PAUL GREENLEAF

A continuity clock from 1970s independent television for schools is running out of time. A voice replicated from the past explains that our future wasn’t always the way it is now.

Compiled largely from vintage VHS clips the film evokes an hauntological nostalgia for lost futures forming a critique of present day political and cultural issues. AI tools are used to regenerate a trustworthy character who invites us to listen carefully and challenge the status quo.

Single channel 4k video, stereo sound, 5.10 mins, 2024

The film explores a destabilisation of time by blending history, observations of contemporary life and premonitions of the future, synthesising visual and audio ideas through the fractured lens of memory and media. Say When is inspired by memories of my grandmother explaining how reading tealeaves gives insights into everyday concerns. Throughout the film tea leaf reading or ‘tasseography’ opens up narratives set around an area of the Kent coast; underwater sound recordings at the site of obsolete cross-channel telegraph cables, memorial benches along the promenade and prophetic graffiti on the sea wall. The film reflects on post-Brexit loss of connectivity with Europe alongside personal grief and heralds a future demise of fast-fashion retailer Primark when mysterious tunnels are found underneath the shop. Beached ruins of the retail outlet emulate the Statue of Liberty in the film Planet of the Apes and stand as a critique of the present from the perspective of an imagined future.

Technical interventions such as macro photography, manipulated video, hydrophone recordings, and 3D scanning are used to forensically examine the tealeaves. Exploring psychogeographic aspects of the landscape and the relationship between technology and esoteric belief systems, the film illustrates a disjointed temporality, interweaving past and present perspectives with premonitions of the future. The work is assembled from new filmed footage, vintage photos, Foley, studio and field recordings. From seemingly disconnected elements cinematic representations fit together to form a provocative whole that emulates my own thought processes where disparate personal and collective cultural issues are juxtaposed and form new associations. The vernacular expression ‘say when’ means enough ie. when to stop (pouring milk or tea). The phrase is tacitly implied towards the socio-political themes in the film and to question the timing of the visions.

Single channel 4K video, stereo sound, 17.50 mins, 2023

This metaphysical voyage weaves together inner and outer time and space. An oneiric journey or a disjointed vision of the future, the film depicts possible starfields, cosmic dust clouds or microscopic cells. Westminster underground station is transformed into an abandoned spacecraft situated deep beneath the Houses of Parliament in London.

We encounter a weightless survey of the subterranean site with the reverberating chimes of Big Ben forming "leaden circles" dissolving through the space. Made during the pandemic, this reference to Virginia Woolf’s 'Mrs Dalloway' invokes the idea that, like the novel’s eponymous character, our daily lives are suppressed and dictated by the decisions made by those in the government. We hear the breathing of an unseen explorer and a voice recites EU president Ursula von der Leyen's borrowed phrase from T.S. Eliot, “What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.”

Stereo sound, 10.24 mins (continuous loop), 2021

In this work nine recordings featuring performances of John Cage's composition 4’33’’ are played simultaneously, merging with the ambient sonic environment of the installation itself.  Composed in 1952 Cage’s score instructs performers not to play throughout three movements that together last 4 minutes and 33 seconds. However, each musician performs and interprets Cage's piece differently some dictated by a stopwatch, others through improvisation and therefore the duration varies according to the individual.

The installation features multiple performances mediated through technology with split screen video and nine speakers delivering separate audio channels for each rendition. Visual counters draw our attention to the time disparity of each performance. The work frames ‘silence’ or Cage’s "absence of intended sounds” within performance environments experienced by audiences over decades shared with that of the contemporary viewers to the installation.

Single channel video, nine channel audio, 7.00 mins, 2022

A son-et-lumière audio visual installation that channels the spirit of John Henry Pepper. Scientist, inventor and director of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, Professor Pepper was a prominent figure in Victorian London. Renowned for his theatrical showmanship, he staged phantasmagoria and patented a visual illusion that became known as 'Pepper's Ghost' still widely used today in theatres, museums and galleries. This manifestation of Pepper's Ghost utters lines by Wordsworth urging us to set aside science and art in favour of nature.

Single channel video, stereo sound, 6.17 mins, 2020

Short film exploring the haunting legacy of the A12 road in East London where over 300 houses were demolished in the 1990s. The film interweaves archive footage and photos with fresh audio and video material merging personal and collective memory. Fragmented recorded voices of former residents (radio transmissions garnered from the decaying remnants of a local art installation) fuse with electromagnetic field recordings and snippets of Konstantin Raudive's 'Voices of the Dead’. Taking its name from the protestors’ slogan on the final house to be demolished and the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, 'I Will Become More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine' summons spectral voices and residual energy from the landscape to confront the motorway.

Single channel video, stereo sound, 16.21 mins, 2019

Audio visual work in three phases each featuring anonymous sightseers gazing away from the viewer into the distant landscape. A journey into the fabric of the photographs where the viewer submerges into grain, dust & scratches whilst encountering digitally mapped textures. 

The film is accompanied by a soundtrack composed on analogue synthesizers and digital audio workstation. As the audience travels further into the image’s materiality each scene dissolves into the next becoming an eternal continuous loop.

Single-channel video, stereo sound, 5.14 mins, 2018

An arrangement based on duration, intensity, pitch and timbre, Tools is a montage of VHS tape clips and audio samples. An experimental sequence attempting to maintain auditory flow whilst ignoring typical composition or melodic principles.

Single channel video, stereo sound, 1.37 mins, 2018

Journal is a dream-like video sequence repeated on a loop. The work examines a moment of conscious detachment made apparent through the intrusion of the digital world into daily life felt when recording a home movie. The installation features three different computer generated voices narrating accounts of the production process, deconstructing the procedures used to make the work.

2 channel video projection (recorded video and live feed), 2 x stereo sound, 8.26 mins, 2018

Inspired by a news story about a 'fake tree' (a camouflaged mobile phone mast designated as 'Macrocell SUF0191') disowned by a town in Suffolk. The film imagines the antenna as a semi-autononmous organism which self-propogates, sending 'spores' into the atmosphere.

"Greenleaf explores such themes as AI, man-made lifeforms, artificial landscape and GM crops. Spores succeeds in being at once ironic/detached and serious/engaged, postmodern art work and polemical socio-cultural comment." - Igloo Magazine

Single channel video, stereo sound, 4.50 mins, 2016

Installation photo: Projection onto blank postcard at AVA Gallery, University of East London, 2016 © greenleafphoto.co.uk

Tightly edited clips of digital television transmissions glitched during an electrical storm. The work refers to the photographer’s activity of cataloguing and archiving batches of images.

Single channel video, stereo sound, 2.13 mins, 2018

The bridge in this film (Pont de Ré road bridge at La Rochelle, France) visually sweeps above our heads and serves as a literal and metaphorical link or connection between two states. Variations in playback speed and split colour channels overlaid on one another create an oneiric quality and a sense of motion aftereffect (MAE). The footage slowly washes in and out eventually disappearing altogether. The soundtrack is comprised of a whispered voiceover designed to elicit an Autonomous Median Sensory Response (AMSR). Asynchronized subtitles conflate elements of the Lord’s Prayer with compliance phrases encountered on the internet such as, “Come let us agree / Give us this day our daily feed / Thank you for choosing this opportunity / To receive your message / Add us to your friends list / As it was in the beginning / So it is now / As it will be / For ever and ever / No thanks / I Agree.”

Single channel video, stereo sound, 5.18 mins, 2018