WHERE DID THE TIME GO?


'It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat. We feared the balmy air - we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard.'

Excerpt from The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826.






Short Film: The Door by Juanita Wilson. Octagon Films, 2009.




Pripyat, Ukraine, September 2010. 
Source.




Clip from Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979.


 Fallout 3. Bethseda Softworks, 2008


S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow Of Chernobyl. GSC Game World, 2007



Half-Life 2. Valve Corporation, 2004

THE ILLUSION OF PRESENT TIME

'Now he had recognised himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were ink stained. It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned pen, what he had been writing - and then drop a hint in the appropriate quarter.'

Excerpt from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, 1949.


Unattended office desk. Location unknown. 14:21pm. 

iSPY (app for ipod, iphone, ipad) screenshot.




Man on crutches retrieving plastic bottle and other items from bin. Yuma, Arizona. 13.15pm. 

iSPY screenshot.



Hotel receptionist, sitting. Perm, Russia. 02:46am.

iSPY screenshot.


Man walking slowly across car park. Moscow, North Butovo, Russia. 03:47am.

 iSPY screenshot.

IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE

'The colours will all fade

Flooded forests and undergrowth

But she'll still be there when it's done

She'll be our home.

I'll live ashore

I'll wait under her neon heart for so long

She'll teach me love, subconsciously,

For everything that now, cannot be'

From 'Concrete Mother', Gazelle Twin. 2010.


Athne by Suzanne Moxhay. 2010. 

Licensed for cover art for 'The Entire City' by Gazelle Twin, July 2011.
 Source.

'In the early morning light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the sombre green-black fronds of the gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past, and the half-submerged white-faced buildings of the 20th Century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time...'

Excerpt from The Drowned World by J.G Ballard. 1962.

London As Venice by Robert Graves, Didier Madoc-Jones, Jason Hawkes (photography). Source.





Amnesiac Shrine by Mike Nelson. 2007. 


NO ONE DRIVING


Driving scene from Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsy. 1972. 





The 'Park Shuttle' (autonomous people mover). Rotterdam. 1999 - present day.
 Source.

RUNNING


"Finally it must also be said that people who inhabit a country should never be degraded by being considered the property of the state. They are the bearers of human dignity, and this is characterised most strongly when a person decides his or her own fate. It is therefore unacceptable for a state or its individual authorities or courts to choose the fate of its citizens." Sourced from Dignitas


 
Screenshot from Soylent Green (euthanasia scene). 1973. View video clip of scene. 


'Other deaths are more dramatic. There are the Runners, for example, a sect of people who run through the streets as fast as they can, flailing their arms wildly about them, punching the air, screaming at the top of their lungs. Most of the time they travel in groups: six, ten, even twenty of them charging down the street together, never stopping for anything in their path, running and running until they drop from exhaustion. The point is to die as quickly as possible to drive yourself so hard that your heart cannot stand it.'

Excerpt from In The Country of Last Things Paul Auster. 1987.


Screenshot from The Running Man. Depicting future Los Angeles. 1987.

THE MAN MACHINE


 Clip from Colossus: The Forbin Project. 1970


Still from Robocop. 1987




Clip from L'uomo meccanico (The Mechanical Man), by André Deed. 1921.






'The face was made of iron, painted a black color, with a pair of fearful eyes, and a tremendous grinning mouth.'

The Huge Hunter or The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis. 1868. 


THE END OF THE WORLD

'When will I know it's over?

Enough has already passed

I'm not even sure I'll ever know how much it all cost me-

Dearly. Dearly. Dearly.
'
Bell Tower'. Gazelle Twin, 2011.


Tomorrow Is Never, by Kay Sage. 1955


Clip from Threads. BBC. 1984. 
 [NB: This film is responsible for the author's life-long phobia of the mushroom cloud/atomic bomb.]

The Great Day Of His Wrath by John Martin. 1851-3 Source.

Bruce Gilbert – 'Where Did The Time Go?'
Vangelis – 'Empty Streets'
Scanner – 'The Illusion Of Present Time'
John Cage – 'Imaginary Landscape'
Fennesz – 'City of Light'
John Foxx - 'No One Driving'
Kraftwerk – 'The Man Machine'
Brad Fiedel – 'The Terminator's Arrival'
Gil Scott-Heron – 'Running'
Elizabeth Walling - 'Runners'*
Laurie Anderson – 'The End Of The World'
Charles Ives - 'The Unanswered Question'

[*Included in the mix is a piece I wrote a while ago (pre-Gazelle Twin). It's un-released/un-published anywhere else so, I guess it's 'exclusive'. It's an electronic piece made from interwoven, found and homemade samples of real instruments and noises, written in response to Paul Auster's novel, 'In The Country Of Last Things'.]