Slip. A Flying Prison     (2011)

Slip. A Flying Prison     (2011)

Single screen video with sound
6 mins 4 secs

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Slip. A Flying Prison: low resolution version on Vimeo

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Slip. A Flying Prison evolved out of a visit Adam Chodzko made in 2010 to the Hudson Valley,  New York and explores his interest in a magic realism catalysed by an apparently innocuous slippage within the ordering or monitoring of the everyday. This work also further investigates his work’s themes of a community’s relationship to place, displacement, missing objects, human error and the supernatural.
Problems with parts of the geodata recording during the 2000 US census meant that Milan, Dutchess County, NY was, overnight, accidentally allocated 2,203 extra people on top of its actual population of 2,356. Investigating these false presences in this town Chodzko found that they had been removed (via a flawed ‘cut and paste’) from Greenhaven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison, 30 miles away. An attempt to make sense of this surreal and menacing flight of convicts, through recording a journey within both communities (on a Go Pro camera) led to the forced deletion of his images by prison security as he attempted to film outside the prison in Greenhaven.  This created another gap, this time within the data of the artwork, the erased imagery filling the vortex left by the 2,203 flying prisoners. Slip. A Flying Prison becomes about accident, flow and displacement across boundaries, between data, individuals, communities and the places they inhabit and our perception of the narratives that might evolve from this.

Slip. A Flying Prison, initially shown at Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt in 2011 was included in Chodzko’s solo exhibition We are Ready for your Arrival (2013) at Raven Row, London, where its function within the design of the exhibition was to act as a remote echo of the wider installations’ themes of small human errors provoking chains of consequences that are not only real  but through their influence on the imaginary, destabilising to our perception of that reality.

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Related works:

A Hostile Environment   (2019)
Adaptation  (2013)
April – May 2000 Arc Ark   (2010)
Better Scenery   (2000 – )
Echo   (2009)
Pyramid    (2008)
Settlement    (2004)
Spare Room    (2014)
White Magic            (2005)