Kimbereley O'Neill
Re-routing (2019)
This film was available until Wednesday 29 April.
In this unique moment of upheaval and change we believe now more than ever it is important to fulfil our mission to bring people together to look at, think about and create contemporary art. Over the next four weeks we’ll be screening a series of films commissioned by Collective, each grounded in artists building works of mutual interest between themselves and participants, and in unpicking the tangled forces that shape our lives today. Some have been produced by artists working directly with groups to explore what can be achieved collectively, while others explore how people have organised in the near past.
Online Discussion
Each film will be available free here on our website for 7 days, at the end of which we will host an informal online discussion on Zoom, framed by a few prompts we’ll share in advance. This is a chance to come together, talk about the films, and discuss how they relate to our current situation.
Re-routing
Re-routing is an exploration of the interconnection between energy, technology and the body. Merging the machine and self in a circuitous visual relationship as it follows a female protagonist’s road trip through the Californian desert and Silicon Valley, a place synonymous with the emergence of personalised technologies. During this journey, Kimberley recorded the filmic landscape in and from a car, and captured audio from her own body.
The film draws inspiration from Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Nog (1969) and Ann Quin’s Tripticks (1973), which use a journey or road trip as an analogy for an individual’s quest to disconnect from society and escape the self. In Re-routing, Kimberley questions how these countercultural narratives of the 1960s-70s intersect with the development of machines, computing and network technologies.
Read more about the film in the the essay, Endless Drifting, by Emmie McLuskey here. The essay was commissioned for the original screening/exhibition Enigma Bodytech, part of Satellites Programme at Collective, in 2019.
Kimberley O’Neill is an artist and filmmaker based in Glasgow. Her work often focusses on co-forming relationships between subjectivity and technology. Recent activities include: Ways to Speculate, Screening, Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2019; Co-Programmer of AMIF 2019 with Ima-Abasi Okon & Emmie McCluskey at Tramway, Glasgow; Technologies of the Self, screening and discussion with SUPERLUX, 2019; Cinenova: Now Showing, The Showroom, London, 2018; Circuits of Bad Conscience, The Telfer Gallery, Glasgow, 2017; and Conatus TV, Edinburgh Art Festival, 2016. Kimberley was shortlisted for the Margaret Tait Award 2017/18 and 2020, and is a Lecturer in Communication Design at Glasgow School of Art.