On Vanishing Land / audio-essay by Mark Fisher and Justin Barton / curated by The Otolith Collective / commissioned and produced in collaboration with The Showroom.

| tag: London

The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8 8PQ
6 February - 30 March 2013
Opening hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12-6pm

Performances by John Foxx and Raime: Thursday 7 March, 7pm

Discussion with Mark Fisher, Justin Barton, The Otolith Collective, John Foxx, Frances Morgan, Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin): Saturday 16 March, 3pm

The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present On Vanishing Land by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.

 

On Vanishing Land (2013, 45m) is a magisterial audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2005, extending from the globalisation entry-point of Felixstowe container port to the ancestral revenants summoned by the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo.

Mark Fisher and Justin Barton have conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings and prefigurations that pervade the erosive edges of the Suffolk coast. The work includes commissions from digital musicians, interviews and the reflections of the artists. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates the Suffolk landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues oneiric affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story by M.R. James in Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad (1904) and the eldritch atmospheric engineering of Brian Eno's album On Land (1982). "Themes of incursion - by unnameable forces, geological sentience and temporal anomaly - recur throughout." (The Otolith Collective, Curator, On Vanishing Land).

On Vanishing Land integrates new compositions by digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman, Raime and Skjolbrot. For the installation at The Showroom it will be accompanied by an untitled image sequence that projects a wide range of visual references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English Heretic).

Events accompanying the exhibition include a performance on 7 March by John Foxx and Raime of compositions from the project.

On 16 March, Fisher and Barton, with The Otolith Collective, John Foxx, Frances Morgan (Deputy Editor, The Wire) and Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle Twin), will discuss the contemporary cultural fascination with the illogic of the Eerie.

Finally, a conversation at Boathouse café on the River Deben, Suffolk between the artists and Andy Sharp (English Heretic) will discuss the reimagining of the M.R.James' ghost story by television directors Jonathan Miller and Lawrence Gordon Clark since the late 1960s.