| Brewing 1984,
Colour, 16 minutes, 1” C-format master
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| Brewing was a significant departure for me after a break of three years. Conceived as a kind of documentary poem, it is our “poetic” response to a wonderful old brewery in Oxfordshire where the entire brewing process and building are driven by a nineteenth century steam engine. The basic visual and aural elements were recorded on location at the Hook Norton Brewery, and then performed, composed and post-produced at Diverse Production’s facility in West London using the Videokalos synthesiser as a subtle colouring and effects instrument. It was also a very early example of a new sound composing technique – all the sounds from the brewery were digitally recorded and samples were then used to create new sounds held digitally on computer. These were then mixed and performed in real time during simultaneous real-time vision mixing of images recorded at the brewery. Technical limitations required that only limited sections could be recorded in one “take”, rather than the whole video as in their earlier works, and the pieces therefore needed later editing to put the whole work together. This process related to the earlier techniques the two had used in the seventies, but extended them to incorporate the real world more directly. All my work
is in response to a sense of flow and process that parallels the processes
of the natural or (in this particular work) the man-made world. Brewing
is a “documentary” to the degree that it documents the process
of the brew, yet it is “poetic” in its sensibility of inspiration
and enactment.
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