Trace

Situating Practice. It started with workshops on Oswin Street and in Borough Market, photographing to a set of categories, drawing sound as a shape, turning video into contact sheets. Then we had to decide what we were tracing, and between which two points.

The subject came out of being told no. Security stopped me documenting where the cameras were or what the stalls were called, so the project became about recording exactly that. I went back and filmed every camera I walked past.

I exported the footage as contact sheets, printed them on the riso and cut the selections out by hand, then scanned them back over collaged backdrops of stall signage, market maps and shopfronts, so the hole shows you what the camera is looking at. The paper I used was thick enough to cast its own shadow on the scan and I left that in.

Then the export glitched. Blocks of corrupted colour appeared across the animation that I hadn't put there, and they looked like encrypted footage, which was already my story. So I kept them, cut them to the beat and let them resolve into clear frames. The sound is background noise I recorded in the market, with robotic effects on top to give the cameras a bit of character, since they're always watching you anyway.

A twenty-seven second looping video, 1920 × 1080, with a soundtrack made out of market recordings.