Longshore drift, early Detroit techno and other processes of erosion    (2006)

 

Longshore drift, early Detroit techno and other processes of erosion    (2006)  

45 minute slide lecture using 35mm film slide projection

Each time Longshore drift,… is performed, although retaining its core narrative, the exact sequence of images and Chodzko’s vocalisation of their possible connections, shifts and evolves through the losses and additions to his attempt to remember the original version.

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Longshore drift, early Detroit techno and other processes of erosion… is a performance lecture, using projected 35mm film slides by Adam Chodzko using, and about, memory, chance and sequence, accumulation and dispersal.
Chodzko’s attempt to understand the moon’s effect on tidal flow (and specifically the process of longshore drift) gives way to an account of beach-combing collections of deposited artefacts along a coastline.  A series of washed up 35mm slides provides the order for a narrative that drifts and weaves together 1960’s tourist snaps with a history of Detroit techno, NASA’s drug experiments on spiders to severed feet in Nike trainers washed up on the shores of British Columbia.
The performance presents a sequence of images together with a method for talking around them. It can be seen as an instruction manual – a script, perhaps – of how to tell a story. Or how to continue a story. Or, how to remember a story. But, despite its role as custodian of information it is itself becoming a little lost, subsumed within its own materials, surrounded by its props.
It seems to begin as an amateur geography lesson about tides. An ordering of fragments of knowledge arising from the desire to ‘try to get one’s head’ around something; The attempt to understand the role of the moon in the erosion and deposition of matter along a coast line.  Navigated through projecting found images (approx. 80- 130 slides, apparently washed up on a beach) the relationship between image and word gradually becomes something that moves between document, certainty and instability and surreality.
A group of slide images are washed up on part of a beach (joining other shoreline litter; a patch of sand where buttons are washed up, another area with littoral car keys, and beyond that, a section of beach which just seems to have been deposited with VHS video tape). Each image is different from any other image through its particular arrangement of emulsion on celluloid.  As a result, Chodzko speculates, the movement of an image, in suspension through water, will be different according to the picture it presents. Because of irregularities within the smoothness of the film’s surface each image will have different levels of drag, or friction, within the water and so will end up deposited in a sequence by tidal movements determined by its ability to be held within or ‘spat out’ from the ocean currents.  Chodzko suggests that there must be a meaning to this order influenced by sea and moon, date, time, weather, geology, coastal shape etc etc.
So, what is the story being told?  The idea of erosion and deposition is linked to remembering within the process of telling, or attempting to tell.  A mnemonic system within the art of memory, using the slide carousel as the memory theatre, attempting to draw a web between one image and the next from a desire for a logical sequence.  But it is a need that is strong enough to stretch the web close to breaking point with some impossible claims.  There is an echoing of tides coming in and out and the swash and backwash of waves on a beach.
At regular intervals within the sequence of images are objects perceived to be moons; some are actual images of the moon but gradually they become eg; a glass of milk on a dark tablecloth or the pale centre of a vinyl record. These ‘moons’ mark chapters within the flow; they catalyse another ‘tide’ and so another flow of images.
Many of the chapters deal with the idea of deposition or erosion and objects in suspension; some quite literally: eg; thousands of Nike trainers that fell from a shipping container on a cargo ship that are now being used to track ocean currents connecting to a series of amputated feet that appeared washed up on the Canadian coast.

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Excerpt from a dialogue between Adam Chodzko and Martin Clark, in Adam Chodzko Proxigean Tide, May 2008, Tate Publishing:
MC: “…I can see how that idea of a procession or sequence of images around a space is very evocative of a carousel of slides, and of the way that you have used slide projections in a number of your works, from Cell–a and The Gorgies Centre, to Turning Point, and the three masked parade proposal works…. It also makes me think of the performance work, Longshore Drift, which you are presenting toward the end of the show.
AC: Yes, it’s strange in relation to memory because I have only done this slide-lecture performance once before, two years ago, and I did it without notes and I have virtually no memory of what I said then. Which is odd, because its subject is partly memory, and it’s also really frustrating because I’ll have to build the bridges between the images again from scratch. So, it will be a very different piece. Its full title is Longshore Drift, early Detroit techno and other forms of erosion, which helps only a little. I know I start by trying to understand tidal flow and its lunar relations and this collapses into an anecdote about finding a slide collection washed up on a beach. I explain a way that I’ve figured out an order to these images, through their sequence of deposition on the beach, and then weave them together. They vary from images from the 1960’s of garden enthusiasts posing in front of rhododendron bushes to pictures from the 1990’s of factories that specialise in distressing denim for jeans. It builds up associations between impossibly disparate material whilst simultaneously undermining any possible connections. Anyway, I have a lot of work to do on it over the summer so I currently have no idea what direction it will go in for St Ives, but ultimately it is about sharing a remembering and forgetting in public.
MC: Well, I think in the way you’ve been thinking about your show as a whole, there is a sense that the works are the traces left behind, washed up by surges of production over the years. But then there is also this more literal, poetic idea that they might have been physically washed into the building after one of these extreme tides – that the show is made up of the detritus that’s left behind as the water recedes . Certainly, these ideas of impossible conjunctions, memory and flow – especially the removal of evidence – is going on in the Tate Etc. work….”
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Excerpt from Bad Timing, Adam Chodzko interviewed by David Barrett, July-August 2008,  Art Monthly, 3181
DB: “…And this connects with the piece that you refer to as the end of the Tate St Ives show, your slide-talk performance, Longshore drift, early Detroit techno, and other processes of erosion (2006-).
AC: [Longshore Drift… and Memory Theatre are image catalysts for memory, and in Longshore drift the memory shifts depending on what the consecutive slides are. The piece began with an observation that on certain stretches of coast you can find in one section, say, all the fragments of washed up glass, and in another will be all the driftwood. So the implication is that there is a sorting, or sifting, that the tide performs, of material from lots of different periods and sources – but there’s a hidden logic as to how it’s been sorted.  Longshore drift is based on a supposition that what constitutes the image on a 35mm slide, the particular placement of emulsion on the celluloid, creates different degrees of friction, and so from one image to another there would be a different amount of drag determining how far an image would float before ending up being deposited along the beach.

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Longshore Drift… was first performed in the sea cadets’ hut at Whitstable Biennale, 2006 and in 2008 at St Ives Arts Club as part of his solo exhibition at Tate St Ives, Proxigean Tide.
Later performances include being part of Volatile Dispersal, Festival of Art Writing, Whitechapel Gallery in 2009.
Chodzko’s exploration of one image from Longshore Drift…appears as ‘de Schuykill’, in Monaco (a publication created by Katie Guggenheim), no. 5 (2012)