Following online discussion, meetings and workshops Machine Room were invited to work in the new project space at Crate, Margate. The idea of this residency was developmental, to give us the opportunity to exchange ideas and methods without a prescribed outcome.
We asked questions about authorship, procedure and the open flow of ideas through discussion and practical collaboration. Our individual methodologies were reframed and challenged.
In responding to the context of the project, we were reminded of Cixous' description of starting to work as being like wandering in a foreign country, uncertain of destination. We began by using the structure of the dérive, a form of psycho-geography beloved of the Situationists, to locate ourselves within the environ of Ramsgate and Margate. In drifting through the promenades and dreamlands, we encountered key moments and pictorial devices embedded in the landscape: look-outs, viewpoints, framings. We shifted our gaze between these cultural 'eye-catchers' stranded in the present - the redundant power station, the blind lido - and the ungraspable horizon, reading in them a cultural history of visuality. What we can see and can't see is always given to us by a historically mediated frame. As viewers, we were enfolded into the sounds and sensations of the beach and the fairground. Visuality is also profoundly somatic, embodied.
These different forms of visuality mapped for us the relation between the two interlinking project spaces at Crate, light and dark. We strategised them as the basis for a series of experimental investigations into and through the devices of painting: the folds and frames of screens and surfaces.
In September 2006 Crate hosted an event documenting the collaboration and launching the Machine Room website.
