Thursday 30 September, 2010

Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network’s (FLAMIN) Productions Fund award winner Phil Coy presents work, reflecting on his process, showcases his research and the work that has influenced him, prior to showing his completed films in January- March 2011.

Phil Coy’s commissioned work, Façade, describes a journey through a topology of contemporary glass architecture. For this screening he delivers a lecture-via-autocue that is based on a text piece by Robert Morris in which the artist describes the material fabric of the museum, alongside Morris’s film Mirror, a record of glassmaking c.1930 and Takehiko Nagakura’s The Palace of the Soviets.

This series of variations on the architectural walkthrough pulls focus on architecture as language and language as an architecture of control.

adaptive reuse and exfiltration, Phil Coy, live performance

Based on the peculiar utilitarian language of materials, finishes and substrates that underlie the Whitechapel's modernisation and expansion Coy describes a walkthrough the building we’re in with technical and material information from Witherford Watson & Mann Architects. This new work makes reference to a text piece of Robert Morris from the late 60's in which he described the fabric of a museum as he walked through it. Delivered from an autocue the piece also illustrates Coy's continued fascination with this 'machine for delivering language' and its explicit use throughout 'Façade'.

Robert Morris, Mirror, US 1969,  16mm, 9mins

Morris, in a winter landscape, holds a mirror to nature, and to the camera.

Library Footage: An exquisitely filmed piece of actuality footage describing the entire process of plate glass manufacture circa 1930.

Takehiko Nagakura, The Palace of Soviets (1931)

Computer generated animation of Corbusier' famously unrealized project. This very early example of a CGI architectural walkthrough used pioneering technology that looks forward to the kinds of visualisations employed by Coy in Façade through a collaboration with specialists Miller and Hare.

Phil Coy’s practice examines film, text and the performance of text as material where rhythm, tone and intonation circumscribe meaning. His work attempts to create distortion and feedback by manipulating the performance of text both as a process for the generation of text itself and the sounding, or speaking, of a pre-composed or ‘found’ text: a process of paying attention to aspects of words other than their meanings.

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