MKVH (Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal)

MKVH (Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal) was a public art work produced by Milton Keynes Gallery. It involved a coach being driven round the Milton Keynes road grid for 39 hours until it ran out of diesel. The initial invite to participate in this project was a public call, inviting people from Milton Keynes to come on a road trip for up to 3 days.

MKVH was part re-enactment of a story about the guru Gurdieff who drove his car until it ran out of petrol and part examination of the life as a journey metaphor in the road-movie genre. It also draws on genres of fiction such as the picaresque novel that are based on linear event-based narrative structures. The narrative resolution of this work was running out of diesel, an event that contributed to current discussion surrounding peak oil. MKVH was covered extensively by local news agencies, taking its debate into the public sphere.

MKVH (The Script), 2007, is an artists’ book that documents this trip. It is written as a film script and is based on transcriptions of dialogues between participants occurring during the 39 hour journey. The script is structured chronologically with each page of the book representing 15 minutes of journey time. It incorporates local press and transcripts of radio interviews conducted during the journey as well as shared documentation/contributions by participants in the form of photos, global positioning drawings, texts and diary entries. Taking the form of a film-script, the book both documents a past event (the journey) and proposes its own future as a film, and as such it is a continuation of work that relates to performance documentation and the fictionalisation of the archive.

The project was written about in Contemporary Magazine (special issue on performance) in 2006.