The work recreates a scene of Francois Truffaut’s 1966 movie Fahrenheit 451, based on the eponymous Ray Bradbury novel. Draws upon  Francois Truffaut’s and Ray Bradbury’s love letter to the printed word Fahrenheit 451 [1966]; the sci-fi classic that pictures a brutal totalitarian future where books are banned and burnt.

The project re-imagines a scene from the film in which commuters on a monorail are locked into autonomous self-titillating gestures. as far as i know [RGB] re-imagines the scene, filmed during a series of rehearsals and public performances by actors on London public transport, shifts emphasis away from the narrative fiction of the original film and towards the more general, distracted and consumptive malaise of today’s commuting populace. Focus falls on the small intimate gestures made by individuals touching the screens of their mobile devices.

By mimicking the production process of the now familiar faked internet memes used for the marketing purposes, the resultant film was distributed across media formats; both through the internet in small distracted looping episodes via emailed Gif’s, Vine, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram (#afaik). The sense of a narrative that we would normally associate with books and a literate populous is here lost. Instead the film generates its own, slowly unfolding meta-narrative, depending on how, when and where we might glimpse ‘the film’ amongst the highly contested public and private mediated spaces it occupies.

Phil Coy’s debut work as Brunel University’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence, has been showcased throughout our Public Lecture Series.