Incorporating digital imaging, new writing, and the web Citizens investigates the notion of a virtual city, an online environment with a ‘living’ populace.
Based around an ever-expanding series of poems by writer Steven Sheil (see below) inspired by experiences of city living, Citizens is a moving, living, mutable entity, with its own internal timezone, transport system and methods of navigation.
Extracts from the development of Citizens were projected onto the glass link building at Broadway Cinema during the period of research and development as part of Now Festival. 2001
A RAINY DAY, AN ELDERLY MAN SLIPS
AS HE ENTERS THE BOOKSHOP
His smooth-soled shoe slid
from the wet metal
W set in
the pavement, that leg
sent sideways across
him, its momentum
tipping him backwards,
unready instinct
panicking his hands
into a twin grasp
at insubstantial
air, his body’s skewed
architecture framed
for that moment by
the shop’s sliding doors
Y
She pushes twins,
lets her flip-flops
flap the pavement
while he talks to
his mother on
the mobile. The
mid-morning sun
sweats the small of
her back, wetting
his fingers as
he hitches up
the waistband of
her leggings to
cover the taut
Y of her thong
Animation and public projection. 2001
Now Festival, Nottingham
BACK TO LIFE
In the aisles of Everything’s £1
a grandmother, 45, stops and
stares towards the till, eyes narrowing,
presses two fingers to her ear. As
shoppers squeeze their baskets past her she
kicks back the wheellocks on her hooded
pushchair and draws a chewed tape from the
walkman on her hip. Scowling, fingers
wedged in the spools, she starts to wind the
slack which spirals towards the shop’s floor