Matt's Gallery: Slow Action
Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.
Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.
You arrive outside a gallery near Mile End, between the park's sports' field and Regent's Canal. It's not yet 12 noon so you sit on nearby picnic table and wait. You talk to shuffle81 and wink_martindale about the gorgeous weather. Three friends sitting nearby chat along the same lines and sip coffee. A girl chains her bike and stands by the gallery's door until it opens.
It's dark inside and you can barely distinguish the girl who hands everyone high-tech headphones. She shows where to adjust volume before another door is opened into a screening room. A woman with a foreign accent speaks softly into your ears while the images on the screen move through an alien desert-like landscape. It takes you a moment to realise that people are sitting on black leather bags on the floor. You slowly inch forward and find one for yourself. For the next forty five minutes you visit the post-apocalyptic societies of Eleven, Hiva (The Society Islands), Kansennashima and Somerset.
To me, this is true science fiction: it's our world viewed through an old camera but at the same time made strange and remote by the stories, facts and figures given by the narrator. It's here and it's nowhere, it's ideas over action, it's completely devoid of clichés. It's perfectly formed and delivered, from the gallery's setting to what's on screen. True science fiction makes you look outside the window and shudder, makes you step out of your comfort zone, even if for a little while, and question the structures and lives around you. It makes you look leave the screening room and see the outside through new eyes.
Slow Action ends today.