Local Space Studies

Local Space Studies is a series of three experimental video-works completed between 2001 and 2005, linked by an investigation of urban space. Local Authority (2001, re-worked in 2005); Defenestrascope (2003) and Metalogue, (2003), all seek a resonance of place treated through devices particular to digital video.

Structural innovations reflect on the spaces as subject and their transformation through the representing technology. My creative exploration draws on concepts of subjective ‘writing’ or ‘enunciation’ of space as described by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life.

Local Authority explores the erratic movement of objects viewed from a window. Stillness is counteracted by ‘scrubbing’ the video track and improvising a ‘scratch’ of midi-audio and snatched selections from an old LCC Tenants' Handbook creating a shifting refrain - a ‘song portrait’ of a 1920s housing estate.

Metalogue is a ‘passage-through’ transitory environments: tunnels and foyers; trains, and buses; elevators, and airports. As a metaphorical travelogue, it combines digital manipulation with abstracted text juxtaposing urban images and public announcements. Normally incidental, ‘hidden’ information like metadata is integral to the subject applying digital database concepts as part of the poetic structure.

Defenestrascope is an eccentric view through windows from monumental towers, in a contemporary and medieval European city. It revolves around an ensemble setting of a 16th century Norfolk song ‘Go from the Window’ and is dedicated to vaudeville artists Alan Lomax and Gus Elen.

Steven Ball

Research Interests

Artists’ Moving Image, Archives and Collections, Experimental Film, Video Art, Landscape, Urban
Space.

Current Research

As Research Fellow attached to the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, my research activity broadly encompasses the history and contemporary practice of artists’ moving image. The Study Collection includes video copies of artists' works, writing by and about artists, institutional documents, books, catalogues, posters, etc., it is accessible to internal and external academic and curatorial research. In this context my research activity involves the collection, cataloguing and digitization of copies of artists' film and video works, documentation and publications, the dissemination of Study Collection research outputs, and facilitating research in artists’ moving image across UAL and beyond. I am also developing research projects around the nature of the relationship of artists’ moving image practice to that of the wide range of contemporary collections and archives in their analogue and digital forms, online and physically located.

My other research interests are in the relationship between audio-visual media practice, spatial representation, landscape, and urban space within a practice encompassing audio-visual media, performance, curation and writing. These have manifested themselves in projects such as: Figuring Landscapes, artists’ moving image from Australia and the UK, touring programme co-curated with Professor Catherine Elwes (Camberwell), (2008 ongoing until 2010); The Centres Project, an ongoing exhibition and publication research project in collaboration with Irene Barberis, Metasenta Projects, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, which has included the Transcentric exhibition at Lethaby Gallery (2008); After Lethaby video performance with Martin Blazícek, (Czech Republic), Lethaby Gallery, 2009.

• http://www.steven-ball.co.uk/recent.html...
• http://www.steven-ball.co.uk/recent.html...
• http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/
• http://www.steven-ball.net/