ALL

THAT

MIGHTY

HEART

A Film by Jayne Wilson

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The Central Office for Clocktime Expansion present

ALL

THAT

MIGHTY

HEARTAn observation on our modern day malady

of supposed urgency

A Film by Jayne Wilson

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THE BRITISH ENGINEERIUM

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Historian of technology Lewis

Mumford wrote ‘the clock is not

merely a means of keeping track of

the hours, but of synchronising the

actions of men… The clock, not the

steam engine, is the key-machine of

the modern industrial age’.

Exploring the intertwined

relationship between the clock and

the steam engine helps shine a light

on our ambivalent approach to

modern technology.

At first glance, the nineteenth

century world was characterised by

the spread of networks which took

time as their standard. The globe

was covered by railways and their

timetables, shipping routes

navigated accurately using marine

chronometers, and trade networks

emanating from workshops, mills

and factories where millions

‘clocked in’ and out at the start and

end of the working day. Everywhere,

the new industrial world was subject

to a new time discipline,

representing a major acceleration

from the old, slow turning of the sun

and moon, and of the seasons.

But these networks of time were

matched by networks of power:

Without steam the railways would

have been stillborn, the shipping

fleets would have languished at the

mercy of wind and tide, summer

droughts would have brought water-

driven mills and factories to a halt.

The clock may have imbued the

industrial world with a sense of the

value of time, but the steam engine

remained its pumping heart.

That said, watching the steam

engine today, with its regular motion

and sound - the measured bass of the

air pump, the whirr of the governor,

and the hiss of the flywheel spokes

– inevitably remind the observer of

the clock, and of the passing of time.

Going further, one might say the

engine is even timeless, its hypnotic

rhythms taking the viewer away

from the world outside, enthralling

them with its protective power.

And that phrase - ‘protective

power’ – lays open the paradox of

the engine: it is simultaneously

protective and coercive. On one

hand it is an astonishing piece of

kinetic art, the first industrial

machine consciously built with the

same precision and attention to

outward appearance as a fine

timepiece, a triumph of the

engineers’ creative capabilities, and

long the subject of public

fascination. But on the other hand it

was a machine capable of terrible

and promethean might, capable of

transforming entire landscapes and

driving production of an intensity far

beyond the limits of human

endurance, its beam and pistons

working up and down ‘in a state of

melancholy madness’.

Today steam power is integrated

into our lives to the point of

invisibility, banished to generating

stations and connected to us only

indirectly via the energy grid.

Instead, we seem most outwardly

concerned with, and ambivalent

about, the passage of time: ‘time is

money’, minimising down-time,

making the best use of time, all the

time. Time is embedded in many of

the things we use in our homes and

workplaces and, as with the steam

engine before, perhaps it’ll become

such an integral part of our lives that

we just stop noticing it. When that

happens – if it hasn’t already - and

we look forward into the

technological future, we can take

some consolation in any

ambivalence we feel about what

comes next having a long history

back to the clock and the steam

engine. The more things change, the

more they stay the same.

The Clock &

The Steam Engineby Ben Russell, Curator of

Mechanical Engineering at the

The Science Museum, London

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At the Salon d’Aviation in Paris in

1912, Marcel Duchamp turned to

Constantin Brancusi and said,

“Painting’s washed up.” He

pointed to a plane’s propeller,

“Can you do better than that?”

Although Brancusi gave it a good

shot throughout his entire career,

such aesthetic admiration has not

survived easily into our present

century, an age of diminishing

resources, with our gathering

dependence on, and fear of, the

Machine. The machines that order

our lives are more safely adored if

the visible moving parts are kept

to the minimum (“All the better for

Health and Safety...”) or rendered

tiny through the marvels of nanno-

culture (“isn’t it marvellous, you

can’t even see it!”).

In her film she wanted to evoke

the spirit of post-War exercises in

Public Information, aiming for

what John Grierson called “the

creative treatment of actuality”.

Her counterpoint of mechanical

action (stately pistons, wheels and

shafts) with indications of human

intervention (signs, dials and

numbers) unfolds with

symmetrically deployed bursts of

steam acting as a sort of lubricant

to the narrative, a quixotic time

frame of acceleration and

deceleration, underpinned by Tim

Howarth’s sinuous musical score.

The film can be differentiated

however from Modernist exercises

in Mechanolatry (Charles Sheeler,

Margaret Bourke-White, and

Humphrey Jennings for example)

in that she has chosen to set her

montage of visual material within

the context of an invented

organisation, The Central Office

for Clocktime Expansion, inspired

by her archival discoveries at the

Engineerium and tapping into

those bodies set up by

Governments to enhance

productivity, spirit or morale.

Perhaps her antecedents are more

accurately seen as Duchamp and

Picabia whose machines were

more perverse and comedic.

The film constructs an arc of

acceleration and deceleration, with

a choreography and rhetoric the

Central Office, with its formality

and institutional earnestness, may

not have originally intended. It is

for the viewer to decide whether

the Central Office behaves as if it

is operating within a Kafka novel

or an Ealing Comedy. A single

stray cobweb patiently shares the

load with one piston towards the

end of the film.

Her new film is a timely

reminder of the power and beauty

of mechanical movement using the

machines and archives of the old

Goldstone Pumping Station, now

resurrected triumphantly as the

British Engineerium. She writes,

“The Victorian chimney always

made me nostalgic for my

Industrial Northern roots. In a

previous project I found myself

occupied in little known archives,

with stories that had no place

within that project, but which

fueled my hunger for more

coherence between my research

and the finished work. The

Engineerium is an extraordinary

site on the verge of development

that permitted me quiet

contemplation to drive my work

and reflect on my own sense of

ease and security in such industrial

environments.’’

The Central Office

for Clocktime

Expansionby Art Historian Dr Chris Mullen

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“My work is about drawing

awareness to the unseen. I

research, record and absorb

elements of place, and then revel

in the layering and sequencing of

my findings making work that

adds new value and narratives to

the often overlooked details of a

site.”Jayne Wilson

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The short hand goes round

the circle in twelve hours.

The long hand goes round the

circle in one hour and moves

from dot to dot in a minute.

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The 64-bit timestamps used by

NTP consist of one 32-bit

seconds part

and a 32-bit fractional second

part

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The making of this work would not have

been possible without the support of The

British Engineerium Trust, especially Peter

Fagg, Alan Roberts, Steve Rather and Michael

Rozsnyaki.

I would also like to thank Dr Chris

Mullen, Ben Russell, Tim Howarth, Darren

and Benjamin Connolly, Catherine Bertola

and all at the Fabrica Peer Review for their

valuable contributions.This 24 page limited edition

pamphlet accompanies the film

and illustrates some of the

printed, unearthed and archive

materials that have influenced

the course of the work.

Additional copies can be

obtained from:

jayne@jaynewilson.co.uk

Copyright © Jayne WilsonPrinted in Great Britain for the Artist by Delta Press Limited, Hove, East Sussex MMXI

Jayne Wilson