David Greenhalgh’s practice uses public domain archival footage, sounds and music to construct short essay films. By taking fragments of media from dozens of different sources, and arranging them into a narrative, these video works are made to speculate on different social and political futures. In these stories, new sciences and technologies attempt to reshape the human condition (and usually fail). The aim of Greenhalgh’s practice is to extend a hand to the future, through acting as a bricoleur of the past.
Essay (On Opposition) is an absurd assemblage of 37 different Public Domain sources into a non-linear, doubt-wracked essay film. Set in a place and time unknown to us, the narrator observes that here museums aren’t repositories of the past but have become investigatory institutions of what could have been: a way of distancing people from alternate realities. The narrator is led into this museum by a colleague and is disturbed by a vision of eternally bickering men. This prompts further thoughts on what control we have over our fate.
2PM is an exploration of a hypothetical future. In this distant world, a scientific and technological breakthrough has ushered in a new political and social era: an individual’s measure of power over others can now be quantified and measured through the delicate swerve of a subatomic particle. This has led to the management or control of human impulses and the ego; coincidentally the overall population has also reduced considerably and humanity enters a lethargic new epoch.
A BROKEN LINK 