Teesside and The Kingdom of Shadows
an introduction to The Salt Passages

The piper, the tune

When Maxim Gorky went to the cinema for the first time, a little over a hundred years ago, just months after the first public projections, he wrote ‘Last night, I visited the kingdom of shadows’. This awe bares some comparison to that expressed by visitors to the Hemispherium at the University of Teesside’s Virtual Reality and Innovation Centre, where Geoff Broadway was based during the production of The Salt Passages. But where cinema could be said to extend an invitation to a world of imagination, where light and dark make patterns in the mind, the emerging field of Virtual Reality operates in a significantly different way. The Virtual Reality Centre operates in the commercial world. It is hugely expensive to manufacture Virtual Reality: it takes a lot of slaving at the screen-face, and a lot of hardware to store, project and experience the worlds created. Although based on immersion, it is participatory only in the service of efficiency and productivity – its primary uses are training and design. Although much of the publicity has centred on individual pleasure (cybersex and so on) the reality is industrial, corporate and functional.

Virtual Reality is not a kingdom of shadows. Any shadows are precisely calculated and are there to allow us to deal with shadows more effectively in actuality. It is not a medium which welcomes the human. Buildings and landscapes can be readily reproduced in great detail, and the sensation of movement is easily created. But people are usually pixelated cardboard cutouts there only to indicate scale. What is lacking is the grain of lived experience, the human voice, the expressiveness of place - those qualities which cannot be scanned in and held in stasis - the qualities reproduced only by shadows.

‘Knuckles pitted with scraping the fire out’

It is to this human element within place that Geoff Broadway has addressed himself in The Salt Passages. Broadway has rejected the smooth, wire-frame world of VR, for one which relies on a wider set of references - stories, memories, feelings, dreams. He has mixed the eloquent voices of ordinary people with some stunning visual condensations of conditions on Teesside today to create a world which the user can explore in an analogous way to that in which he or she might explore the commercial VR Middlesbrough created at the VR Centre. But with Broadway’s version, the user will get a clear impression of the lived experience of that reality, an experience trapped in commercial discourses, and in a world where instability - perhaps the antithesis of commercial VR, which fixes, ‘for the sake of argument’, the multi-million pixels of perception - is ever-present. The native tongue is made poetic by the rhythms of the storytelling and the details, by Broadway’s editing and by the random collages made by the viewer, mixing images and words to their own satisfaction, according to their own rules.

“Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be.” (Lyotard)

This endemic instability shows itself in many ways. Drugs undermine the family, society and the individual. Marriage too is crumbling as an institution, though for some that is a good thing. A picture by the bedside of an old woman is not a sign of eternal love, but there ‘to remind me what a bastard he (her husband) was to me’. Now he is dead the old woman takes pride in ‘more than 6 dresses of my own in the wardrobe and £100 in the bank that belongs to me.’ The meagreness of the ambitions of many of the people here is touching and sad.

One of the most moving moments of speech is a young man longing for an apprenticeship and a job – ‘I’d stick with it for life, I would, stick with it for life’. We know, however, the distance between his heartfelt yearning and the reality we know surrounds that yearning, reflected via other voices and in the melancholy evocations of what remains of Teesside’s industry. For this man, and others here, the landscapes Broadway artfully captures and makes beautiful are always out of reach. The floating headshots pin them down in the midst of this landscape, like so many exotic butterflies.

You notice only slowly that these specimens do actually move when paid attention, that these people – young, old, rich, poor, white, black, Asian, all dignified and arresting - are actually the centre of the work, the things which make all other elements function. This is form as metaphor, Broadway’s political values of community shaping the rules of the work, not just the content. Implicit in this is a rejection of the false realism of Virtual Reality, recalling perhaps Lyotard’s assertion that realism now lies “somewhere between academicism and kitsch”.

Salt of the Earth

The title of this work is enormously evocative without ever being fixed in its meanings. There is a clear reference to the geological basis of Teesside, as well as to the ways in which the elements of the work function as passages for the viewer to explore. To ‘salt a mine’ means, according to Brewer’s, ‘to introduce pieces of ore and the like into the workings so as to delude prospective purchasers into thinking that a worthless mine is in reality profitable’, whilst to ‘salt an account’ is similar, meaning ‘to put an extreme value on something, to give it piquancy and raise its market value’. Whilst there is also a preservative meaning, and The Salt Passages is in no way a pessimistic portrayal of Teesside, the voices here reject Development Agency hype to tell sad tales of life in an area often described as post-industrial. These are voices which some would like to sideline as being hopelessly out of date, out of touch with ‘the real world’ – people such as the man yearning for an apprenticeship when only New Deal beckons. New ways of life are growing up - from new kinds of extended family created through separation and new relationships, to new jobs or new ways to pass the time. What characterises all the speakers is a positivity – wanting to avoid what one calls ‘a state of bitterness’ – and the social nature of their desires. No doubt there are selfish people on Teesside – Broadway has chosen not to preserve them in The Salt Passages.

All That Is Solid…

Virtual Reality relies on speed - the eye is quicker than the brain so fools us into thinking what is actually a mesh of pixels is as solid as steel and likely to hurt if we crash into it. VR reduces to smooth simple surfaces the complexity of the world so that we can understand it - so we can stand under it and perform as expected. It gives us only the information necessary to make us want to perform efficiently. Shadows are functional. Too much information and reality would begin to break down - our processors could not handle it. Broadway’s work is based around the difference between moving and not moving, between speech and silence, slow motion and fast-forward. This applies technically - the movement of the mouse activates sounds and film, bringing to life the accusing faces - and thematically. The landscape of Teesside as seen here is slow - the clouds drift, the flames flicker in slow motion - but the people are frantically racing through rituals of consumption as if trying to get somewhere. Aside from the faces which form a key part of the work, humans are seen only fast-forwarding at the check out in Sainsbury’s, or in Middlesbrough town centre, or representing by cars hurtling along arterial roads. There is no space here, Broadway implies, for the kind of storytelling which makes us human, and by means of which people make up a community. The human here is pushed out by the commercial, can only surround it like white blood cells attacking a virus.

Searching for the psychic hotspots

The Salt Passages rejects the lightning quick trompe l’‚ il for enforced wandering. To experience this virtual version of Teesside you must let your mouse wander and stop. Your hand must drift for you to discover anything (paralleling Broadway’s own ‘dérive’ through Teesside, a search for psychic hotspots in the urban landscape). What you find will be fragmentary, collaged partly by the artist and partly by the user - you can create your own movement through the work, dig your own tunnels to recreate later, make your own Director’s Cut from the material. The juxtapositions of words and pictures can be worked for, achieved by the viewer, within Broadway’s rules. The fixed gaze and fade out of the faces sets off the fades and metamorphosing images of the larger films, where the historic landscapes of political power – a Middlesbrough skyline taking in the Town Hall and the Transporter Bridge – shifts into the economic power of the industrial complexes, or the leisure spaces of parks and beaches, or the enforced, conscripted leisure time spent at Sainsbury’s. The river melts into roads, darkness over a roundabout pulsing with traffic into sunset over the sea. These can be reinforced or undermined by the words – the human experiences – that surround them.

Turning the landscape into a commodity

Teesside has never had a great problem with commodifying the ground beneath its feet. If the iron masters had not done that, Middlesbrough would not have expanded from five huts into a bustling town in less than five years. The difficulty comes when that commodification ceases to yield a return to the people who live in the landscape. Broadway’s camera surfs the streets, parks and beaches of Teesside, as if hungry for the ‘texture’ which Virtual Reality uses to give body to its wire frames. It draws in the clouds and the flames, the river and the roads, the lights of the traffic and the eerily similar lights of the petroleum plant control desks. It is not a documentary gaze, but an interrogative one. What is this place? What is it made of? What is this place doing to the people who live here? Some of the answers can be seen etched on the faces of the people he has interviewed, their non-talking heads moving only slightly when the mouse hovers over them, nervous smiles and glances the only movement, except for hair caught in the wind. Each engages the viewer directly and without aggression. Their juxtaposition with the ebbing and flowing of the landscapes of Teesside gives their gaze a kind of pride. Their juxtaposition with the disembodied fragments of stories gives that gaze a sadness that finds its echo in the empty, haunted streets. (Many of the houses and streets suggest more innocent times, given a visual feel reminiscent somehow of the 50s and 60’s, the years of full employment. These shots, which you want to loop round again, are like the opening sequence to any number of unmade movies about working class life during the long, slow process of becoming post-industrial.)
The Salt Passages is one of the best evocations of Teesside in the 1990’s, capturing the light, the dark, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the bad habits, the humour, the sentimentality and the warmth, the old-fashioned decency of the place, all on the cusp of a new century, and all rather besieged. It is, however, more than that. It is an expression of the values which make society more than a place to go shopping, life more than something we need training for, and community more than a way of defining a market sector. The Salt Passages is not Virtual Reality in the technical sense, but in the artistic sense: it allows us to explore an imaginary world with real shadows.

Mark Robinson
Head of Film, Media & Literature, Northern Arts