De-energised

Single channel video with stereo sound, 9:26 min, 2023; currently viewable here, thanks to Firstdraft.

De-energised examines the relationship between energy use, technological waste and the urban environment, contemplating the fate of storage devices and attitudes towards their disposal.

It is a process-based work of fairly modest means, shot vérité style while walking in Sydney’s inner west suburbs (Chippendale, Redfern, Darlington, Newtown, Camperdown, Glebe, Forest Lodge, St Peters, Marrickville, and Alexandria) between 2021 and 2023. Stylistically, the work borrows from the history of Minimalist art cinema but imbues it with a contemporary subject, pursuing a slowly developing logic that brings its subject – energy use and waste – gradually (if incessantly) into focus.

Every time I found a discarded battery lying in the street, I made a brief video of it in situ, shot from the angle at which it was first sighted. The framing followed a basic cinematic language (mid-shot, close up, extreme close up) that was largely dictated by the conditions (e.g., traffic, pedestrians, or time available) rather than any predetermined sequence, becoming progressively more stylised as the project developed. The batteries were then recovered and sent to be properly disposed of. Each video was then edited down to a 4–5 second fragment, determined not by the image but its accompanying soundtrack, making sound the main indicator for the context each battery was found in (quiet back lane, noisy major road, front yard, busy footpath, etc.). Finally, these fragments were simply edited together in chronological order.

All up there are 200 shots of over 200 dumped batteries, predominately AA and AAA sized, in various states of damage and decay from pristine to completely oxidised. De-energised doesn’t postulate on how these batteries came to be where they were (although that is fairly obvious); instead, it asks its audience to contemplate something simple but overlooked that is occurring around us everyday and to consider what happens next – a meditation on waste, so to speak.