© Dr Steven Gartside
Viewing archive, documentary and amateur film footage can be a magical experience. Like a window into the past, the flickering images of yesteryear can create seductive resonances that for a fleeting moment bring the past to life.
Imagine, then, immersing yourself in a multi-dimensional installation of archive and contemporary film footage that heightens this effect through the use of multiple screens.
This is what visitors to the MOSI are currently experiencing in the shape of Dr Steven Gartside’s ambitious, multi-screen film installation, Accumulation, which constructs its own image space to explore how a city functions in the everyday.
In effect a collection of layers, fragments and film clips, the experiment immerses the spectator in an intensified encounter of the themes, activities and patterns and behaviour of the city.
Short segments follow thematic threads over time that on the surface seem to offer much evidence of change. But beneath it the core of the city and the way it is used stays remarkably similar. The result, says Dr Gartside,
is a more "everyday" version of city life through which we see a more extraordinary city.
Accumulation may on the face of it seem like a muddle of images but what emerges is a unique spatial environment of city life over a century, which may just open up a different way of seeing what surrounds us now.
