October

October is a documentary artwork about the early rise and fall of the Occupy movement. It is made entirely from information found on the worldwide web and was specially commissioned by Brighton Photo-biennial 2012. First and foremost, October is a portrait of a protest movement -one that rapidly propagated itself across the world through its use of the Internet, replicating its own language, methods and behaviours worldwide to encompass a diverse range of issues surrounding social and economic inequality. On one gallery wall, a short documentary montage focuses on two key events -the global day of action that took place on October 15th 2011, where Occupy Wall Street spread almost spontaneously to over 900 cities worldwide, and then a systematic crackdown on many of the camps that had emerged taking place from November 2011. A synchronous compass floor projection interacts with the montage showing where each clip originated in relation to the geographical location of the artwork offering a direct physical relationship between the viewer and the provenance of the footage on a 1:1 scale, thus placing the viewer in the centre of this tele-visual data visualisation. In doing so, we attempt to invoke a critical space, where we can consider what it means to witness something that can only be apprehended, represented and documented through the mediated space of the Internet -the very same network that spawned Occupy as a global phenomenon in the first place