Much of my work inhabits the ‘public' realm, the unregulated disused sites, cellars, underpasses and cinemas. Recurrent interests include liminal sites, the thresholds between spaces, the redundant and the ignored, and how we might frame them in order to recover their significance.

The work in The Futurist, like many of my other works, reflects my interest in sites that are, in the words of Kerry Brougher,
"not empty but filled with absence"

	The cinema screened its last film in 1982 and since then has lain dormant, quietly decaying. Now exactly ninety-two years after its first screening, The Futurist will once again open its doors to the public, on the 16th of September 2004. On this occasion, for one month only, the cinema is the subject of its screenings. In the ultimate act of cinematic self-reflexivity, the cinema becomes the location, the principal actor, and the source for the script for its last film, 'The Futurist'.
The Futurist presents a flat document of a banal, empty, abandoned present, waiting for something to happen. We witness the process of entropy at play within the space. From its bowels to its heart and its underbelly to its rooftops, the anatomy of the building will be exposed, and these images projected live into the cinema's foyer. Twelve surveillance cameras will scrutinise its secrets, excavating and dissecting the decaying hulk.
	The foyer of the cinema, fronting onto the ever-busy Lime Street in Liverpool, is currently hidden behind a ubiquitous battered roller shutter. Three metres in from the street, the entire entrance will be sealed by a large sheet of toughened glass, glazing this threshold. The glass screen offers visual access whilst at the same time preventing any other physical passage to 'within'. Within out, without in.
In his essay on the 'Dialectics of Outside and Inside', Pg 211, Bachelard quotes Pierre Jean Jouve (Lyrique Pg 59) "car nous sommes ou nous ne sommes pas" - for we are where we are not. This new window will allow passers-by to stop, step up and gaze into The Futurist's immediate interior.
	Over a period of days, the glass will be obscured to create a CinemaScope screen, which will then catch the images relayed from the cameras, via a powerful video projector. In addition to this continual twenty four hours-a-day live broadcast, the installation will be used to explore the representation of the 'real' and the 'fictional' and the whole work will also be harnessed as a tool by which the rich fabric of anecdote and myth from The Futurist's past can be gathered.
On occasion the work will create a 'Venue' - the camera system will be trained on a specific site such as the remains of the first floor stage, where local acts; musicians, comedians and singers, will be invited to perform to the empty auditorium, the performance watched by whoever happens to be passing by outside at the time.

Looking Back At The Futurist

"The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say wide open.”

Gaston Bachelard "The Poetics of Space" Pg 222.

The Futurist cinema first opened its doors to the public as the Lime Street Picture House on the 16th of September 1912. It was Liverpool's first purpose- built cinema. The history of The Futurist appears to mirror the evolution of the Society of the Spectacle in our modern lives. The bold title 'The Futurist' celebrated the advent of faster, more powerful, more spectacular technologies and was matched by this cinema's continuous quest for technical innovation. The Futurist was the first cinema in Liverpool to host the 'Amazing Talking Picture' - the first to show CinemaScope and later the 'Huge Miracle Mirror Cinema Scope.' It was first to go to the even larger Todd-AO 70mm screen and finally, in desperation in the mid-seventies, the first to embrace the novelty 'Sensurround', screening vibrating spectaculars like 'Earthquake.'