Crossing: Death the Horizontal (2024)
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Crossing: Death the Horizontal is a short film that re-imagines the crossing of life and death as a gallery experience. What if we could 'see' our ancestors in paintings, spaces, animals, and certain poetry? What if death was the antithesis of ontological certainty and instead the vital pulse of life. This film is not about the act of dying but the potency of entropy in life. The older we get the more visceral the ancestral textures. The poetic move has no end or beginning, on the cartography of breath.
Premiere Screened at Genesis Cinema, RCA Contemporary Art Film Festival (2024), exhibited in Occult: Surge, Shoreditch (2024) * this video contains artistic nudity |
THE INFINITY OF BREATH (2024)
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Part of a body of filmed performance work recording my 60-minute sunrise meditation practice on the seasonal solstices and equinoxes. This 3-minute edited short film speaks to the geometry of breath experienced during action meditation. Akin to action drawing, the breath body expands to infinity through yogic meditation practices. The text was both created and applied as spontaneous emergence and re-emergence of star light. The sunrise meditation took place on the Winter Solstice 2020.
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KINETIC ENTROPY (2023)
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Kinetic Entropy explores 'performance making' as research methodology. My aim was to take 9 sheets of tin plate steel and join them as a 9 ft square sheet, the maximum size I could interact with and shape unassisted. The film is largely continuous, recording the emergence of the figural through human touch. The performance is a tactile improvisation inspired by the thrumming rhythms of the overhead M25 flyover and passing trains on the London Waterloo to Woking trainline. Birds also join in. My aim now is to make 9 of these figures in different locations using the making process to think about birth and death, what constitutes a minimal life, what shapes belonging, what enables happiness, and the flow of relationships.
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M25 LAMENT FOR GAIA (2023)
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M25 Lament speaks to the intersectional complexity of a life as a borrowed nervous system and the finitudal breath. My sanctuary for 10 years is a houseboat moored on the Basingstoke Canal. The canal was conceived as a waterway to stimulate colonial trade. Her stillness reflects the underbelly of the M25, its pillars and trusses and anonymous graffiti tattoos. A few miles away is Heathrow airport - the sky is crowded. To the left on the other side of the canal is colossal electricity power station. Earth, sky and body buzz. This project overlaps Investigate and Realise projects evolving from raw recording in a ‘hide’ to an urban lament. Voice Margot Wilson & Directing Images James Merrell Sound Design Marcus Herne Video Editing Margot Wilson Fuji GFX100S Camera Premiere Pro v23.3.0
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...and then she (2023)
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A film that contemplates Buddhist 'transitoriness' and 'impermanence'. Filmed at the M25 / Basingstoke Canal/ Woking-London train line' and Heathrow flight path, the narrative contemplates energy transmission as transitory embodiment. The filming was shot on a foggy morning including the sound recording. The 'clicking' is the compressed rhythm of the M25 traffic flowing overhead. The 'silence' is the same sound compressed to in-audible presence. Transitoriness is not a unitary linear journey, it is not even truly a circle, it is the transformation of presence as the infinite expanding cosmos punctuated and 'held' by breath.
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BLUE MEDITATION: WINTER SOLSTICE (2020)
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Film #1 - Winter Solstice (2020): Performance by Margot Wilson, Videography & Photography by James Merrell
Filmed at sunrise, these 60-minute films examine the intersection of light and elevation in the sun and body. Each practice is spontaneous according to the movement of the spiral energy emerging through the body. In this piece, the arms are effortlessly raised for the majority of the experimental meditation performance. This project forms part of my 'embodied emergence' research. Critical to ‘embodied emergence’ is the circadian nature of waking and sleep and geometry of the bodily postures as horizontal and perpendicular. Falling occurs in sleep, dreaming, and dying, and is a constant of gravity. Elevation occurs in bodily uprightness, dreaming and rising against gravity in all its forms. Embodied emergence here is the constant of gravity and the emergence ‘thickness’ (Lyotard: 1996) and re-emergent rise against gravity. Humans rise and fall each day. The research aims at a view of embodied emergence as the thickness (Lyotard: 1996) between rising and falling, called here, elevation towards levitation. Elevation not only resists gravity but transcends or grasps agency it in dreaming and hypnogogic and hypnopompic visualisation. Meaning, humans as embodied elevation, possess physical and virtual technologies, enabling us agents of own emergence and re-emergence. |
TIBETAN TANTRIC BREATHING SONIC INSTALLATION (2017)
Sound and Video by Marcus Herne. www.marcusherne.com
THE DREAM DOCTOR (2017) - THE DRAMA STUDIO, SHEFFIELD
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Written and directed by Margot Robbins ('The Bag', Cockpit Theatre, London) and performed by Matthew Hickey (Band of Brothers, Wallander, Children of the Sun - National Theatre) and Mary Margaret Lyons (All My Children ABC NY, The Rimmers of Eldrich - New York). The Dream Doctor is set in a dream research lab within a psychiatric hospital where psychiatrist Dr. Jay, convinces an agoraphobic addict called 'Pig' to become a guinea pig in an off-the-grid experiment with shocking consequences.
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OTHER PROJECTS
The second project is a full-length play titled 'Algorithm' (synopsis: It was agreed in 2015 following the creation of a super-computer Algorithm based on all of the philosophies and geopolitical systems ever created on earth, that the 8 global leaders retain the power to sanction or veto all radical solutions. A quirk of the Algorithm is the inclusion of the Oracle of Delphi to mediate the sanctioning process). |
The VREAM Project (2017-2022)
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About: The VREAM Method
The word VREAM relates to the activity of ‘vivid dreaming’ as highly memorable, frequently absurd, dream fragments induced by a specific technique of breathing. The technique was developed in 2005 by Margot Wilson (me) as part of long-standing experimentation with breathing, meditation and lucid dreaming and went onto to be used as a personal-transformation method still in use today. Over 250 individuals have successfully participated in the VREAM Method and with few exceptions[1], the method is reliable. Vivid Dreams are analysed differently to regular REM dreaming and relate specifically to periods of the dreamer’s life, spatial relationship with self, and when/how existing soma-neuro-holding patterns held within dreamer were established. This VREAM Method was presented at The Royal College of Psychiatrists Congress (Edinburgh, 2017) and Towards a Science of Consciousness in Helsinki (2015). Dream neuroscience today (see Friston, Hobson) proposes dreaming as (performances of) ‘sampling’ change and absurdity and as a necessary feature of evolution and human development. The idea is that we are by necessity wired to constantly anticipate change, in being so, inevitably move around on a spectrum between conditioned cognition, cognitive bias, outright tunnel vision and delusion. Further, that this virtual sampling in sleep is essential to stabilise our continuous experience of self (me-ness) and to avoid total overwhelming, indeed, annihilation by the incessant accumulation of experience, memory and data. [1] Participants who smoked marijuana or pot failed to remember their dreams. This is thought to be due to the disruption in REM sleep cycles. Low dosages of anti-depressants and prescribed anxiety also affected dream recall. |
