Friday 12 October 2018

The Remote Viewer at Light Night 2018

Mick Schofield art photography projection university of leeds light night phd

rephotography leeds video art research hauntology

deconstructed rephotography hauntology photography art leeds

Special Collections Godfrey Bingley Light Night research

installation at the university of leeds

video art installation photography leeds landscape hauntology

photography installation archives research rephotography spectrality

Michael C Coldwell Michael Schofield University of Leeds PhD practice final show exhibition

Quarry Hill rephotography Leeds art event

The Remote Viewer Leeds video art rephotography

Michael C Coldwell photographer and artist projection work installation

Light Night 2018 University of Leeds gallery event archive

projected photographs of Leeds with sound art field recordings Light Night

rephotography photography Leeds events Light Night Remote Viewer 2018

Michael C Coldwell Mick Schofield research final show rephotography archive

photography event special collections installation archive Leeds history slum clearance Quarry Hill art


The Remote Viewer (at Light Night 2018) from Michael C Coldwell on Vimeo.


Images and footage from The Remote Viewer, a new projection work and 'final show' from my practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds, entitled Aura and Trace: The Hauntology of the Rephotographic Image

Just my viva to go!

Tuesday 5 June 2018

The Remote Viewer is coming...

Photography by Michael C Coldwell
Boynton Street has disappeared (Projection 2) 1906-2018

Hauntography by Michael Coldwell
Unhealthy Area, Quarry Hill 1905-2018


These are deconstructed rephotographs of Quarry Hill in Leeds. The work attempts to take archive photographs of the cleared slums back to those streets that have disappeared, as part of an ongoing exploration of photography as a form of haunting.

This work is part of my practice-led PhD research which is nearing completion.

The final rephotographs will be projected on Light Night this year as part of a video installation called The Remote Viewer

Here's a sneak preview of the sort of thing we'll be doing...


Slum Clearance (2017) from Michael C Coldwell on Vimeo.

Monday 11 September 2017

Residuum Exhibition


Residuum Left Bank Leeds

My first solo exhibition, Residuum, is on this month at Left Bank Leeds, September 22nd


Here's the official blurb:


Residuum
Exhibition of photography, film and music by Michael C Coldwell
6pm - 11pm, 22nd September 2017, Left Bank Leeds

The city is haunted by traces of what came before. The past leaves a material residue, but sometimes little else. Absences and voids litter the landscape, fading photographs are all that remain of places which no longer exist, or have transformed beyond recognition - strange sounds hang in the ether. The fragments that are left behind are no longer part of any meaningful narrative, they no longer make a coherent picture. They are not memories anymore, but something else. Confronted with these remnants the imaginary is activated. We are driven to try and make sense of this detritus. We fill in the gaps with stories, myths, ghosts, hauntings - but the real spectrality lies in the affect of loss, and the uncanny afterlife of the absent, gifted by recorded media.  

Michael C Coldwell (also known as Mick Schofield) is an interdisciplinary artist and practice-led researcher in photography at the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. When he hasn't got his head stuck in books by Derrida and Baudrillard, he spends his time taking photographs of slums that were cleared 100 years ago, or recording radio stations which have long disappeared. This event marks his debut solo exhibition, alongside the launch of a new record label called Crooked Acres, specialising in hauntology and experimental music. 

Free Entry. Prints and music will be on sale at the event. Performances from 9pm. Family friendly. Fully stocked bar! Get down early to see the prints in good light.






Monday 24 April 2017

Failures of Presence by Michael C Coldwell


Photograph from Failures of Presence
The Voids at Crossly Ln, Huddersfield by Michael C Coldwell, 2017

Pages from Failures of Presence including essay The Eerie and the Banal

pages continued

pages from Failures of Presence

The trace is not a presence but rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces and refers beyond itself. Jacques Derrida, 1973


Failures of Presence

by Michael C Coldwell

a new photo book is in preparation


The eerie can be characterised as a "failure of absence or by a failure of presence" 
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2016.  

Failures of Landscape
Failures of Context
Failures of Narrative
Failures of Representation
Failures of Humanity
Failures of Presence

"Through the uncanny, presence is stripped of its reassuring content and "things" are reduced to their shadows" Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place

This is a book of such shadows.



Coming soon...




Monday 20 March 2017

Conflux Coldwell - Ante Meridiem





























CC - AM

This "visual album" is part of Michael C Coldwell’s ongoing research into the ghostly properties of photography, video and radio - the aura of the obsolete medium and the sublation of the analogue by the digital, reality by simulation.

We are saturated in the incessant pulsing of invisible lights, their waves pass through walls and through our bodies without our noticing, carrying memories, pictures, music and strange signals.

Like some synesthesia machine, the radio allows us to tune into them, and listen to these lights.

However, as the digital revolution advances a desert has opened up in the once busy aether. The analogue airwaves are slowly dying. Huge tracks of AM radio have been abandoned for newer methods of broadcast. This album was created out of the odd scraps of sound left behind in the void - strange military signals, faint foreign stations and morse code flickering in a sea of unending noise and static.

Every sound used to make this music was recorded from a Sony ICF-2001D Synthesised Receiver, a worldband radio from the 1980s capable of picking up very long-distance signals. This machine is historically significant because of its role in Cold War espionage. It was used by Eastern-Bloc spies in the West to receive coded messages in the form of mysterious ‘numbers stations’, a very few of which still seem to be in operation.

Due to the way shortwave signals are reflected back off the ionosphere, the best time to record these distant signals is just before dawn.

http://confluxcoldwell.bandcamp.com/album/am