Site_15

i'm choosing photograph 15.

"my first response to this photograph was that it made me think of the internet. I wouldn't want the event to be 'about' the internet - because that would be tedious - and I know how everyone blathers on about the web, cyber-space and blah blah blah .... and I don't want to jump on any bandwagon ... although wagons would feature in my event. We go on the internet to find stuff out, to discover things we don't know and (of course) to book cheap holidays. The rail tracks seem to criss-cross and take any potential traffic off into a mysterious and unseen destination, whilst the two tracks on the outside seems straight and superfast ... with some kind of broadband velocity and directness. And for goodness' sake, there's even three very clear letters offering a 'www' welcome.

So .... let's have the audience on the bridge looking out over the scene as it is presented in the photograph, but over time somehow ferried to the underneath, and assigned those hilarious wagons where two people push up and down on a giant lever to get the thing going - i think laurel and hardy used one to get home from a very long way away after another fine mess - but i also have memory of a looped black white cartoon of two people pushing up and down, at either end of a wagon, on a giant central lever that caused forward momentum. I think they're called, simply, handwagons. We must get lots of these! And get the audience to drive them!

If we could make the lights flash on and off very quickly as well that might make it quite exciting.

And then on the outside I think we should have someone dressed in a mask and cape, cackling, whilst he ties down a blond-haired damsel onto the tracks with thick rope. She should be screaming quite a bit, but not to scare people. If their movements could be slightly jerky and sped up it would help reinforce the idea that we might be watching an old black and white film, or at least the opening credits of 'The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop'. And then, obviously, someone should jump out and punch the bad guy in the face and undo the rope and pull the woman away just seconds before a really fast steam locomotive speeds down the tracks off into the horizon. From there some audience members could be assigned electric train cars that would travel them much quicker than their unlucky self-propelling colleagues.

Continuing the railroad theme, I'd like to have prisoners in chains and manacles cutting the grass on either side of the tracks. I'd like my event to be tidy and leave behind something positive after it's all over. My chain gang would be real time bad guys - murderers hopefully - and I'd want a scary man with a Texan accent holding a rifle and shouting at them.

The weather should be as hot as possible.

And that's about it. The tying-the-girl-to-the-tracks to start everything off, followed by the ferrying of audience members into the distance with

the lights flashing like paparazzi cameras, or the light bulbs of a 'great idea', or the hard work of a modem. With a chorus of prisoners tidying the sidelines. I'm not sure where this audience is going, but that's not really the point - it's more about the journey than the destination (asever).

But it's not a representation of anything, least of all the internet, right?

And I haven't got a name for it yet. But I'm thinking about it."

[Finlay Robertson © 2005]