the fouled compass

Focusing on experimental film and sound for digital presentation, pause ~ play seeks to engage with new forms of communication and presentation and to create connectivity and comradeship within the vast expanses of digital realms.

The first in the series is the fouled compass, a new film by South Australian artist Madison Bycroft, who currently resides in Marseille, France. Taking its name from Adrienne Rich’s 1973 poem ‘Diving the Wreck’, the fouled compass focusses on the ontology of floating and the literary form of elegy. Here, floating is explored as a methodology of disorientation and a practice of pleasure that is not goal oriented and instead fractured, wandering, abstracted and planktonic.

^{Madison BYCROFT
the fouled compass, 2020
single channel digital video, 23 min 27 sec}

^{Subtitle legend
Yellow: the voice over
Yellow in square brackets: extra notes, unspoken
Yellow with music notes: sung or song-like
Duplicated, yellow: two separate recordings of the same speaker
Red: lyrics for the songs sung by The Gate Keepers
Light blue: Quotation by Jacques Cousteau
White: Spoken by Romain Rolland as found in a letter to Sigmund Freud
Other colours (green, purple, dark blue) are aesthetic choices to indicate where voices are sampled}

‍

‍

^{Written, directed, edited and scored by Madison Bycroft.}

^{Performances by Silvia Romanelli, Marie Boudet, Tilly Webber, Felipe Vasquez, Timothée Calame, Joel White, Gillian Adamson, Caitlin Dempsey, Mel O'Del, Angela Schilling and Madison Bycroft.}

^{Camera by Joel White, Yoav Lutzky, Marie Boudet and Madison Bycroft, with footage from 2017—2020.}

^{The Gate Keeper costumes by Silvia Romanelli, Marie Boudet and Madison Bycroft.}

^{The score includes three original songs: Montagues and Capulets, Sergei Prokofiev: Suite from the 1935 Romeo and Juliet; The Ascot Gavotte by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, from the 1956 Musical My Fair Lady; L'ài domandade di Sàbide - traditional song from Friuli Venezia Giulia.}

^{Excerpts from the writing of: Virginia Woolf, Melody Jue, Dionne Brand, Jacques Cousteau, Karen Barad, Gertrude Stein, Edouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Romain Rolland}

‍