Return to Nowhere

Revisiting a non-place from last year's Failures of Presence

Return to Nowhere is now up on www.michaelcoldwell.co.uk

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

Reciprocal Structures

a different kind of spectral investigation

splitting light and sound

a commission for

Shelley James and Scott McLaughlin

More images here:

http://www.michaelcoldwell.co.uk/reciprocal5.html

Project details here:

http://reciprocalstructures.blogspot.co.uk

scir ac

from The Spectral Forest

the marks and traces of those who came before, here at the site of the

Skyrack Oak or scir rac (shire oak)

the old tree finally collapsed in 1941

I wonder if there are still roots beneath the pavement?

The Skyrack Wapentake

The Skyrack Wapentake I (2017)

The Skyrack Wapentake II

the dead-centre of an ancient kingdom

reflected in the window of a empty office unit

a tree stood here for one thousand years

now gradually forgotten