High Angle, Dead Drop (2006, 32’) is a series of short video vignettes produced on, and in response to the landscape and history of the Isle of Portland. The screening event is taking place in what used to be the cinema of the now-decommissioned Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, one of the locations used in a sequence of the videos.

The videos themselves follow the distracted conduct of a character that is ostensibly some kind of spy-figure, involved in an undisclosed mission or subterfuge on the island. However, any sense of meaningful purpose is constantly undone by the character’s recurring visits to the same locations, to no further effect. A feeling of inertia pervades.

They were made in direct relation to the idea of Portland once being an island, the landscape and its features (what the artist Paul Nash referred to as genius loci, or sense of place) often determining how parts were conceived and structured. The character’s actions being restricted to this one place gives the sense that they are delusional in thinking they are confined to the island, and this accounts for the nagging absurdity and claustrophobia of the situation.

Constantly cutting across location and time, the effect of tension is created by shifting between long static takes and fast inserts and reverse-angle shots, but as this rhythm of cutting is repetitive the tension is diffused and slowly emptied out over the duration of viewing a section. By presenting the works in the same location as they were produced there is created a rupture in visitors’ own sense of place and time, and the uncanniness of being immediately faced with the reality of the place that is normally only experienced through the screen.

Portland has an intense concentration of military sites, due to its strategic position on the coast, and as a result there remains much evidence of these endeavours both past and present- from century-old citadels to government-contracted research outposts. To travel between them is to be disorientated in time, and this is further complicated by the place being imbued with other related resonances: an example of cold war paranoia, the science fiction feature film These are the Damned (Dir. Joseph Losey, 1963) was shot partly on location there, and depicts the island as the site of secret testing on children in readiness for the threat of nuclear war. Another key event in relation to these videos is the work of Robert Smithson, a seminal American artist of the 1960s/70s, who produced works on location here using mirrors in the landscape. At the same time, there are many which are unconsciously present:

‘Within these mysterious fragments of narrative, one can point to numerous references; beyond the aforementioned 1960’s earthworks [Smithson’s film and sculpture Spiral Jetty], there are also subtle nods to British spy films, Antonioni’s use of silence, and the isolation of Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic La Jetée. Each of these points of significance is layered and folded over, functioning less as homage than as cultural apparition.’
(Darryl Bank, Ghosts of Presence, Art Gallery of York University, 2007)

It has been asserted that Science Fiction is not a genre as such, but a ‘mode of apprehension’, with which to approach the future but to deal with the present. There is the feeling that although we are assured that there will be drastic and perhaps violent changes in the environment and society, we are powerless now to change the course of the future. It is within this mode that the character can be seen: uncertain and aimless, but bearing the premonition of something; and there is nothing they are able to do apart from simply to wait.