Output details

B O R T H

Two Screen Film Installation. Funded by the Arts Council of Wales. Premiered at ‘Diffusions’, Cardiff International Festival of Photography 1-31 May 2013; further exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 11 May - 20 June 2013. A development of Koppel’s long-term research enquiry into the relationship between documentary form, film poetics, and the aesthetic practice of examining changing configurations of landscape and community, BORTH investigates the deployment of metaphor and sensory evocation in documentary film-making and the temporal dynamics of viewing and listening. An isolated coastal town in mid-Wales, Borth consists of a single road stretching for 1 km, with houses lining both sides. One side backs onto a flat bog which extends for about 15 km towards the Cambrian Mountains and on the other is the Welsh Sea which constantly threatens to invade the local community. This fragile ecology is presented in B O R T H through two screens: one presents a single unbroken hour-long track along the bricolage of architectures; the other captures the opposite view from the beach. The soundscape is based on the actual internal sounds of each of the houses the camera passes, with additional foley and a narrative dynamic from music by collaborator James Dean Bradfield. The technologies developed to produce these two images – shooting uncompressed to allow for cropping down to 3:1 aspect ratio, with several daisy-chained hard drives to store the files – form part of the research enquiry (hence the sponsorship from Arri Media, Codex and Chapman). The digital files were split to produce left and right sources for the four projectors – each pair producing a single widescreen ‘soft-edge-blend’ image. The complexity of this technology was largely defined by the practice-based research’s methodological explorations of scale –enabling the illusion of actual-size imagery and juxtapositions of human gesture with landscape.