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Soundtrack Relocation
Synchronised DVD on twin monitors
Dur: 18m [looped]
2005

 

Notes:
Begun early in April 2005 "Soundtrack..." examined the construction of the charaer "Deep Throat", the then undisclosed informant who blew the whistle on the Nixon administration's complicity in funding political espionage. His representation was primarily developed by the film All the President's Men, a dramatization of the Watergate story directed by Alan J. Pakula and released in 1976. My interest lies in how these images have passed into a visual lore, they were the only location scenes in the film not to be shot in Washington DC, having been filmed in the parking lot of the ABC studios in Los Angeles. Everything in the character's lexicon is a construction of cinema, from the location, the film-noir aesthetic and even his name (borrowed from a popular porno movie of the time by the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee). So much so that there were theories that he never even existed and was a textual device used to combine numerous unnamed sources and move the narrative along in the original book by Woodward and Bernstein. The location of this character has become central to his identification and our understanding of him. In the work I re-recorded a soundtrack and dubbed it over two edits appropriated from the film, taking the integrity (or lack thereof) in the location sound and authority of the spoken word and undermining it in an act of duplicity relocated in a multi-story car-park attached to a cinema in Belfast. The work was first exhibited in Belfast on May 31st. The very next day in the early hours of the morning, with no fore warning, Mark Felt, second in command at the F.B.I during the Nixon administration, revealed himself to the world's press as "Deep Throat".