May Pope and Guthrie live in interesting times ...

We put this project forward for the interesting set of commissions advertised by bloc and Chapter, with support from Cywaith Cymru, for their festival MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES. Sadly we just couldn't co-ordinate the timing for carrying out our residency on the BBC bus. The idea of making these recorded journeys is one we plan to revisit though ...

May we participate in interesting times ... & travel with interesting people...

Artists' Statement:
Despite spending much of the last year travelling and filming on another yellow bus (see
www.bata-ville.com for details!) we were both very excited to read of the May you participate in a digital world, mobile studio commission. The BBC bus looks fantastic - the ideal Pope & Guthrie work/travel environment that would provide us with the perfect situation in which to author a collaborative new work - making full use of both the technical & crew support on offer. This combination of travelling 'tech', an interesting and unfamiliar 'site' and the challenge to collaborate with a new audience has, in the past, produced some of our most exciting work.

Relevant past work - why are we interested in this commission?
The intense experience of travel and generating work live with an audience has drawn us back many times to this model of practice. Beginning in 1996 with A Hypertext Journal where we used Boswell and Johnson's A Journey to the Western Isles as a template for a physical journey but also an exploration of how artists might use the Internet as a creative space. In 1999 we presented Broadcast (29 Pilgrims, 29 Tales) delivering a collection of moving personal tales told via mobile phones - collectively exploring what a contemporary version of the Canterbury Tales might look and sound like. In 2000 for Additional Footage we found ourselves living on a boat in Norwich creating five short films for the East Anglia Film Archive - looking at how local people saw the region's profile as presented through film and TV. Last year we shot Bata-ville our most ambitious project to date, which saw us travel to the Czech Republic with 42 people (many OAPs) - the resulting film tells the bittersweet story of an intense pilgrimage to the roots of the Bata shoe empire. With each journey the route, people and importantly the technology we use, to tell our/their stories have a profound influence on the projects content. We would now like to produce a new work, combining the most successful aspects of past projects and (as with each previous work) allowing the technology currently available to shape the way we deliver the particular content.

What would we do?
Should we be offered the commission we would obviously want to spend some R&D time with the BBC bus team looking at the real conceptual and practical possibilities for the project. However, as an initial suggestion we would be keen to try out a project that we've wanted to explore for some time: a hybrid between our own intense experience of 'live' performative travel, and that of instigating significant journeys as a collaboration with our immediate audience. We propose to offer the bus and ourselves as guides/hosts/presenters to the audience in North Wales, as a free travel and broadcasting service - but only to destinations of personal significance to each traveller. Possibly using the BBC links to local radio we would advertise the Pope & Guthrie travel offer in advance of the residency. Inviting people to request our transport service to locations in North Wales they wish to visit. These journeys might be to a place they've never been but have always wanted to see, to meet a person, carry out a duty, perform a pilgrimage, illustrate a cause, investigate a hunch ... the journeys can be as diverse as the audience suggesting them. Once applications have been collected we would select a collection of journeys to make on the bus, carrying out our own research into the destinations and developing a timetable. During the residency we will then collect and transport each day's traveller to their destination, with them, documenting both the journey and our joint experience. We plan to use a combination of different visual and audio recordings (from time-lapse to straight radio-style interviews). New material will uploaded onto the project website each day (in the form of blogs/mobcasts/webpages/streaming media etc.) but some footage will also be edited at a later date for broadcast/exhibition at the Cardiff Festival.

Nina Pope + Karen Guthrie April 2005

Postscript:
For the project interview we developed the proposal further, suggesting that we locate our travellers via Welsh blogs. By focussing on Welsh speakers we hoped to emphasis our status as 'tourists' to the area and play on some of the problems/happy accidents we had encountered when filming via a translator in the Czech Republic for Bata-ville. We also suggested that we would video the journeys with two locked off cameras recording our conversations en route and the view as we travelled to the chosen destinations. These tapes could then be 'edited' by speeding up (time-lapse) sequences and slowing down to realtime as conversation/ideas developed, thus avoiding 'cutting' the journeys.