Author: field

The image of Shanghai as a highly developed city is a construct founded in the 1990s. In 1990 the State Council of the People’s Republic of China made the decision to open and develop the Pudong area, and in 1992 established the Pudong New District. Ever since, all kinds of development projects, on a massive scale, have been implemented. In the past 20 or so years, these projects have facilitated the global flow of capital into Shanghai, bringing global corporations to settle here.

The worlds encountered in the works of Field Recordings—whether produced collaboratively or by the group’s individual members—are striking in their absolute particularity. The viewer is aware, straight away, that these are not scenes waiting self-consciously for a filmmaker to appear; they will continue with or without an audience’s attention…

We have learned to measure the distance between Auckland and Shanghai in kilometres (9,376) but by other measures (cultural, philosophical, social) the span is still evasive. Show me the containers that ferry meaning between these places…

Combined together they look at the fetishistic attitudes towards consumer goods and the lives of those who produce them in a global context.

Behind the “zero degree writing” of the video, it is the repeated, measuring, editing and polishing of every detail.

Sometimes the movements of the machine are mimicked by the actions of the workers. Or the workers are hidden by piles of fabric, as if the material were some sort of metaphor about the processes and politics of documentation and representation…