again and again

That’s what the bucket is for is the beginnings of a radiophonic fiction by Alison Scott, Becky Šik and Rosie Roberts. The work generates and dissolves an amorphous identity who sifts through data and is transfixed and subsumed by facts, stories and observations. The collaboration is informed by an improvisational ‘scrapbook’ approach to science fiction-making. A fragmentary narrative emerges from intuitive responses to both immediate environments and a rangey lot of matter the trio collected surrounding the theme of orbits. The result is a giddy selection of moving people, places and objects created through spinning, looping and reading in each other’s presence, expressed through music, narration, field recordings, and transcription.

It seemed astonishing to them that the most enduring mysteries of modern times could be reduced to a recorded analysis of stolen paperwork. If they were trying to say – what goes around, comes around – I was trying to make it real.

References for materials and publications used in this piece:

Marina Warner, ’ETHEREAL BODY: THE QUEST FOR ECTOPLASM, Seeing Is Believing’, in Cabinet Magazine, 2003. Available at:  https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/warner.php

Edwin Morgan, ‘Space and Spaces’, Selected Poems, Polygon, 2020. 

Joanna Russ, ‘The Female Man’, The Women’s Press, 1975. 

Lisa Parks, ‘Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual’, Duke University Press, 2005.

David Clarke, ‘UFO drawings from the national Archives’, Four Corners Irregulars, 2017

Mark Fisher, ‘The weird and the Eerie’, Repeater Books, 2016

Rosie Roberts is an artist, writer and editor in Glasgow generally working collaboratively through ideas of synchronicity, time, locality and affect. She also works as a tour guide and in a shop.

Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker often working with other artists on projects. Recent work has drawn on encounters with weather, land, and the idea of the commons. She is based in Angus.

Becky Šik is an artist filmmaker based in Glasgow whose work spans moving image, installation, sound, music, writing and publishing, often working collaboratively. Becky’s recent work explores the echo, electromagnetic phenomena and technologies as a way of understanding the body’s relationship to constructs of time and state.