Richard Ducker & Ian Thompson: The Accurate Perception Available When Our Eye Becomes Single

16 Jan-24 Feb 2024

PV 20 Jan 2024, 12-3pm

Overview

The Accurate Perception Available When Our Eye Becomes Single is an immersive multi-screen installation evoking the emotional specifics of place (Orford Ness on the Suffolk Coast) while exploring the elasticity of time and history. It is an audio-visual collaboration between Richard Ducker (video) and Ian Thompson (sound) with no linear narrative; sound and image are not synchronised, so each viewing is a unique experience.

Orford Ness is an eight-kilometre shingle spit, used for secret military testing during the first world war until the cold war in the 1980's. The site is now desolate but the decaying architecture from seventy years of military occupation remain. These strange elemental structures are formed out of an alien landscape that resembles a lost movie set.

To capture Orford Ness's eerie sense of dislocation, most of the imagery is filmed very slowly in black and white as if watching a still image in motion; one of the histories of the site was the development of fast film techniques for capturing bombing runs. Intercut with this are sections in colour, shot with a handheld smartphone camera and telephoto lens as a deliberate counterpoint, inviting the viewer to slowly absorb the extraordinary landscape and ruined buildings that appear like post-apocalyptic ancient burial sites.

For the installation, the film's constituent parts are broken into seven looped sections and projected on multiple screens and monitors, with four stereo audio channels on loudspeakers.

The film includes performance by artist Sarah Sparkes, in costume as part mythical creature, part out-of-time character. she appears incidentally, unexplained, like an avatar, contrasting mythology with military. This mythical figure has somehow become displaced on the Ness, a lost Godzilla out of place in the strangeness of this part of the Suffolk coastline.