AV Festival 10. How long did the film take you to edit all the archive footage together?

It took about a week of selection from the database. It took about a week of capture time, because I actually captured over 180 films to work with, it’s easier to look through them beforehand that way, and then I spent about a couple of weeks editing according to a scheme that I had established.

It would be different and it would probably be better if I had six months to really reason it over and think about it. In a lot of ways this is a first draft, but that’s the amount of work that’s appropriate and possible for this project.

I imagine with an archive over 60,000 films having a deadline must help you to make decisions…

Right, the liberation that arises from constraint and all that. The other thing is that other interests percolate – there’s this other film I’m thinking about that’s about mobility and Megan’s working on space-related projects right now.

On the Prelinger Archives site there are over 200 mashups that other people have made with the archive footage. How do you feel about the mashups? Is there any quality control about what’s posted?

That’s what the whole thing is designed to encourage.

There’s no quality control. Anybody can post anything to that collection they want, which is great. If I had the time I would actually trawl the web to try to find more. I started doing it, I went to YouTube and looked at everything that credited us and I wrote to them and I said, “Hey, why don’t you also post to Mashups?” and a bunch of people did, but I don’t have the time to do it.

The physical collection absorbs a lot of time. Besides the meta-archival stuff that I do, I’m really hands-on with the collection, as is Megan, who is also the taxonomist and arranger of the Library. This last year has been a huge year for logging, for selecting new stuff to transfer for viewing.

What we do when a film comes in is we evaluate it by watching it, then if it seems as if it is something that we might want to work with, or might support our sales activities, we will transfer it to video, and ultimately we digitise the video. Then we have to log it and get it into the database – it’s quite labour intensive.

So you are still very much involved in the archiving process?

Oh yes, I didn’t touch film for a few years because I got involved with other stuff and our collection had mostly gone to the Library of Congress – it was a relief to get away from this huge mass of material. But now the huge mass has once again descended, we are collecting home movies now and we have in our front room almost 40 cartons of home movies that we have yet to look at.

Where do you find the home movies?

We buy stuff, people give us stuff, and we find stuff…

Home movies, in the same way that people since the 70’s have been collecting vernacular photography and snapshots, home movies have become now something that connoisseurs collect as well.

Is there a culture in San Francisco of people making work using their home movies? With Mock Up On Mu, filmmaker Craig Baldwin combines found footage and live action, but he doesn’t use his own home movies to tell his story does he?

He shoots some footage, but he doesn’t use archival footage of his own, but he shoots a lot. His Mock Up On Mu has tons of stuff that he shot expressly.

San Francisco is one of the world capitals of appropriation and found footage.

So what artists and filmmakers should we be looking out for?

Ask Craig! I don’t know…we like Brian Boyce. Brian helped Craig on his titles. He works with found material from the mass media and he does very beautiful work.

I’m not the person to ask, I’m a little hermetic. I was a big film buff when I was young. I started collecting film in 1982 and it just pushed everything else out. I stopped listening to rock and roll, I stopped going to the movies, there was just too much to focus on. There was a world of 400,000 or more non-theatrical films that hardly anyone knew anything about it, it was all I could focus on.

Do you go to the movies now? Or do you avoid big budget blockbusters like Avatar and focus on the more obscure home movies?

We (myself and Megan) haven’t seen Avatar but we try to go to the movies, we like going to the movies. This year what did we see? We saw District 9, we saw… what was the other Apocalypse film we saw?

2012?

2012, of course, 2012 was great. What else…? We saw Julie & Julia…

I get a little fed up with documentaries because so many of them are just the same, “My incontinent grandfather, on the morning of his eviction…” They just get too character driven and focused on narrative arcs. Though they may treat different subjects, their structure and execution are so often the same.

So with films like Avatar, how do you feel about the whole hysteria around HD & 3D? Do you feel in some ways that the Internet Archive and the found footage is almost the antithesis of this movement?

Not really, because colour was once a move of that seismic sort, movement to sound was a seismic change of that sort… 3D, which goes back a while; there has always been this move towards greater immersivity.

I live in a fairly non-immersive media world, if you look at my stuff you have to make the jump to it; it doesn’t tie you up in its sensory web.

The other thing about our footage is that to a great extent it’s going to be the matrix for building worlds. I know that people have already used our footage as some templates around which other kinds of effects based stuff is going to be done. So I think it’s all part of a continuum really, I don’t see any great divide.

You mentioned yesterday at the Symposium how music videos use found footage in a very decorative way these days.

Increasingly. It’s similar to how graffiti became a fashion accessory. I guess the issue with appropriation-based work is that a lot of times it has lofty aims. It’s supposed to be critically based or it’s supposed to be a revolutionary intervention in the language of representation or the strategies of representation. Let’s ask more of appropriation. If we are going to do it, let’s keep our loftier goals alive.

Do you think there is a line? That there’s some work that is sacred and shouldn’t be messed with or do you think anything goes?

I think most anything goes. We could reject something if we don’t like it, we can criticise… We can have our doubts about where Kenneth Anger stands on the Hitler Youth but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to do that. We can judge his work after he makes it, not before.

And with your collage films The Lives of Energy and Panorama Ephemera, you avoid adding a narrative; you let the material to tell the story…

Not exactly. First off some people can do that really well. Look at Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu. Mock Up is narrativised beautifully and he says that it’s made easier because of his numerical sequencing and because he divided it up. But he actually did something that is beautifully narrativised. It really works; it’s a mature work, smart.

Panorama is different, Panorama is 64 segments and when you put it together there is an implicit narrative. It’s like – you ever listen to a rock and roll album where you build a narrative between the 11 or 12 tracks? It’s kind of what’s happening with Panorama. And actually I think the narrative is present, in some cases I think it’s up front, other cases it’s maybe a little more veiled, but it’s definitely there.

And you would never make a work of fiction with the footage or…?

I’m not against working with fiction; I’m just not smart enough yet to know how to do that. I think it takes great discipline.

My objection to storytelling isn’t inherent or anything like that, it’s to this idea that storytelling is the only way, that conventional narrative is hard wired. A lot of people say it’s the only way to express a thought, an idea, and a tale. I think that’s just bogus, it’s acculturated.

So what other online archives do you like?

I don’t spend enough time on the Internet, but I think UbuWeb is totally great.

Have you thought of an iPhone application for the Prelinger Archive?

Yes, we were very interested in a Prelinger Archives app and it turns out there is actually a few of them. The Weather Underground media player, which is a web-based app, has a Prelinger Archives section. You know how those apps are, they just look at a website or the XML and they just put a nice skin over it and allow you to touch that.

We are interested in historicising the present. One of the things we would like to do with our fast growing collection of historical images, maps, pieces of text is to figure out ways to superimpose them on the landscape, as a augmented reality thin. Tons of people are working on this kind of stuff, so it’s not giving anything away to say this. But that’s the logical direction for us to move.

Then I guess being based in California it must be a great place to meet these sorts of technically minded people.

There are lots of people who are technically competent and interesting. Also, lots of people who are technically focused, who are interested in real world issues as well. That was one of the great discoveries about moving to the Bay area; that you are never terribly far away from geeks who are doing interesting stuff. I think both of us have gotten more technically focused.

And what do you think of Twitter? I see you have an account.

This hasn’t been a big tweeting crowd at AV. I don’t think a lot of people really understand Twitter’s potential. I’m not trying to boost a commercial service here or anything, Twitter is derived from an old Unix shell command called ‘wall’ where you type ‘wall something’ and then it goes out to everybody in your workgroup. So it’s not a new idea by any means, it just happens to be executed in such a way that it caught on. Of course being California and all that, you know in my field which is MLA, Museums, Libraries and Archives, every morning there is just a hefty handful of tweets that point to really interesting work that people are doing.

Do you think there are always going to be closed archives or do you think archives will move to be more generous about how people work with the archive materials?

There will always be both.

So the Internet Archive always has taken this position that we are going to be very open and very flat, and that anybody who wants to build their own skin is welcome to do so.

It hasn’t happened in the moving images sections. A young man made an app for the music collection, which is huge, around 250,000 items, and he built a skin, a web service that fronts for the Internet Archive music collection. It’s a lot better than ours and I wish somebody would do it for our collection.

One of the things that’s actually a burning issue, is that we have these 2,100 films up and there is active participation – the reviewing and the annotation – but it’s all pretty much fan based, and while the collection is used heavily by scholars, researchers and educators, it’s not a friendly portal for them and they don’t participate, even though they use the stuff. I’ve often thought that it would be great to build an educational portal or research based portal onto the same work where anybody would be welcome, that would have a different focus.

Do people who have used the archive for research ever post their essays up or do you just find them out there on the Internet?

No, there is tons of writing out there. I do a vanity Google search every so often just so we can print out stuff for our personal archives, and there is so much stuff that gets written. Sometimes people even post little essays about specific films or filmmakers as part of the reviews but I think the online archive has been written about thousands of times.

I love reading the student blogs about it when they are doing something – a remix in a class or reviews – it’s very interesting for a 19 year old to write about, coming culturally from a very different place. I just love that kind of bridge building.

With the collection in the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, are you trying to digitise the non-media work as well?

Yes, we partnered with the Internet Archive and we’ve done 3,700 items – books, volumes of periodicals, print ephemera, etc. That project is resting right now because there was a lot of excess scanning capacity that we could take advantage of and there isn’t right now because all the Internet Archive scanning centres are very busy. But I am sure we’ll do more.

We did a body of key works that were out of copyright that are part of a bunch of different collections within the IA. So some of them are part of the American Library’s collection, some of them are part of our New Deal/WPA section – all these amazing, regional guides to the USA that were produced, they’re an incredible repository of information about America, we digitised about 40 of those and we’ve done a lot of ephemera that is quite unusual as well.

The neat thing about our library is if you walk through it you will see if a book has a certain bookmark it means that it is digital as well, so that you can see a book that you like and then you can go and actually download a high quality searchable facsimile of it. So the physical collection serves as a set of pointers or a kind of index to the digital collection rather than the other way around.

It’s an interesting place, it’s not about saving print per se, it’s about reframing how print and digital work together. We love it.

Do you get people working on feature films visiting your Library for research for period films?

No. With the film archives we sell footage to everybody because Getty Images reps us.

Lately, we’ve done Michael Moore… we’ve been in many feature… I can’t even remember what feature films we’ve been in. We sell to feature films all the time.

And that’s what supports the Library?

Yes, that supports us. It’s advertising, it’s cable TV documentaries, it’s feature films, it’s interactive, it’s presentations… We always did that and Getty represents us quite well. And we do certain kinds of jobs on our own that don’t fall under the Getty rubric.

Mock Up On Mu, Craig Baldwin

APEngine asked auteur filmmaker Craig Baldwin about Cold War Paranoia in the underground after the UK premiere of his latest feature film Mock Up On Mu at the AV Festival.

Is this your first trip to Newcastle for the AV Festival?

Well, as a matter of fact I’ve been to the UK four or five times. About five years ago I was invited by Eddie Berg at FACT Liverpool to not only show my film but do a workshop like I was doing right here in Newcastle. So when they flew me over then I knew that I should seize on the opportunity to go visit other sites. And I had already heard about an earlier iteration of the Star and Shadow, which was called the Side Cinema, so I booked my own tour, so to speak.

So that’s why I feel comfortable with the people at the Star and Shadow because I met them earlier.  I mean, they’re still young now but like five years ago they were just kids. They have really great energy, and that’s inspiring to me.

The Star and Shadow Is a great space, isn’t it?

Yes.  I love it.  I’ve got my own little microcinema in San Francisco but it’s only one space, where they have three – the bar, the performance space and the theatre.

And how long has your space, the Other Cinema, been going now?

26 years.

And how do you fund the cinema, if that’s not a personal question?

No, it’s okay. It’s not through grants. It’s through earned revenue – ticket sales. The community supports it.

We keep costs down. I’m not paid, I do it for the love of it and maybe if there’s a little bit of money left at the end of the night, then that’ll buy me beer for the next week.  That’s what it comes down to.

And you’ve recently set up your OCD DVD distribution arm of the Other Cinema.  How’s that going?

I can’t claim that it’s making a whole lot of money. But we’re in the black, that’s for sure. It’s more of a personal vision of a small group of people and I’m glad we’re making this stuff available. It pays for itself and it allows us to do certain things, like meet artists.

We connect the publication of the DVD with cinema screenings, and that allows us to have a presence on panels in festivals internationally, and gets us reviews and things like that.

So to me it’s just stepping up to the next level; opening up the space for experimental makers in the US, because there’s not that many spaces, by the way.

Which experimental filmmakers would you recommend then?  Who should we be looking out for?

Oh geez… Kerry Laitala. Although a name you might not recognise, here is a woman who makes 3D films using the Chroma Depth effect, which is where you don’t need 3D glasses and I think that’s brilliant – It has to do with the way the eye perceives colours and their depth. She is so ingenuous to figure out this technique and then shoot with film stock which is no longer made, and that she is so resourceful to save, to make a new genre of film called Chromatic Cocktails. I think that’s particularly inspiring, but you see that’s kind of a local thing.

I mean it could sure play at Rotterdam, in fact I’m sure it has, but what I mean it represents a fertile activity, especially among West Coast filmmakers. Now you might not be as sensitive to this, but as the United States is quite large there are different regional sensibilities, and in San Francisco we have a very active movement. So I tend to support people who I work with, who I know and I like. As opposed to far off worshipping of Chris Marker, who I’ve never really met, but you know I could say, “look out for Chris Marker” but you already know that.

I know a lot of people who are working with projection and multiple projection. I’m very much into that. We always have shows at the Other Cinema on expanded cinema or projection arts. 3D is kind of part of that. Or Live AV, where people create sound and image simultaneously with the Max/MSP system Jitter, which was developed in San Francisco by the way in the school where I teach. Not to brag, but it’s kind of a local thing that’s gone international.

Makers who are interested in developing either photo-chemical or digital applications to allow people to create new kinds of forms and express themselves in different ways. And to do that at the grassroots level within the neighbourhood not at an institution like Google or even in a college, but really coming at it as a communal interest.

You led the 16mm recycled film lab at the Star and Shadow.  Do you similar work back in San Francisco?

Yes I do it all the time. First of all I do it for myself. I worked my way through school by doing light shows. In fact I’m supposedly helping Vicki Bennett’s AV show tonight – I don’t know what that will be, by the way. I have two projectors in my studio and a lot of time they’re both running.  And so someone might come visit or find a film on the street, or I have this huge archive – you know I’ve only seen like one tenth of those films.

Educational films can be very boring, but sometimes they’re really great. It’s like a process of discovery. I have these for free, right?  Either I pulled them out of the garbage or someone gave them to me. Sometimes you can pull a film out of the pile and be like “what is this?” then put it back – never throw it away.

Or you can find a unique film, like I’ve got something made about Pakistan in 1930 by someone like the British Film Institute in a beautiful Duo Tone or some other obsolete process. Now that’s brilliant.

That film could be worth a thousand dollars -not that that means anything; what I mean is there’s true value when you do that kind of digging through. So I do that all the time, not that I have a lot of spare time to do it.

People come over who are making films, and so we actively search. Bill Morrison was just at my house only three days ago. He was doing something on Frankenstein. So we’ll pull from the pile and then he’ll start looking at the stuff and he’ll be editing in one room. Sometimes we’ll have two or three people editing at the same time. And that’s my kind of a lifestyle. Being around film I love to do it, just to have fun and be just playful with film. “Let’s do a double projection… Let’s take it out on street… Let’s take this over to this other party…” That kind of stuff.

So yes out of that comes this workshop: both in school, and also the workshop that I did at FACT in Liverpool and the one I did in Berlin like three/four months ago.

You said that your collection was divided into six categories – what are they?

I drew them from the Dewey Decimal system. So it’s one of the most general divisions that any person, an intern or a busy artist would be able to find useful. So it’s Natural Science, Social Science, Applied Science or Technology, Geography and History, Humanities, and  Language/Arts, which includes Literature and a few narrative films.

I thought it would be more bizarre.

Oh no, no. Not idiosyncratic at all. I just wanted the most ‘normal’ system that anyone would be able to use. Obviously there’s overlap – conservation could be in Natural Science, but then again it could be in Applied Science.

I’m interested in what we were talking about at the Symposium, the Archival and film history. The value of film and the kinds of film, like industrial film. Industrial film is fascinating to me because the makers don’t get the credit. They have just as much imagination, and more control over what they’re doing in a lot of cases than the Hollywood stuff that gets all the credit. And there are vastly more educational and industrial films. Also there’s a found quality which I like, there’s something absurd about them.

So you collect home movies as well? Is there anything you ever say no to in your collection or do you just take everything?

I never say no. Not wanting to seem like such a whore but basically that’s what I’m saying. I will take anything off the street, you know, it could be pop, it could be like a cartoon…

There’s different kinds of archives. I represent one kind of thing which tries to find value in anything – even the lowest most common thing like a PSA or a commercial.  But also even a scrap or fragment.

The narrative films I have––and I don’t generally collect those––are the ‘odd reels’. In other words, if you have a feature which is 90 minutes let’s say, on three 16mm reels and one reel gets separated from the other two, well what happens to it?  I mean just think about that, I mean just conceptually it’s a bizarre idea.

You’re like an animal refuge for films.

Yes, that’s what we mean by orphan films. They’re little children and for the most part they’re just going to be thrown away because they don’t have any value. And that odd reel doesn’t have value because most people want to see a feature with a complete story. It could be the last reel of Godzilla let’s say. Which is the reel you want to see anyway which has all the action on it.

Like with the extra footage of Metropolis that has been found.

Yes, sure. That’s more in the library. The fetishising of film history, and that’s fine but I’m on the other end of that. I appreciate that but I’m on the other side – of not finding something missing but putting missing things together to make a complete thing out of it, like Frankenstein. It’s not so much analysis, it’s more synthesis.

To actually take the footage and take it to another meaning. It has the original meaning embedded, and then is taken to somewhere else creatively. And that’s kind of a way of adding context too – personal imagination.

Which is what you do.

Yes, I do that when I produce. Collage narrative is a new form; maybe it’s not worth living past my life, but it’s an interesting way of making use of this material. I don’t have to go out and shoot an explosion when there’s already five billion explosions in five billion bad movies. So to use that I think is crafty, it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s sardonic. It represents a critique of the original sensationalism and bombast of the film in an ironic pop art way.

And so with Mock Up On Mu you’re taking real people and you’re fictionalising them. Where did that idea come from? Is it a case of truth being stranger than fiction?

Yes. With the sub-cultural stories. That’s a good history and it’s a true history, the kind of history you wouldn’t hear about in schools. So I feel like I’m doing the right thing by telling this story, enriching everyone’s life by telling a story.

It’s really about my own background. My father worked for Aerojet, and the New Age movement came out when I was growing up. So this marriage of Aerospace and the Occult is really the ground against which I formed my own identity. So that’s why I’m close to it and I’m entitled to make that film.

If I’d just got people to act it out it wouldn’t have the same impact. People have already written the story, in fact there’s two or three book out now; one’s by a British guy, George Pendle. I wasn’t trying to write the story and do the research, what I wanted to do is tell a story in visual terms, with creativity. Like the era of Kenneth Anger, 50s LA guys who were making assemblage, they were making junk sculpture. So mine is a junk sculpture, where form and content are married. That’s what I like to do. That what makes it arty and not just a biography.

If other people want to make biography, that’s fine. You know I could do it if I wanted to, but I’m not interested in reproducing a genre.  I’m more interested in smashing genres. In the way that Vicki Bennett’s work is called Genre Collage. Through mash-ups you see what a genre is.

I’d rather do something more surprising than documentary, more like painting. Here’s a painting of Jack Parsons, you know, and then Marjorie Cameron. It has more humour and more spirit and life to it. It’s funnier and more imaginative; it has more creative energy behind it.

But you have mixed the footage – you shot some of Mock Up On Mu?

Yes, I did. I like that idea, of doing something new. I’m adding, hopefully, to the world of fine art film – this idea of mixing found footage with live action.

It’s a storytelling strategy and it takes a certain amount of bravery, but you know I think it works.  I could go to inter-titles in the archive sections. Everybody would say “Great. He has this archive material and he told us about stuff that’s missing through the inter-titles”. But that’s already part of the convention.

But even the so-called re-enactments are part of the convention, too. But mine weren’t really “re-enactments”, they were more like what Anger was doing earlier on – actually creating poetic gesture.

Does Kenneth Anger know that you’ve used some of his footage in your film?

I don’t know if he knows. And the thing is when Rebecca Shatwell said, “Kenneth Anger would like a copy of Mu.”  My jaw dropped, but I gave it to her.

But you know, I shot it off a piece of toilet paper. There’s one shot of Marjorie Cameron.  But basically it was about ten seconds. But I don’t feel sorry or sad that I ripped him off for that. See the great thing is the distance created by the implausibility of the complex collage I created and the fact that it’s really a true story. It’s all based on real history, like Picasso’s Guernica, which was based on a real event. What I like to do is an historically based thing but with my gestures, be it in the live-action or the stock footage.

I couldn’t necessarily tell the story with stock footage because there’s certain things in the story that aren’t in the stock footage. As I said, most people would solve this problem through inter-titles or a shadow on the wall or shooting from behind or a silhouette or it can be total voiceover – there’s other cinematic strategies.  But we’ll go out and shoot in the desert because the desert looks beautiful and it’s a desert story.

All my movies are about the West and the Southwest. O No Coronado! was about a conquistador, a real story, where he was looking for the Seven Cities of Gold. Are there seven cities of gold? No. Did he change the life of everyone? Yes.

His whole history was based on a lie, a fable. So, it’s to contradict the idea that history is a set of rational decisions. It’s a set of fabulous ideas, dreams, fantasies. I like the idea that what really drives a lot of political decisions is based on fear, or it could be love or desire.

What I have to offer is this kind of mad, fantasy, fabulist thing. It’s in a way like poetry or metaphor, you know? And all of a sudden the way that history’s represented has another presence on the screen, and that’s my right. I have the prerogative to do what I want with those images, with that screen, with those shapes.

So this is my version of the story. There could be other versions but no one else would do it because L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology would sue them. But a guy like me could do it because I’m beneath the radar. So that was my opening, you know, it’s a very small window but I got through it.

If not a lot of people see it in a theatre, it doesn’t make that much difference because people into the sub-culture are going to know it’s out there with the world wide web… So I don’t have to speak to a larger mass culture, I don’t believe in it.

The film is structured as 13 episodes. Have you thought about putting the film up online in episodes?

The first episode is online but I didn’t put it there.

I’m not worried about it, I mean I’ll sell the DVD, I do a lot of work to get stuff out. UbuWeb has put up my stuff, but I don’t complain when that happens. That’s just bound to happen.

And it took you five years to make?

More than that, at least five years.

Is that partly due to the vast amount of material?

If you’ve got a production company, usually you’ve got a lot of money upfront, you kiss a lot of ass, get a lot of money and then hire people and get studios and stuff like that. But that’s not my model.

My model is more closely knitted into my lifestyle. You don’t clock in when you’re making an experimental film, you don’t hire certain people and have a budget. You’ll live with it.

So I could’ve made the film in a shorter period of time, but it’s just more of a trace of decisions I’ve made over a long period: looking at, thinking about, reading more and figuring out problems. So there’s weeks that I wouldn’t work on it at all.

It was six years or so after my last film. But all that time I was doing other things, travelling round the world, teaching, running our gallery, etc.

Also, your DoP or Cinematographer might go out of town and then only come back once every few months – so when he’s there you jump on him. Your actress might not be available. All these continuity problems.

Some of the last pick ups were shot literally five years after the original material, only because my actress came back in, and I said, “I have to have a fix here.” I had to have her in the opening sequence; when Hubbard’s lecturing we realised it would be much stronger if she was listening to him. You know, I hadn’t thought that one through. I didn’t have a script when I shot, which is not the kind of way that feature films are generally made.

So I made an experimental film, but it had to be feature length; it has a big story and deserves feature consideration.

But my thing was more exploratory. When I was in the desert, we shot that fantastic location. I didn’t know how it’d be used, but it resonated and spoke of the same kinds of sensibilities that I was trying to express – something weird about the West, something mysterious.

So I shot it, then later decided it would be the lab – it’s not like it necessarily looks like a lab, but in the allegorical state that I have hopefully brought the audience into – people say, “Oh, this represents the lab.” With the film as a whole, I want people to see the whole thing like a puzzle they would put together. It’s participatory and it demands a bit more of people rather than an easy through-line.

Mock Up On Mu, Craig Baldwin

Yes. And are you happy with the final product? You said there were some edits you weren’t happy with.

No, no.

I think there’s some great things – the idea of mixing live action and found footage is brilliant. (It sounds like I’m patting myself on the back.) The idea of putting words in people’s mouth is genius; I call it ventriloquism, and my next film is definitely going to do that.

But, it’s poorly paced, there’s no rhythm, there’s too much talk, it goes on too long… a lot of things are wrong with it.  Any artist would probably admit that he or she sees flaws.

So, no, I would do other things, but there’s things I did in this case that I have never done before. I’m not a professional filmmaker, I’m a curator, I’m an educator. But I made a film that will carry this story further; it’ll do justice for a very small amount of money compared to what other makers would require, even Kenneth Anger.

It was made out of found materials. It’s like when you make a piece of junk sculpture, using stuff from the beach. I redeemed it, I brought the story out of the stuff that I had.

Is it all footage from your own collection is it? Is it all 16mm or is it a mixture of different formats?

Yes, mostly 16mm. There was maybe 10% video.

Yes, and I noticed that there was a few shots zooming in and out of internet maps.

Yes, everybody’s always picked up on that.

Thomson & Craighead, who spoke yesterday, have made work with online maps.

Yes, well you know I saw that at the Symposium yesterday and thought, “That’s exactly what I did.”  It’s not like they or I invented it, it’s just a great idea, obviously. Am I going to worry about Google maps? No, it’s just a beautiful way of using something available and free. In fact it wasn’t even from my laptop.

But that’s the exception. For the most part it was made out of the stuff that I had available. It’s working with the material one has, like a beatnik guy who has no money and yet can do something magical because of the limitations.

And if you can’t solve it, then you can have your friends make these gestures against the wall. In this last pick up sequence we had to have Marjorie Cameron say something and so I just put my actress against the wall and just filmed it.  And then later put the words in. I don’t know if you remember that, but the point is it’s crude, it’s beautiful.  That’s the aesthetic of it.

I appreciate the funky quality. That’s the aesthetic, which is jerry-rigged, cobbled together, like Rube Goldberg. The whole thing is held together with springs and pullies, like a creaking machine, but it actually works. It’s just a punk rock thing.

There’s something nice about the materiality as well. When you can see the wear on the film. There was one bit where I thought you’d animated a butterfly, and then I realised it’s just a scratch…

I felt terrible about that for so many years, but after a while I said, “Well, in fact that’s cool.” It’s like a piece of marble or wood. If a table is made out of wood and there’s a knot in the wood, that’s cool. And that’s what it is with the film, there’s a knot, there’s the grain, it’s the film. So that again is another level of self-reflection, people see how it’s constructed.

You’ve been making films since the ‘70s. Has the internet made things easier for you to collect or do you still stick to collecting celluloid?

Yes and no. The internet has not made a whole big difference to me except in the case of sound, because my thing remains this resolutely Luddite kind of thing. But the thing is the audio – I really have to give a lot of credit to my editor Sylvia Schedelbauer whose work I showed at the Symposium.

Oh that was great. I loved that bit of the film.

You can get the audio all for free; basically it’s a virtual beach to comb. It’s a little bit more difficult for the picture, the picture would look terrible if you got clips off the internet. But the audio’s worked totally, no one could tell. And there’s so many people who’ve given their stuff up for free; there’s a huge range of things. I have to give Sylvia credit for that.

I’ve been able to find movie sound tracks etc., that’s what I’ve always done. In this case the sounds were more individualised, more creative, more experimental, more industrial-drone that just worked so perfectly. You could make 99 versions of that movie, all with different sound tracks, there’s that much material there.

So, I have to give credit to the online resources too. And those people don’t expect any pay, so it’s not like pirating.  Not that pirating bothers me.

I don’t pirate from other artists, Kenneth Anger is the only example there for ten seconds of this movie. But I pirate from the Hollywood productions or industrial films or educational films, which are mostly in the public domain because they’re 50 years old and their producers are dead and they’re orphans, no one’s taking care of them. I’m doing the best thing for them, I’m giving them a new life.

Anything else you want to say about Kenneth Anger showing his films off DVD last night?

No I don’t want to.  Maybe I’m getting over excited. I almost had a tear in my eye at the screening. Should I have yelled?

He probably would’ve loved that.

Well, I’m not so sure.

But it was very much a thing about celebrity. I admit I’m part of that, I was like “Wow, it’s Kenneth Anger.” I was very excited to see him in the flesh.

Well, he certainly looked freaky. Yes, I loved it. Yes, that part was worth the price of admission.

He could’ve been in your film.

Oh, yes.  That’s what I mean, you could find footage of a person, you don’t need an actor, or a found location, that’s what I’m totally into, like that big dome in the desert. It’s a ‘found’ thing that speaks for itself. It doesn’t represent, it presents. There’s so much weight in the presence of it and that’s a story in and of itself.  Every shot in my movie is like that. There’s a story that resonates at so many levels.

I know I definitely need to watch it again because I just felt like so much was happening. You could almost watch it without the narrative, the imagery was amazing, so strong.

Thank you very much.  Well a lot of people watch Tribulation 99, my early film, with the sound off. All these Americans, they don’t want to hear about Imperialism, they want to see flying saucers. My whole strategy is to take the luridness of cinema and yet take it to a progressive, critical point. I don’t want to make a guilt-ridden, hand-wringing film – I’m glad those films are made, but other people can do them.

But my strength is visual art. I have a certain way of putting the images and sounds together that is provocative. I don’t want to do it for the sake of it, which is what you’d call your experimental film, like at Ann Arbor, it’s like one flower film after another, super close-up of little bubbles and grain – and that’s great, I love it. So I said “Why don’t we take these tools for telling – taking positions, not telling stories, proposing ideas towards something other than a pure formal play?” Formal play’s okay, but actually to create an experimental way of writing history, experimental historiography is what’s needed now, not more avant-garde, big, Abstract Expressionist painters.

That’s fine if you’re an expressionist painter. But my point of view is “every image is political.” This conference could be seen as a way of politicising this issue of archives. It’s like, what use do we make of them?

That’s the question that Anger is totally clueless about with Ich Will!, he’s insensitive. Those images have a history and meaning and he could’ve played with the context of it but he just completely drained them of history and just took the gesture, as if it didn’t contain this tale of the 20th Century.

I like this idea of adding context – that’s why I liked A Short Film about War by Thomson & Craighead. You could see this came from this and this came from that. To me that’s so much smarter, and actually that’s why cinema can’t keep it up.

Yes, it’s demystifying, showing where the source is, real people’s experience of war…

Yes, it’s genius.  I really felt close to that project, I totally got it.  I mean, I had that thought too.  With Negativland, the band I represent, at the end of their record they have pages of sources. I don’t do that because I’d have way too many sources. I just name some for about a minute and then say there are many more.

It’s at least a gesture towards this idea that we live in a vast pool of information, of images and sounds. And that we’re made of that, we’re children of it.  And it’s all in our head already, so you just trigger it and the meaning flows out.  And that’s why all this resonates in your head when you’re watching Mock Up On Mu. What I want to do–and this is the problem with the film –is that it gets a little bit too much, all these overtones.

It’s just like noise music, industrial music or punk rock.  It’s supposed to be loud, it’s supposed to be confusing.

Now if you wanted to coddle the audience then you keep everything plain and simple, and it’s easy. I’d rather do something that’s more disturbing. It’s supposed to be aggressive, it’s supposed to hurt just a little bit. That’s the experience.

So what’s next for you? What’s your next film?

My films are not just about gesture even though there’s a lot of gestures in them… it really has to do with this relationship between gestures and identities and histories.

It’s always an effort to create a set of ideas, I’m trying to get behind to the history and the ideas behind the gestures. For example Nazism. Okay, all those guys in Anger’s Ich Will! are dead. We don’t really want to think about that, I don’t know if that occurred to anyone else… But still we have complete right wing arseholes who are destroying the lives of others. So in other words, Nazism is not dead. So the idea outlives the human flesh.

Cinema is not just about beauty. I see the beauty in ideas. So I’m moving increasingly towards a kind of literature – writing with images is what I want to do.

So my next film is really about literature. It’s about the literature of William Burroughs.  Okay now, William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch, which is a cut-up, that’s exactly what I do.

Now there’s been a trillion films made about Burroughs, but not that many films are made about Guy Debord of the Situationists. The films that are made about the Situationists are all made by the Situationists.

But yet if you look at Paris in the ‘50s where Burroughs and Debord were living in the Left Bank, when they wrote their most famous works – Society of the Spectacle from the Situationists and Naked Lunch.

Well Naked Lunch was actually written in North Africa, but they both were published by the same guy, Olympia Press.  So now I have this triangle like I had with Marjorie Cameron.

They’re historical figures but they represent citation of history in the case of the writings of the Situationists or the collage techniques of their filmmakers. And in case of Burroughs, a very cinematic way of writing literature.

So they were both there working in the same literary circle, but all these literary circles grew within a subculture. Again, another sub-cultural story. Yet it changed the lives of every artist, every citizen and every cultural activist on the planet with what was being born in that little cauldron there, of Paris at that time. Just like I feel in San Francisco sometimes.

So what I’d like to do is create a coming-together of these two minds, which represent the post-War undergrounds of both continents, but also ways of working with found material – found literature, found philosophy, and creating their own distinctive body of work, and the idea of their followers. There’s enough drama there – the intrigues and the deaths and murders and addictions…

The whole thing would operate on this level of critique of literary form. Not form for its own sake, but ideas about how contemporary reality can only be expressed in a collage way, because there’s too much going on. It’s not ideal, idealist or naturalistic. No, it’s Constructivist, it’s multi-layered.

My next film will be called Invisible Insurrection, which was the title of an essay by Alexander Trocchi, who was also there at that time. And they were all addicts, they were all bad people, they were gay and they were drunks… It’s got a good human story. I like taking those ideas and working between the human life of these people, which is exactly like mine, impoverished.

You like anti heroes don’t you?

Yes, anti-heroes, sure.  People who are against the grain.

Astarte (Anaïs Nin) - Kenneth Anger

Dates: 19th February – 27th March | Location: Sprueth Magers, London

Sprüth Magers London is exhibiting ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’, the work by the legendary filmmaker and artist Kenneth Anger, in his first solo show in London for five years. Making films continuously since the late 1940s and considered a countercultural icon, Kenneth Anger is widely acclaimed as a pioneering and influential force in avant-garde cinema. His groundbreaking body of work has inspired cineastes, filmmakers and artists alike. Many channels of contemporary visual culture, from queer iconography to MTV, similarly owe a debt to his art.

The exhibition will feature his seminal 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother. This work, a hypnotic montage of jarringly edited images, shifting intense colours and symbols with a repetitive synthesised soundtrack by Mick Jagger, is typical of Anger’s sinister and subversive aesthetic. There is also an opportunity to purchase signed film stills.

Entry is free. For further information, visit Sprueth Magers

XXX: Get Off at Edge Hill

APEngine talks to artists AL and AL, winners of the Liverpool Art Prize 2009, about XXX: Get Off at Edge Hill, a show they’ve curated to open Metal’s new space at Liverpool’s Edge Hill Station.

I want to ask you about your work as curators, but the background to that you’ve been collaborating as artists for a long time, and I wondered you came to work together as artists in the first place?

AL Taylor: We have been collaborating around 11 years. And that began when we met really – we almost instantaneously began making work together, and it’s just been a progression from there.

AL Holmes: I think the work started coming out of a conversation, which was “How do I do that?”  Or “Can you help me do this?” – and, as everybody knows who works in film and media, you always need hands around to hold cameras or help you with lighting.

Our practice grew out of helping each other, until the point where we realised we were making each other’s work, then to the point where we were making the same work. From there we started asking each other how elaborate the work could become. And I think that curating as well comes out of that conversation.

When did you start curating, as opposed to making?

AL T: Well in a way, since the beginning. We’ve always done shows with friends or peers or people we’ve met in London. Though I never saw it then as ‘curating’, because it was more about knowing somebody’s work that you felt was interesting, and they knew your work. So it was a collaborative curation then of all the artists.

But even so, even at that level, there must be not just a subconscious filtering or or thinking about who would be appropriate artists.

AL T: Exactly – even friends that you’re hanging out with have the same concerns as you and it’s not as if you’re going to hang out with an artist who thinks something completely opposite to you.

AL H: Also there’s a sense in which you’re having a conversation with those people and you find the place. Quite often, in the earlier stage of your career, you’re not being asked by galleries to show work. So you’re finding spaces – in London anyway – that people will come to. And quite often those spaces have a context about them – they’re not like the modernist white space – that kind of generated work and generated conversations, and helped you select artists. Quite early on the idea of the site specific emerged in our minds – the importance of context and making it work, which of course later on happened as artists, making work for television. Those early experiences of putting exhibitions on in certain spaces, we transferred over into the idea of making a work for television as a site.

There’s a kind of a curatorial consideration inherent in your practice then – in making site specific work rather than just making work.

AL H: Absolutely.

AL T: It is always about responding to the space that we’re in, even if that’s a city that you live in – not necessarily a building. Because for us that’s what’s interesting – we think about where we are.

Well, where you are now is Liverpool. And you moved to Liverpool because you were preparing a show, at FACT, and you were hosted by the agency Metal, at Edge Hill?

AL T: We were invited to do a solo exhibition for the European Capital of Culture Year in Liverpool. And we said to them ”Well actually, we’ll move up to Liverpool for a few months and make a work from that context.” There was all this investment in city and we wanted to explore what that might mean and how that might affect our work.

So we came up to look for a studio, and discovered that Metal were trying to talk Northern Rail into giving over Edge Hill’s train station as a space for culture.

One stop out of the city centre…

AL T: That’s right. We happened to be there on the day that they’d finally got to meet up with Northern Rail. When we walked around we immediately knew the significance of the space in terms of technology – it’s the first place that a passenger train left to go to another city.

It was where fossilised fuel was used to create movement rather than using horse power. So we like the idea of installing our technological studio there – our virtual studio, our blue screen studio, which we sort of see as like an inert vehicle – it’s like a flying carpet. It’s the idea of being able to travel anywhere but stay within one space.

We sort of saw it as an end game of an idea of travelling, virtual travel. And the place where people first started to think of travelling as something they could do daily – it seemed like the perfect place for us to have a studio.

So all of that idea of context and the site specific emerged immediately.

That’s the context for your practice as artists making work. But then you had a practice as curators, curating other people’s work in that context. I think that has to be more than just an extension of your artist practice, it’s a leap and it’s a different kind of thing. How did that come about?

AL T: When we moved into Metal we got involved in trying to bring the station back to life again. And there was an opportunity for the space to be transformed into a project space. So it began in trying to make that happen. We felt we had a lot of good ideas – site specific ideas – that we didn’t want to explore in our own work necessarily. Or we didn’t want to explore them to the extent that we had to sort of lock ourselves in a studio for 12 months and make a work. For me, the curatorial thing became a way to think about ideas and see how other people had maybe made work that had responded to some of those ideas.

AL H: Yes.  It’s almost as if it became the building. And putting exhibitions on became a way of showing our sketchbook. It became a way of actually thinking about ideas, and rather than realising them as this gargantuan art work, we could actually show the process of those ideas by conversations and collaborations and by showing other people’s work within a particular site.

AL T: When we first got here we realised that even though it was the Capital of Culture and the Liverpool Biennial had been putting shows on for a number of years, that artists within Liverpool itself weren’t given much space. They weren’t given any space actually.

We wanted to give them a space, and we wanted to bring some ideas that they could then respond to. And perhaps try and kind of create an art scene here that had a community and that wasn’t just kind of an isolated artists, in a city that was ignoring them essentially.

Well, you say curating is a sketchbook, but I think it’s more than that. With the Horse Power show that you did at Edge Hill, you’re not simply appropriating other artists work. The show included established artists like Malcolm Le Grice and Tim Macmillan, and non-fine art kind of artists, like graphic novelist Grant Morrison…

AL H: And also, we also brought in other elements like engineering – drawings by Ferrari or films that Ferrari had made. We realised that the space is as much about innovative engineering as it is about culture. Although we do sort of see that as an artist’s job, like Michelangelo’s drawings of machines are as important to us as his Annunciation for example.

What I’m thinking is that it may work, to you, as a sketch book. But Also, you’re organising a conversation between those objects, and that’s curating isn’t it?

AL H: Exactly.  And actually, we were really inspired by Marina Warner and the way in which she curates. We went to the Science Museum when she put on her exhibition Metamorphing.

AL H: And she was quite willing to put for example GM seeds, genetically modified seeds next to Hieronymus Bosch.

AL T: We thought that was really brave – more brave than perhaps just going to an exhibition that just had Bosch paintings pinned to the wall. That there didn’t seem to be any thought process in that. You know, that you can put on a Gustav Klimt show, but what are you going to do, just go through the catalogue? That’s fine, but we wanted to break down some of those boundaries between what is an art object and what isn’t an art object.

The shows that we have curated have, so far, always included different disciplines and different practices within them. That somebody in the art world may not necessarily think is art.

AL H: It’s fascinating allowing the world to creep in next to our art works and seeing the way in which the world does influence and penetrate what artists talk about.

It’s a rare approach in this country, but it does happen abroad.

AL H: Absolutely. The Museum of Modern Art shows ball bearings next to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel.

AL T: I think in this country that usually gets seen as being appropriate for the Victoria and Albert Museum or those other institutions, rather than the white cube space.

But we love those cross discipline shows.

And while the Science Museum is quite happy to display art alongside mechanical objects, to reflect upon each other, our art galleries seem generally averse to that. I think it’s very strange.

AL T: As well what we really realise is that in London you can enclose yourself in an art bubble. All your friends are artists, and you go to galleries and you are a particular way. Coming to Liverpool, we live in a community, a working class community, and you begin to see the untouchability of some of the exhibitions that are in those bigger institutions for some people.

Anyway, what I love about, for example in Horse Power, is seeing a Ferrari advert of its factory next to a painting by an artist in relationship to the idea of movement. People can start to unpick the art itself as well – which may have seemed more cryptic or coded but actually. It’s about breaking down those boundaries.

AL H: But technology is also interesting in relation to the way art works have come into being. We included Muybridge in that show and his pictures were realised by a railway engineer who had worked out how to create a trigger to enable the 12 cameras to go off at the right speed in order to capture movement.

That collaboration between a photographer and a railway engineer enabled us to create the moving image. And so it’s taken as a given now that the moving image is a medium that can be used to create art works.

AL T: The curatorial decision has actually become the story of the show – of a subject matter or an interest rather than the artist.

When was the Horse Power show?

AL H: It was autumn 2008.

And since then the station’s been redeveloped.

AL H: The station closed for the winter. Horse Power was in buildings on platforms three and four, which is where we had our studio. But there was this much more magnificent building, this engine room, an accumulator tower on platform one and two that needed completely renovating.

During the winter and spring of 2008/2009, Metal managed to secure funding from various bodies… Network Rail, Northern Rail, from lots of different rail companies interestingly enough. And all of the building work is now coming to completion.

Metal have ‘renovated’ the buildings to their raw state, so that anything can happen in them.  They’ve not been turned into refrigerated modernist spaces or anything like that. It’s just that we’ve cleaned up all the Victorian brick.

They’re resolutely industrial spaces…

AL H: Exactly. They’re 1836 the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign – buildings that mark the beginning of the great industrial period of England.

So, back to Belgium… working with the curator Edwin Carels?

AL H: We had an early conversation about what we might realise together as a curatorial and a commissioning process. One of the things that Edwin felt about our big solo show in 2008 was that it concealed the formalist end of our work, in the sense that we put on a big spectacular show that was really about the special effects end of the spectacle of perfect illusion and the malpractice.

AL T: The show was for MuHKA, in in Mechelen, which is where trains for Auschwitz departed. We went over Mechelen to get a feel of the place. Again it’s a site specific thing – we went to Mechelen and we made some video work relating to that. It became a show of what we call our ‘void’ works – all ‘blue’ works.

Rather than the more elaborate baroque pieces – those works about our relationship with contemporary culture and pop and the relationship between that and science and technology. Our FACT exhibition as AL just said, really focussed on that.  I mean we kind of see those three works as being a kind of trilogy really – Perpetual Motion, Interstellar Stella, and Eternal Youth. Edwin came over and said “But you also do loads of really formal, beautiful, stripped down performance work that’s actually not about this…”

And so it was gorgeous to revisit all that older work and make some new work more in line with that.

AL H: And when we went over we discovered about the trains, because everyone knows about the trains to Auschwitz, but nobody ever knows where they set off from.  It’s a really curious one way journey that has no departure point. And we discovered that that was the departure point. Mechelen happened to be at the centre of the railway network in Europe from very early on, it connects all across Europe.

And the Nazis acquired the city in order to use that as a distribution centre. When we got there it just, we just couldn’t help but think about it.

AL T: And we realised that 50 years previously we’d have been on the trains. That felt really terrifying and hideous, and nobody actually spoke about this. We did a lecture in Ghent at an art school and they looked really shocked when we spoke about this.

But the people from Mukha, the curators, they were touched that we’d even mentioned it, because nobody normally talks about this there. And it was almost as if we were the only ones that had the guts to say anything. But to me it didn’t seem like something that shouldn’t be spoken about anyway.

AL H: It came up was because we were talking about doing some formalist works we’d been thinking a while about doing stripped down biometric works from our performances. By which I mean the system used in animation, where the human body is recorded doing various movements and then that data gets transferred into an animated character.

We’d become fascinated by the fact that within all the spectacle films of animations at the moment there was this biped skeleton inside those characters that you never see, that produces all of the movement.

The Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee makes ‘skeletons’ of Sylvester and Tweety Pie…

AL H: Essentially, we made a kind of dancing skeleton film which showed a number of our studio performances stripped back down to being a biped, that were sort of mirrored, like a chrome biped, reflecting a snow of pink triangles.

AL T: Because it was a big institution and we had a budget, we could also show some Yves Klein and Anish Kapoor.

There’s a different kind of curation there – you’re making work and you’re invited to select other work to show alongside.

AL T: Yes, and funnily enough, when I saw it, it felt like an installation. I think all our curated shows feel like installations. More artists should curate shows.

AL H: People like Duchamp did – when the Surrealists first went to New York he he wrapped works in string and you had to find your way through the show.

It’s something that has always been part of our vocabulary, that artists do create shows with the people who they’re having conversations with.

Get Off is the show that launches the new renovated space.

AL H: Yes. “Get Off at Edge Hill” is a local Scouse pun that describes coitus interruptus.

AL T: I don’t quite know what that means actually.  Is that actually a scientific term?

AL H: Yes – it’s pulling out.

AL T: When we’d been talking to people in Liverpool about us renovating Edge Hill they’d all go “Ah… you’re getting off at Edge Hill!” It’s this joke about that pun – if you get a taxi there they always try and tell you about this pun “Have you ever heard of getting off at Edge Hill?”

And so the show became about the kind of Scouse vocabulary, as well as it’s originating point.

AL H: The station has actually found it’s way into the language of the city.

Are the people of Edge Hill notoriously randy!?

AL H: Well exactly! But there’s also a technical reason, because the train – The Rocket – couldn’t travel into the Liverpool city centre because there’s a gradation, a hill, and at that point there was no brakes on the train. There was no sense of how to make the train travel down a hill and be able to stop.

AL T: So Edge Hill is where people got off and got onto a horse and carriage for the rest of journey. So it goes further back than the community reascribing the idea of getting off at Edge Hill – for the bourgeois in the 1840s it meant getting off the train. But for the local community it means something quite different.  So we’ve explored that.

AL H: And we were fascinated by the idea, the sexual pun and the industrial landscape.  Because, like Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, it’s a machine, there is a sexual pun about the mechanics of sex. This idea of engineering and these machines that go in and out, in and out, in and out.

And trains go into tunnels.

AL T: Yes, there are so many puns, so many cinematic clichés about that. We wanted to explore all of those things.

AL H: For example, we are showing the first edited sequence from the 1899 film A Kiss in the Tunnel – which is the first time that pun of a train entering a tunnel was projected onto the silver screen. That’s the earliest work in the show, but it goes to show the way in which the industrial world has become resonant with the idea of sexual puns.

Especially now, with cyber… humans and machines melding.

AL H: Exactly. And we’ve made works ourselves about the sexuality of the computer world and people meeting up and finding love together. And we’ve been thinking about Alan Turing,  and the fact that those machines have come out of his thinking and that he himself went through a difficult political life because of…

AL T: …his sexuality. And yet now you’ve got literally 16, 17, 18 year old kids who are dealing with their sexuality through the internet. Because of these machines that Turing helped invent they’re coming to terms with those issues.

What else is in the show?

AL T: We’ve got some local artists that all have made new works for the show.

AL H: Imogen Stidworthy is looking at Scouse back slang, which is a kind of a language that comes from the street that Scousers use with each to pass secret messages onto one another. She felt that the Get Off at Edge Hill being a Scouse pun enabled her to explore that.

We’ve got Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos, which essentially is a film that explores a boy’s love affair with his car, his chrome car. It’s an extraordinary work, with the Paris Sisters singing Dream Lover, which is going to be a delicious sound within the show – the idea of the machine being a dream lover, being this perfect, powerful source of energy.

AL T: We’ve got a sort of Bride Stripped Bare – in Through the Large Glass, by Hannah Wilke, who does a strip tease behind the large glass. It’s a performance from 1976 and an absolutely beautiful piece of work.

AL H: That carries on our idea of actually drawing on the history of video art and performance and using that to put in some major works that are interlaced with local artists.

Any engineering pieces?

AL H: We’ll have a Pirelli calendar.

Which is sex and engineering, and mechanics…

AL H: Yes. You’d find it in every garage and it becomes a collectors item.  And in a way it’s an engineer’s art work. It’s collected and considered as art work, and combines sexuality and engineering.

AL T: I worked in fashion many years ago and to do the Pirelli calendar is a big thing fo a photographer. People think of the Pirelli calendar and think of scrubby garage men.

I think that’s a difference in this country – things like Pirelli and Playboy have this American exuberance around sexuality, it’s not repressed.

AL H: And of course, we are talking about putting an exhibition in a Victorian building, which is the archetypal word for repression. And yet here we are talking about a building that has given birth to a Scouse pun.

All of those things generate meaning and discussion about the space. And about the emancipatory nature of technology and sexuality.

AL T: The other two other shows that we’ve done at the station have been quite formal about the technology there and the science there. And we wanted to have a little bit more fun with this one.

AL H: It is about fun and it is about how culture can be about learning and enjoying yourself at the same time.

The group show XXX: Get Off at Edge Hill curated by AL and AL is showing at Liverpool’s Edge Hill Station from 23 October – 5 December 2009.

Kustom Kar Kommandos, Kennth Anger

Kenneth Anger’s best known for his fondness for Lucifer, as expressed in gorgeous sorcery’n'Satanism epics like Scorpio Rising.  But – it not being Hallowe’en just yet – we’ve chosen instead to showcase his 1965 hymn to automobile upkeep, Kustom Kar Kommandos. Plotwise, there’s not much going on here: a boy tunes and preens a hotrod to the strains of the Paris Sisters’ Dream Lover, and that’s about it. Texture and colourwise, however, there’s plenty to enjoy, with Anger’s camera gliding drowsily over fields of  powder blue denim, glossy chrome and ruby leather. As pre-MTV music video goes, it’s pretty special – if a little sinister.