Matthew Noel-Tod

Noel-Tod's film, Blind Carbon Copy, is based on an evocative script collaged from the artist's personal email correspondence. The emails are interpreted via a combination of spoken, physical and musical performances, taking its central focus from the language and emotions of the correspondence. The title of the film refers to the process of sending a blind copy of an email or letter to a hidden third-person recipient.

Noel-Tod's film rethinks 1970s examples of artists' performance addressing technology and disembodiment. In Blind Carbon Copy there is an attempt to reverse the cold, impersonal state of technological communication through the primacy of human speech and performance. Words and phrases become incongruous and weighty as they are lifted from their natural context and reinterpreted both by actors and by the audience.

The complex shoot for Blind Carbon Copy took place at Picture This' Atelier in Bristol - the same space in which it was later exhibited - and features a cast of actors, life models, children, and with musicians Corey Orbison and Katapulto. The dramatic imagery in the film uses light from car headlights, lasers and smoke machines.

Matthew Noel-Tod was resident in Bristol from July to October 2008 as the recipient of the Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and Picture This 2008 Bristol Mean Time* residency.

Read press-release here

Read William Fowler's essay here

Watch an interview with Matthew Noel-Tod here

* Until the dawn of the railways local time for the people of Bristol was 10 minutes faster than Greenwich Mean Time, based on the city’s latitudinal position relative to the Greenwich Meridian Line in London.

To this day the clock over the old Corn Exchange in Bristol has two minute hands. The black minute hand shows Greenwich Mean Time while the red minute hand shows Bristol time.

Exhibition

04 October to 15 November, 2008

Picture This, Bristol.

Blind Carbon Copy was also screened at the ICA in October as part of Nought to Sixty.