“Joules” is a project based around the court testimony from Elizabeth Forrester (a witness in the 1798 Wapping Coal Riots in London) who claimed that a police officer shot two people with one bullet. This moment took place within the opening of the Thames River police unit, (known as the advent of preventive policing), a department of a shipping company commissioned to prevent loss in their inventory. Through looking at the negative space of time, (the possible undead history that Forrester claimed), the work crystallizes the material history of criminalizing supply-chain chain workers, within a dramaturgy that unpacks the interweaving of historical, cinematic, and logistical conceptions of lost time.
This component is centred around the precise phenomena in which the police shot from the hole in the window that was smashed by the rioters below, looking at the dialectical vacuum of directionality, how the negative space from one historical motion makes room for another to fill it. As a study of the "double-shot" Forrester witnessed (killing two people at the same time), I worked with a professional ballistics consultancy firm, to build a report that has concluded that what Forrester witness would have in fact been possible.
A motion-study of the "double-shot" that Elizabeth Forrester witnessed, through studying the motion of property title, as a trajectory. Looking at the intersecting materialities of empty space, between the object of wage (the pocket) and the object of work (the glove). The trajectory of "Work" ( force times distance in classical physics), is used to study the historical moment in which "wage per time unit" was introduced by the Thames River Police. The studying of Forrester's testimony, is embodied through the 17th century ballistics diagrams printed onto the cloth.
