Shots from Residuum

Noise Ghosts from Michael C Coldwell on Vimeo.

Residuum Exhibition

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

Facebook Event Page

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.

Failures of Presence by Michael C Coldwell

The Voids at Crossly Ln, Huddersfield by Michael C Coldwell, 2017

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...

CC - AM from Michael C Coldwell on Vimeo.

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

Godfrey Bingley 'maquettes'

These test images were created as part of a research project into the ontology of rephotography. They use appropriated plates from the Godfrey Bingley collection, University of Leeds, to explore landscapes which have changed beyond all recognition. 

From Outside Time

Photographs made

for Outside Time 2016

children...

have

...vanished