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ALL
THAT
MIGHTY
HEART
A Film by Jayne Wilson
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The Central Office for Clocktime Expansion present
ALL
THAT
MIGHTY
HEARTAn observation on our modern day malady
of supposed urgency
A Film by Jayne Wilson
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THE BRITISH ENGINEERIUM
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Historian of technology Lewis
Mumford wrote ‘the clock is not
merely a means of keeping track of
the hours, but of synchronising the
actions of men… The clock, not the
steam engine, is the key-machine of
the modern industrial age’.
Exploring the intertwined
relationship between the clock and
the steam engine helps shine a light
on our ambivalent approach to
modern technology.
At first glance, the nineteenth
century world was characterised by
the spread of networks which took
time as their standard. The globe
was covered by railways and their
timetables, shipping routes
navigated accurately using marine
chronometers, and trade networks
emanating from workshops, mills
and factories where millions
‘clocked in’ and out at the start and
end of the working day. Everywhere,
the new industrial world was subject
to a new time discipline,
representing a major acceleration
from the old, slow turning of the sun
and moon, and of the seasons.
But these networks of time were
matched by networks of power:
Without steam the railways would
have been stillborn, the shipping
fleets would have languished at the
mercy of wind and tide, summer
droughts would have brought water-
driven mills and factories to a halt.
The clock may have imbued the
industrial world with a sense of the
value of time, but the steam engine
remained its pumping heart.
That said, watching the steam
engine today, with its regular motion
and sound - the measured bass of the
air pump, the whirr of the governor,
and the hiss of the flywheel spokes
– inevitably remind the observer of
the clock, and of the passing of time.
Going further, one might say the
engine is even timeless, its hypnotic
rhythms taking the viewer away
from the world outside, enthralling
them with its protective power.
And that phrase - ‘protective
power’ – lays open the paradox of
the engine: it is simultaneously
protective and coercive. On one
hand it is an astonishing piece of
kinetic art, the first industrial
machine consciously built with the
same precision and attention to
outward appearance as a fine
timepiece, a triumph of the
engineers’ creative capabilities, and
long the subject of public
fascination. But on the other hand it
was a machine capable of terrible
and promethean might, capable of
transforming entire landscapes and
driving production of an intensity far
beyond the limits of human
endurance, its beam and pistons
working up and down ‘in a state of
melancholy madness’.
Today steam power is integrated
into our lives to the point of
invisibility, banished to generating
stations and connected to us only
indirectly via the energy grid.
Instead, we seem most outwardly
concerned with, and ambivalent
about, the passage of time: ‘time is
money’, minimising down-time,
making the best use of time, all the
time. Time is embedded in many of
the things we use in our homes and
workplaces and, as with the steam
engine before, perhaps it’ll become
such an integral part of our lives that
we just stop noticing it. When that
happens – if it hasn’t already - and
we look forward into the
technological future, we can take
some consolation in any
ambivalence we feel about what
comes next having a long history
back to the clock and the steam
engine. The more things change, the
more they stay the same.
The Clock &
The Steam Engineby Ben Russell, Curator of
Mechanical Engineering at the
The Science Museum, London
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At the Salon d’Aviation in Paris in
1912, Marcel Duchamp turned to
Constantin Brancusi and said,
“Painting’s washed up.” He
pointed to a plane’s propeller,
“Can you do better than that?”
Although Brancusi gave it a good
shot throughout his entire career,
such aesthetic admiration has not
survived easily into our present
century, an age of diminishing
resources, with our gathering
dependence on, and fear of, the
Machine. The machines that order
our lives are more safely adored if
the visible moving parts are kept
to the minimum (“All the better for
Health and Safety...”) or rendered
tiny through the marvels of nanno-
culture (“isn’t it marvellous, you
can’t even see it!”).
In her film she wanted to evoke
the spirit of post-War exercises in
Public Information, aiming for
what John Grierson called “the
creative treatment of actuality”.
Her counterpoint of mechanical
action (stately pistons, wheels and
shafts) with indications of human
intervention (signs, dials and
numbers) unfolds with
symmetrically deployed bursts of
steam acting as a sort of lubricant
to the narrative, a quixotic time
frame of acceleration and
deceleration, underpinned by Tim
Howarth’s sinuous musical score.
The film can be differentiated
however from Modernist exercises
in Mechanolatry (Charles Sheeler,
Margaret Bourke-White, and
Humphrey Jennings for example)
in that she has chosen to set her
montage of visual material within
the context of an invented
organisation, The Central Office
for Clocktime Expansion, inspired
by her archival discoveries at the
Engineerium and tapping into
those bodies set up by
Governments to enhance
productivity, spirit or morale.
Perhaps her antecedents are more
accurately seen as Duchamp and
Picabia whose machines were
more perverse and comedic.
The film constructs an arc of
acceleration and deceleration, with
a choreography and rhetoric the
Central Office, with its formality
and institutional earnestness, may
not have originally intended. It is
for the viewer to decide whether
the Central Office behaves as if it
is operating within a Kafka novel
or an Ealing Comedy. A single
stray cobweb patiently shares the
load with one piston towards the
end of the film.
Her new film is a timely
reminder of the power and beauty
of mechanical movement using the
machines and archives of the old
Goldstone Pumping Station, now
resurrected triumphantly as the
British Engineerium. She writes,
“The Victorian chimney always
made me nostalgic for my
Industrial Northern roots. In a
previous project I found myself
occupied in little known archives,
with stories that had no place
within that project, but which
fueled my hunger for more
coherence between my research
and the finished work. The
Engineerium is an extraordinary
site on the verge of development
that permitted me quiet
contemplation to drive my work
and reflect on my own sense of
ease and security in such industrial
environments.’’
The Central Office
for Clocktime
Expansionby Art Historian Dr Chris Mullen
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“My work is about drawing
awareness to the unseen. I
research, record and absorb
elements of place, and then revel
in the layering and sequencing of
my findings making work that
adds new value and narratives to
the often overlooked details of a
site.”Jayne Wilson
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The short hand goes round
the circle in twelve hours.
The long hand goes round the
circle in one hour and moves
from dot to dot in a minute.
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The 64-bit timestamps used by
NTP consist of one 32-bit
seconds part
and a 32-bit fractional second
part
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The making of this work would not have
been possible without the support of The
British Engineerium Trust, especially Peter
Fagg, Alan Roberts, Steve Rather and Michael
Rozsnyaki.
I would also like to thank Dr Chris
Mullen, Ben Russell, Tim Howarth, Darren
and Benjamin Connolly, Catherine Bertola
and all at the Fabrica Peer Review for their
valuable contributions.This 24 page limited edition
pamphlet accompanies the film
and illustrates some of the
printed, unearthed and archive
materials that have influenced
the course of the work.
Additional copies can be
obtained from:
Copyright © Jayne WilsonPrinted in Great Britain for the Artist by Delta Press Limited, Hove, East Sussex MMXI
Jayne Wilson