Media Migrations: Island Race

Media Migrations is a new channel on 2010Lab dedicated to artists’ film and video, focusing on boundaries of change and transformation within urban space.

Each month artists working with the moving image will be invited to exhibit their work and to engage with a diverse and international audience on the web.

The channel kick starts this month with Island Race by William Raban (1995).

Island Race reviewed in WAZ, Germany, April 1996 (courtesy of the artist)

Island Race was made at a time of social transition in London and focuses on a specific moment of upheaval and change in the Isle of Dogs, part of the East London Borough of Tower Hamlets during the mid-1990s. 

A lyrical cine-poem, likened in many ways with the visual documentary of Humphrey Jennings, Island Race closely observes the changing landscapes of human experience. 

We see the impact of the then Tory government’s investment in the expanding financial industry on local, grass-roots politics displacing and alienating working class communities in London’s old dockland areas as right-wing extremism moves in, threatening to fill the void left behind.

Avoiding the conventions of an authorial voice-over, or a traditional documentary narrative, the film moves through urban space in an original and beguiling way, mapping the shifting time-zones of direct and mediated experience.

William Raban, 2'45'' (1973)

William Raban has been making films since the early 1970s and is an influential figure within the history of UK experimental film.  Much of his work has been concerned with concepts of time and space from his early expanded cinema pieces such as 2’45’’ (1973) and his later time-lapse work such as About Now MMX (2010).  

William Raban, ABout Now MMX (2010)

In Island Race the earlier formalism associated with ‘structural film’ practices is brought to bear on the vibrant informalities of urban life in London.  The film turns on three specific ‘events’ local to the area that attract wider media coverage: the London Marathon, local government elections and the funeral of the infamous gangster, Ronnie Kray. 

Each event operates at a different level of experience and media significance and yet impacts on the local community in direct and relatively meaningful ways.  The film traverses the flux and energy of these events making unlikely connections and parallels.  Most tellingly is the subtle observation of the ways in which many of London’s streets are policed (sic) by the complex interaction of crime, television and ideology.

In its various migrations across and within urban space, there are numerous crossings of unmarked boundaries within Island Race and within the systems of order and control jostling to define the organisation of London’s morphing territories. 

But the presentation of Island Race here on 2010Lab is an example of another much needed media migration. 

Originally shot on 16mm film the work has been digitised and made available beyond the auditorium or the art gallery within the shifting context of web-culture – a perfect place to begin the Media Migrations programme and to question assumptions concerning the boundaries between the real and the constructed and between art and life in the 21^st Century.

Media Migrations has been developed in association with Been Out.

Future Media Migrations will include the work of Erica Scourti, Steven Ball & Rastko Novakovic, Thomas Lock and Louis Henderson.

Please contact Duncan White for further information.