Writings – Chris Welsby

Interview: Chris Welsby in conversation with Catherine Elwes

TS: MIRAJ 2.2_Images_Welsby1.jpg CAPTION: Chris Welsby, Seven Days (1974), 20 min. Courtesy of the artist. Chris Welsby is one of the luminaries of British experimental film. Since the early 1970s, his work has combined an engagement with landscape, cybernetic systems and the material and procedural concerns of artists associated with the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. He has concentrated on the observable phenomena of natural elements – wind, rain, tides and the …

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Interview: Martin Grennberger in conversation with Chris Welsby

CW: The thing about a panoramic view is that everything is very different: you’re not very involved in the scene. And from a military point of view, that can be a good point. But from the point of the work that I make, I tend to use close up much more. And be more involved inside the landscape, rather than looking objectively from outside. That would be my main reason …

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Interview: Filming with Nature: A Conversation with Experimental Filmmaker Chris Welsby

by Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera and Sophie Cook Shore Line I (1977) © Chris Welsby First one drop of rain, then another, hit the lens, blurring the vistas in front of it. A gust of wind moves the camera, precariously attached to a homemade windmill, and frames the natural scenery. The raindrop is not a stain, nor is the wind a disruption; rather, these elements represent some of the many ways …

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Expanded Cinema: 20th Century Encounters with the Machine.

This essay is based on a paper written for the symposium on Expanded Cinema, which was held at the Tate Modern in April 2009. It is written from the perspective of my own art practice, which was heavily influenced by the structural materialist film theory at the London Film Makers Co-operative[1], where I began making landscape films and installations in the early 1970s, and by cybernetic and systems theory at …

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Technology, Nature, Software and Networks: Materializing the Post-Romantic Landscape

Abstract I began making films and installations in the early 1970s. Although I have worked across a range of media, I have always concentrated on one particular theme that I conceptualise as a two-sided question: How do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world, and how should we position our selves and our technologies within it? This essay traces some of the threads of these seminal ideas through …

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A Systems View of Nature

Experimental Film and Video: an anthology. Chapter 3 P.26 Published 2006 During the 1960s American physicist Edward Lorenz turned his attention to the seem ingly mundane field of weather prediction. Devising a mathematical formula known as the Lorenz Attractor, he mapped the course of chaos itself. The study of complex sys- tems such as the weather has since been seen to have applications in all fields of the life sciences …

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Landscape in the 20th Century?

August 1980 Chris Welsby: Films/ Photographs/ Writings. Edited by David Curtis and Published by the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Question “is it relevant to be producing landscape art in the latter half of the 20th Century” is a question which, when engaged in making or exhibiting my work, is always uppermost in my mind. The Work is, not surprisingly, classified under the general art historical term “landscape” and …

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Clocks and Clouds

1975 “There is nothing permanent except change” Heraclitus 535-475 BC In this short essay I have quite arbitrarily divided the elements of making a film into two quite separate categories. Changing light, wind, clouds, waves and animals are examples of cloud like phenomena. The camera running at a constant film rate, the tides, buses running on regular time tables and the rotation of the planet are examples of clock like …

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Outside the City Limits

Along with approximately half the population of the planet, I have lived most of my life in cities. However, the forests and tidal estuaries of the south coast of England were my first home and the subject of my first paintings and drawings. I painted these subjects because that was where I lived, and because of a deeply experienced connection to the land and the sea. When, in 1972, I …

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