Site Integrity: how might experimental moving image perform the materiality of site?

This practice-based research uses motorized rigs to critically evaluate the ways in which the moving image can perform the materiality of site. The study’s phenomenological approach to filmmaking uses dual-motorized rigs to record and re-present moving images both made and displayed in situ – in the very site of their making. This practical contribution to new knowledge – a contribution I term ‘site-integrity’ – was developed through, and can be experienced in, the production of three artworks, Reference Rio (2014) Lokomotywownia (2016) and Salat (2016). These artworks, these situations, seek to place the audience at the centre of both the work and, crucially, the site, as integral to the experience. Contemporary theorizations of site often stress its performative and experiential qualities, but their engagements with those aspects of the social typically occur on the representational register. When site is reduced to representation, the experiential qualities of site/place are lost. This thesis challenges such assumptions, insisting that through the material performance of site, an experience for the viewer emerges which is a corporeal-theoretical engagement with both the particular site in question and a theoretical challenge to writing that would reduce site to its ‘attributes’, whether they be social, economic, political, aesthetic, etc. In asking the viewer to confront the instability of site through re-presented material, and temporal images in situ, my practice builds upon the image making of structural filmmakers such as Hamlyn, Hill, Raban and Snow. The site-integral, dual-motorized rig investigates new explorations in space and time to produce an experience that leads to a shift in awareness, a physical and mental re-positioning in relation to the architectural site. The viewer is invited to collaborate in a performance in which artist, place, machine and audience are inextricably bound together. This study implicitly performs involvements in, as opposed to observations on, site.

The author of this thesis has permanently restricted access to the text.